Gilded Age Research Articles

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Old Ironsides.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a 19th century elite physician, curmudgeon, essayist, and poet. His works were numerous, insightful, entertaining, and characteristic of the pre-Civil War, Civil War, and Gilded age eras. Many of his shorter poems are taught in high school as examples of late 19th century works, as they are relatively easy to memorize and understand. Holmes and the Fireside Poets (Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell, among others) created works that, in their time, were read aloud by fathers and mothers to their family because the poems often centered around values, morals, and historic events. "Old Ironsides" is characteristic of the type of work for which the Fireside Poets became famous. It is an entertaining poem to read, study, and hear, particularly when linking it to the oldest ship in the world, still afloat and sailing around Boston Bay.

Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire by Robert Elias and Peter Dreier

Reviewed by: Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire by Robert Elias and Peter Dreier Mark McGee Robert Elias and Peter Dreier. Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022. 336 pp. Cloth, $38.00. Any book with the word “rebel” in its title is going to attract my attention, as people who have not been happy with the way things are and fight for change are fascinating to me. With a foreword written by former Major League pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee I was further convinced I was going to like this book before I ever started a chapter. Authors Robert Elias and Peter Dreier didn’t disappointment me with their book Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire. This is an extensive examination of the often-dark side of baseball from a business standpoint with players in battles over low pay, overall treatment, and racism. The authors skillfully show how baseball owners in the late 1800s mimicked the businessmen of the day, who took advantage of their workers in every way possible in order to fill their pockets. The revolt of players during [End Page 120] the era known as the “Gilded Age” sets the stage for future dissent among baseball players. Labor issues, the way pro baseball deals with events such as wars, patriotism, and segregation are all examined under a harsh light. But into the light they thrust many players a reader may not have heard about before. Every baseball fan knows, or should know, Curt Flood unsuccessfully fought the reserve clause through legal channels. But as the authors point out, players across all pro leagues received an education in how the reserve clause worked with players being treated as property rather than human beings. Flood saw his baseball career end as a result of his beliefs, but he laid the foundation for the multimillionaire players of today. Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, is legendary for making the union successful after years of false starts. But Elias and Dreier also give readers in- depth looks at players like Jim O’Rourke, Tim Keefe, Danny Gardella, and Tony Lupien, to name a few rebellious players profiled in the book whose names aren’t in the mainstream. One of the more interesting parts of the book is how the Mexican League, which provided a safe haven for Black players, attracted several major league players through higher salaries. Jorge Pasquel owned the league and was a thorn in the side of major league owners for many years with some big- name players making the move south of the border. His challenge to Major League Baseball would end as his money eventually ran out. Any book about baseball rebels has to include pitcher Jim Bouton, author of the infamous book Ball Four. Bouton, already known as a player who didn’t mind challenging the New York Yankees, his first major league team, was banned from old-timers’ day at Yankee Stadium. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball at the time the book was published, tried to influence Bouton to say publicly his stories in the book were more imaginative than accurate. A threat throughout the book is how baseball purists— including owners, executives, sports writers, and even some players—tried to protest the sport as being untarnished in any way. Elias and Dreier dedicate their book to Terry Cannon, Bouton, Flood, and Miller. All were true rebels in the eyes of the baseball establishment, so it was fitting they were chosen. The only complaint about the book is the authors often let their political views and beliefs show through instead of merely letting the facts tell the story. They destroy the myth that baseball is as American as apple pie. Some baseball purists may not enjoy what Elias and Dreier have to say, but I found the book to be well researched and interesting on many levels. [End Page 121] Copyright © 2023 University of Nebraska Press

Optimizing feeding regimen of replacement gilts to improve their reproductive performance and retention rate of their first 2 parities.

The effects of age, body weight (BW), and backfat thickness (BF) of replacement gilts at first estrus and first mating on their subsequent reproductive performance and retention of their first 2 parities as sows was evaluated. A total of 3,025 Danish replacement gilts were categorized by farm (allocated to 4 farms), cross combination, age, BW and BF at first estrus and first mating, estrous cycle number at first mating, and flush feeding before first mating. The result shows that all the factors mentioned above were significantly associated with reproductive performance and retention rates of the first 2 parities. Farm 3 had more piglets born alive per litter (BA) (P<0.05). Farms 3 and 4 had more healthy piglets per litter (HP) (P<0.05). Farm 4 had the most piglets weaned per litter (PW) (P<0.05). Landrace×Landrace×Yorkshire (L×L×Y) replacement gilts had the most total piglets born per litter (TB), BA, HP, PW and a higher retention rate of the 2 parities than Landrace×Yorkshire (L×Y) replacement gilts (P<0.05). In addition, flush feeding before first mating had the most TB, BA, HP, PW, and a higher retention rate of the 2 parities than no flush feeding (P<0.05). Because the effects of replacement gilts rearing parameters on reproductive performance traits differed, we used 100 replacement gilts as a unit and the total number of weaned piglets from the first 2 parities as a new index. Replacement gilts undergoing their first estrus between 180 and 210d of age at 115 to 124.9kg BW and 14 to 15mm BF had significantly higher reproductive indexes for their first 2 parities per 100 replacement gilts. Replacement gilts that mated between 210 and 230d of age at 140 to 149.9kg BW and 15 to 16mm BF had optimal reproductive indexes. These results provide a new insight into the complex relationships among these reproductive performance traits and may help guide successful management of replacement gilts as a pivotal starting point for future fertility and longevity of rearing herds.

Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama by Jennifer E. Brooks

The true connoisseur of monographs knows better than to look first to the book itself. The notes are where to find treasure. Brooks’ Resident Strangers is stupendously rich in that respect—sixty-one pages of citations and lengthy discursions, shrewd and thoughtful, proof positive that her study of immigration in Alabama at the turn of the century will long stand the test of time and challenge.And what an array of sources! It takes three pages, nearly, to list all the newspapers. Interviews with immigrants and their descendants, custom-house records, correspondence from the United Mine Workers’ archives, wills and probates, immigrant passenger lists, passport applications, and most revealingly, convict records make the most convincing of cases: Hungry for a foreign workforce to supplement or supplant Black labor in factory and field, white officials and employers strove to bring in the huddled masses, who were all too often treated like wretched refuse. Woe to the Chinese immigrant that came to work along the Stantons’ Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad project, stiffed in their wages as readily as the bondholders were in their interest payments. Used as strikebreakers and treated with contempt or summary punishment when they fell afoul of the law, Europeans found themselves relegated to a position between Blacks and self-defined whites, their labor as necessary as their presence distrusted. It is no wonder that so many of them chose to look elsewhere for a better abode.It is a story well-worth telling; the dramatic moments and rank injustices will rouse readers’ indignation easily. Historians of immigration may suggest that, as some of the material cited shows, Alabama authorities worked assiduously to summon Americans from the Midwest and West. How successful they were, the census might have told. Conceivably, they heavily outnumbered those from abroad. Specialists in Reconstruction may demur with the commentary, mostly from secondary literature, about the disgruntlement that white planters felt about Black labor. Undoubtedly they did, but it was not only the frustration with alternatives that kept the Black Belt Black. Many of the complaints, just after the war, were the wish fathering the thought: Convinced that slaves could not work in freedom, their former masters assumed the worst, at the top of their lungs. Yet, as accounts (not used)—like the papers of Sidney Andrews, Charles Nordhoff, and a wide array of those from other planter families—make clear, those fears dwindled to an occasional grumble. For planters, Black labor was not a necessary evil; to their minds, it had become a positive good.At this juncture, a problem with the endnotes emerges. On the one hand, they beg the question of when Brooks over-eggs the pudding. Vast and lavish they are in their newspaper coverage, but are the newspapers from Honolulu, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, and Oregon as directly pertinent to the Alabama experience as, say, those from Montgomery or Mobile? Yet for the period when freedpeople’s labor was put to the test, the primary materials are thin indeed. Until 1871, the journals cited are from Memphis, Mississippi, California, New York, and South Carolina. For a brief burst in that last year, the Alabama State Journal holds lonely eminence, but thereafter, except for one 1875 article, no references to it appear until 1877. Thereafter, Alabama papers remain in short supply into the mid-1880s. The very rich, very revealing Freedmen’s Bureau papers are cited, but readers will strain to find where Brooks uses them. Sometimes a source is puzzling. Brooks mentions gangs of Chinese workers mistreated on the Stantons’ railroad, but the census figure cited for the total number of Chinese people in Alabama was … one. Minor matters may perplex: Was there really a revolution in France in 1868? Where was the battle of “Mission Ridge”?None of these cavils changes the thumbs-up that this review affords. For intense, thorough work, at least after 1886, Resident Strangers should not be a stranger on any Gilded Age historian’s shelves.

Grounding the Landscape: Epistemic Aspects of Materiality in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Open-Air Painting

This article examines how notions of “material” and “materiality” were infused, both technically and discursively, into American landscape painting in the late nineteenth century. Focusing particularly on the praxis of open-air painting as consolidating a new mode in landscape painting as well as a new artistic identity, this article argues that painting outdoors was perceived by artists in terms of agency, uniting painter, painting, and landscape; but unlike earlier romantic or Transcendentalist approaches, this idea was not conceived of as a solely spiritual union but, rather, as a mode that is embedded in the mundane, in the existence of objects, of embodied engagement and material means. The overt affinity between the basic idea of the praxis—painting outdoors in ‘real’ nature—and material aspects of art-making, is discussed as the underpinning of a new emerging episteme of American landscape painting, while considering the environment wherein this phenomenon was cultivated within a specific moment in American culture. Paintings and texts, generated by American painters and critics between the late 1870s and the 1890s, are read in this article through the lens of recent theoretical phenomenological approaches to landscape, illuminating the unique role that materiality played in these representations. Moreover, tying the findings to the changing conceptions of both landscape and art in the Gilded Age, the article concludes that landscape painters of the ‘new generation’ sought to evade commodifying tendencies of image-making by deliberately engaging with materiality, devising a mode of landscape representation that would not succumb to the flattening steamroller of capitalist consumer culture.

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

Review: Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, by Peter Boag

In 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery, the eldest son of a rural sharecropping family in Brownsville, Oregon, committed a triple homicide that sent shockwaves throughout the region. With seemingly little provocation beyond a slap in the face, Montgomery turned his rifle on his parents and a family friend. In his fascinating study of the murder and its aftermath, Peter Boag insists that typical explanations for parricides provided by psychologists and criminologists are insufficient: “Ascribing the offense to personality types and mental illness ignores a variety of temporal matters” (p. 9). Instead, Boag places the parricide within the context of 1890s agrarian Oregon at a time of economic depression, political disillusionment, and increasing urbanization.What emerges from the book is, on one hand, a declension narrative. Montgomery grew up in the shadow of dwindling prospects for putatively self-sufficient Anglo-American farm families, ceaselessly romanticized for subduing Indigenous communities and altering the physical landscape of Oregon. In contrast, Montgomery’s family did not own their farm and were at the mercy of global markets and fluctuating crop prices. But for Boag, there’s more to the story. The violence at the root of American expansion and ethnic cleansing, combined with the danger and severity of agrarian boyhood, forged a culture of killing and death in which Montgomery was deeply immersed.Boag structures his work in three major sections. The first explores local and national media accounts of idealized rural life in Oregon’s Willamette Valley at a time when many young people were relocating to cities. Boag juxtaposes such sentimental depictions with the brutal reality of childhood in agrarian towns like Brownsville. The second section examines the parricide within the economic context of the major depression wrought by the Panic of 1893 with particular attention to the vicissitudes of raising cash crops in a shifting marketplace and the Montgomery family’s unyielding poverty. He also examines how anxieties produced by the passing of so-called “pioneer” generation at the end of the century affected the community’s perceptions of the murders. In the final section, Boag recounts Montgomery’s prosecution, incarceration, and execution. He also offers an analysis of the materials and means the state used to end Montgomery’s life, focusing on the extensive reach of global markets and industrial capitalism into rural life by the end of the nineteenth century.In his study, Boag successfully accomplishes two tasks: he assesses the environmental pressures that may have led Montgomery to slay his parents while offering a rare and intimate portrait of ordinary people in agrarian Oregon during the Gilded Age. Given his nod to Michel Foucault in the introduction, I expected a more in-depth discussion regarding changes in discipline and punishment in the American West, particularly since Montgomery’s was the last Oregon execution to occur outside the privacy of penitentiary walls. In addition, some of his digressions—such as tracing the origins of the executioner’s noose to the plantations of the Philippines—may strike some as needlessly esoteric. Nevertheless, Boag’s engaging prose, provocative ideas, and the inherent luridness of his subject matter make this work that rarest of things: an academic page-turner that should appeal to broad audience of readers.

Sul Ross at Texas A&amp;M by John A. Adams Jr

Reviewed by: Sul Ross at Texas A&M by John A. Adams Jr Dan R. Frost Sul Ross at Texas A&M. By John A. Adams Jr. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 269. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-62349-938-9.) The title of this book is slightly misleading. Sul Ross at Texas A&M covers more than just Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross’s time as president of the [End Page 166] Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (Texas A&M) from February 1891 until his death in January 1898. The work also provides solid background information on Ross’s previous roles as a Texas Ranger, Confederate brigadier general, and governor of Texas. John A. Adams Jr. demonstrates that Ross’s popularity in these earlier occupations paved the way for his tenure as the college’s president. The book also more fully develops Ross’s time at Texas A&M than the two other key works on the subject, Henry C. Dethloff’s A Centennial History of Texas A&M University, 1876 to 1976 (College Station, Tex., 1975) and Judith Ann Benner’s Sul Ross: Soldier, Statesman, Educator (College Station, Tex., 1983). Aside from the typical duties of running a college, Ross spent much time mulling requests to return to political office, including a possible third term as governor. Nevertheless, through the copious use of Ross’s personal correspondence, Adams reveals that Ross, although attracted to the intrigues of Texas politics, decided to remain at the college and forgo a resumption of his political career. Politics nonetheless intruded on Ross’s time as president. Like other leaders of agricultural and mechanical colleges during the Gilded Age, Ross annually lobbied sympathetic legislators for appropriations and fought those who doubted the value of the applied scientific, agricultural, and mechanical engineering courses provided by the college and who would have scrapped the institution altogether. His popularity and political connections prevailed in getting the larger budgets necessary to accommodate the growing number of students and faculty during what Adams rightly touts as Ross’s successful administration. This accomplishment is especially remarkable given that it coincided with an economic depression during the 1890s. Still, Adams’s treatment of Ross is adulatory. If Ross made any mistakes, either before or during his time at Texas A&M, one would never know it from reading this work. Ross’s efforts in behalf of his school are portrayed as selfless and in the best interests of all Texans. The author dismisses contemporary critics of Ross and his administration at A&M, who questioned the school’s classical courses or military instruction at the expense of scientific, agricultural, and mechanical engineering education, as ignorantly, politically, selfishly, or even nefariously motivated. Yet academics and legislators throughout the South legitimately debated such issues regarding the proper courses of instruction for agricultural and mechanical colleges. Adams needed not impugn the motives of all of Ross’s critics over their valid concerns to demonstrate what the author believes was the Texas A&M president’s outstanding character. Like his detractors who supported other schools, Ross fought politically to advance his college’s interests. The Texas legislature, Adams notes, struggled to appropriate funds to at least four state-supported institutions of higher learning during the late nineteenth century. The post–Civil War proliferation of schools offering similar curricula occurred throughout the South, and, as in Texas, it left behind more academically and financially weak institutions than strong ones. In this environment, the political and personal interests of collegiate presidents in acquiring larger appropriations than their competitors were inevitable and made Ross no more innocent of political machinations for his school than any other collegiate president. Ross was an influential former governor; it is not surprising that he triumphed over adversaries with less political influence. [End Page 167] Adams credits much of Ross’s fame in Texas to an emerging “celebrity journalism” that “heightened the visibility of business and political icons, lionizing these key personalities and their activities” (p. 204). This ode to Ross includes him among such accomplished figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and William Jennings...

The Shady Side of the Lens: Six Lawbreaking Nineteenth-Century New Jersey Photographers

While the vast majority of New Jersey photographers in the 1800s were law-abiding, there were exceptions, including six photographers accused of crimes: Gideon C. Angle, Edward W. Blake, Frederick Fearn, Edward R. Stoutenburgh, John C. Tibbels, and Peter Walker. This study examines the lives of these photographers just before and during the Gilded Age. See also additional illustrations at http://saretzky.com/shadyside.

‘For Men Only:’ Sexual Health Education, Neurasthenia and the Modern YMCA in the Gilded Age

Summary In the late-nineteenth century, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) presented medical lectures designated ‘For Men Only’. This article argues that YMCA lectures about sexual health relied on the discourse of neurasthenia to address sexual health and morality in medical terms. By demonstrating that sexual licentiousness could be both a cause and consequence of this common nervous disease, lecturers at the YMCA invited young men to understand themselves as victims of circumstance, corrupted by modern society. While this period in YMCA history is often considered part of the social hygiene movement of the early twentieth century, this article shows that the efforts of health reform in the 1880s and 1890s mobilised an approach unique to Gilded-Age America, one which served the to bolster the legitimacy of physicians and to attract men into YMCA Halls.

JOURNALISTIC INFLUENCE OF WRITING ON THE GILDED AGE A TIMELINE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

The themes found in the writings by authors during the Gilded Age are still prevalent in writings of the twenty-first century. The Gilded Age, a term used to describe a period of economic boom after the American Civil War at the turn of the century, have influenced communication to readers by using the ethos unearthed by writers who were opposed to a particular politician and their policies. Newspaper writing played a crucial role in exposing scandals, the pathos of the American Dream, and the logos or persuasion by using the trials of society. Writing was a powerful tool of communication during the Gilded Age that allowed writers to target events during this era. Newspaper writing was important to communicate prominent issues to the public, as writing upheld ideals to question government and to keep it accountable. However, the Gilded Age writings helped to permanently etch in the minds of readers the importance of themes that were prevalent post-Civil War that impacted the writing and writers of American Literature.

Still Searching: A Black Family’s Quest for Equality and Recognition during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

AbstractHistorians have correctly interpreted the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as periods in which African Americans faced unpreceded violence, a significant decline in franchise, and the loss of many civil rights. These years however, were far more complex when viewed from the vantage point of African American families who attempted to empower themselves through education, securing employment in white-collar occupations, such as teaching, and working to advance themselves through race betterment groups, including women’s clubs and civil rights organizations. Yet some middle-class Black families like the Stewarts not only rejected white society’s widely held belief of Blacks as racially inferior and incapable of progress. They also embraced migration as a constructive strategy to advance their individual careers and to elevate the race. In an era when the majority of Black workers had minimal literacy and worked unskilled menial jobs, T. McCants Stewart and his children each graduated from college or professional school, worked in white-collar or professional jobs, and paved the way for the next generation. Yet each also understood that migration outside of the Jim Crow South, including to Africa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the territory of Hawaii, held the key to their success. Thus, the Stewarts constructed a new vision of freedom and opportunity and believed that even despite the repressive conditions imposed upon Blacks during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that there was room for growth and an opportunity to advance their careers. Migration, therefore, should be reconsidered as a viable strategy that some Black families adopted to find their place in American society.

The impact of essential fatty acid ratios and unsaturated to saturated fat ratio on growth performance of grow-finish pigs and estrus detection of gilts.

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of dietary unsaturated and saturated fat ratio (U:S) and the ratio of linoleic and linolenic acid (LA:ALA) on the growth performance of grow-finish pigs and estrus detection of gilts. A total of 240 pigs with initial body weight (BW) 54.4 ± 5.5 kg were randomly assigned to a high (>1.8; HUS) or low (<1.0; LUS) U:S in combination with a high (20:1), moderate (12:1), or low (4:1) LA:ALA in a 3 × 2 factorial arrangement. Dietary ratios were achieved using blends of choice white grease, beef tallow, corn oil, flaxseed oil, or palm kernel oil. Diets were fed across three phases and balanced for energy and LA. Pigs were housed across 60 pens with either four gilts or four barrows per pen. On day 49, 1 gilt per pen was moved to individual housing at approximately 154 d of age for evaluation of reproductive characteristics. Data were analyzed as repeated measures using PROC MIXED (SAS 9.4; SAS Inst., Cary, NC) with pen as the experimental unit and U:S, LA:ALA, sex, and their interactions as fixed effects. Initial BW was fit as a covariate. Within each phase, there were no differences in BW, daily gain (ADG), feed intake (ADFI), or feed efficiency (G:F) for U:S, LA:ALA, or their interaction when averaged across sex (P ≥0.128). Gilt feed efficiency was improved during the second phase compared to barrows; however, feed efficiency was not different between barrows and gilts during the first and third phases; resulting in a similar feed efficiency between sexes for the overall period (P = 0.523). Compared to HUS, gilts receiving LUS had higher ADFI overall (P = 0.018), which translated into improved G:F for HUS gilts (P = 0.011). Overall, gilts receiving the 20:1 diet tended to have improved G:F compared to 12:1 (P = 0.086). ADG was improved in pigs fed diets formulated with unsaturated fat sources to a 20:1 LA:ALA, regardless of sex. Detection of first estrus by 235 d of age in gilts was not impacted by U:S or LA:ALA (P ≥ 0.356). In conclusion, feeding differing dietary U:S and LA:ALA ratios impacts growth of growing pigs, particularly improving feed efficiency of gilts fed diets with unsaturated fat sources or a 20:1 LA:ALA. Further investigation into the physiological mechanisms differentially affecting gilt growth when fed varying dietary LA:ALA is warranted to understand the impact on reproductive outcomes.

The Gilded Age 2.0 of the US Economy

The Gilded Age 2.0 of the US Economy

Sensing Pollution: Picturing “Bad Air” in Gilded Age New York

Sensing Pollution: Picturing “Bad Air” in Gilded Age New York

Finally Statehood! Utah's Struggles, 1849–1896

Finally Statehood! Utah's Struggles, 1849–1896

Banking on Railroads: The Effect of Market Access on Banking Provision During the Gilded Age

Banking on Railroads: The Effect of Market Access on Banking Provision During the Gilded Age

Drag Race to the Bottom

Drag Race to the Bottom Ariel Munczek Edelman (bio) On the morning of May 10, 2022, standing in front of stock tickers for some of the world's most valuable companies, drag queen Monét X Change proclaimed: "On behalf of RuPaul, World of Wonder, and queer people far and near, it's time to ring the bell, honey!" On cue, seven winners of RuPaul's Drag Race—the hit reality competition TV series, which had just finished its fourteenth season—reached across a logo-strewn podium to announce the daily opening of the world's second-largest stock exchange. "We represent what scholars will one day call the drag revolution," Shea Coulee, the winner of one of Drag Race's many spinoff shows, added. "I want to thank NASDAQ." I started watching Drag Race early in my first year of college. The Emmy Award-winning program puts its drag queen contestants through a gauntlet of challenges, from walking the runway and writing original songs to impersonating celebrities and making costumes from scratch. The competing artists' ingenuity and glamour drew me to the form with a ravenous hunger. I began attending local drag shows and, soon after, performing in drag myself, first for other students and then in bars in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Prague. Drag Race has led more people than ever to appreciate art that plays with gender expression, myself included. Drag's unique flexibility allows performers from across the globe to combine breathtaking looks with lip syncs, stand-up comedy, [End Page 11] circus arts, experimental fashion, live music, and endless other art forms. But even as a fan of the show, it didn't take long for me to realize that Drag Race's influence was not entirely benevolent. While some Drag Race alumni leverage their success to pay off student loans or buy a home, others leave the competition with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Unlike most other reality programs, Drag Race contestants must self-fund the plethora of cosmetics, costumes, wigs, and props needed to compete on the show. As one contestant, Kameron Michaels, recounted, "I spent more coming into this competition than I did as the down payment on my house." As Drag Race's rewards reach new heights—the winner of the most recent season of the spinoff RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars won a cool $200,000, ten times the size of the cash prize for the first season—work for most drag artists remains so precarious that they frequently take on several other jobs to stay afloat. The so-called drag golden age is really a gilded age, where the runaway success of a few is made possible at the expense of the many. And if economic insecurity wasn't enough, local performers increasingly face threats of extremist violence from the right. Even the most diehard drag fans should cast a critical eye on Drag Race and its architects, who have built an unequal drag performance economy while remaking the art of drag in the show's own image. ______ In the late 2000s, superstar drag queen RuPaul Charles felt it was time for a drag competition show. "The Obama movement was happening," he told New York in 2017, "and I could feel it in my bones that it was time." Viacom's LGBT television network, Logo TV, rejected Drag Race several times, out of fear that it would make the network appear too gay. It acquiesced in 2009, however, when RuPaul's production company, World of Wonder, agreed to downplay drag's role in gay nightlife. The reality television genre that emerged in the decades leading up to Drag Race had already proved its value to American network executives: it nearly eliminated writing and acting costs and was less prone to strikes and shutdowns than scripted programs. Early reality programs like The Real World, Road Rules, and Big Brother centered on charismatic, low-paid workers who did labor that previously took several actors or crew members to carry out. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and American Idol extended the possibilities of the format with vote-by-texting features, interactive websites, and fan...