Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first wrote about the “Gilded Age” in 1883, they certainly did not mean the phrase to be laudatory. The two men sawthe latterpartof the nineteenth century as the expression ofall the worst traits in the nation’s character, and that view has remained with the public ever since. There is no question that in the decades afterthe Civil War, America’s industrialization came accompanied by horrid working condi­ tions for laborers in mines and factories, ex­ ploitation ofwomenand children, and conspic­ uous consumption by the captains of industry that appalled many people besides Twain and Warner. While historians have not denied the truth ofthe “Gilded Age” charges, they have found the erato be farmore complex. The completion of thousands of miles of railroad track helped to tie the various states into a Union, to make men and women whereverthey lived see them­ selves as “Americans” rather than “Kansans” or “Georgians.” While so-calledrobberbarons such as JohnD. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan grew phenomenally wealthy, the industries they created helped to make the American standard of living the highest in the world. The depredations of industrialization also laid the basis for the Populist and Pro­ gressive movements and the birth ofthe mod­ ern political order. And an age that produced the writings of Mark Twain, Emily Dickin­ son, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Stephen Crane cannot be characterized as a cultural wasteland. In terms of constitutional history, for too long the jurisprudence of the postwar period has been characterized simply as laissez-faire, with the Court erecting the Constitution into a protective wall for property rights. In re­ cent years we have begun to understand that while the Court, like the rest of the country, believed in the protection of property, there were other currents running through this clas­ sicaljurisprudence. Ofcourse, somehave since been outmodedbychanges in oureconomy and society, but if we wish to understand the great jurisprudential changes that took place in the twentieth century, we have to start in the latter part ofthe nineteenth. This is what the contributors to this is­ sue have done, in papers originally given as v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY part of a lecture series on the Court and the Gilded Age. Other than people interested in the Court’s history, few will even recognize the names of Samuel Miller, Stephen Field, Stan­ ley Matthews, and David Brewer, but as you will discover on reading these articles, they played an important role in shaping the Court’s response to the new America. And that re­ sponse, ofcourse, is what progressive reform­ ers like Holmes and Brandeis attacked in their turn. In addition, we have an article by Ross Davies regarding an incident mentioned in the best-selling book about the Court, The Brethren. It is the type of article that results when a careful reader is suddenly pulled up short by something he or she reads and says “That can’t be true!” In this case the ques­ tion came out of a baseball case decided by the Court and written by Harry A. Blackmun, whom everyone knew was a rabidbaseball fan. Could he have deliberately overlooked impor­ tant African-American players, as Bob Wood­ ward and ScottArmstrong charged? The open­ ing of the Blackmun Papers gave Professor Davies a chance to find out the truth. Finally, as always, we are grateful to Grier Stephenson for keeping us up to date on the important books appearing about the Court. ...