Gilded Age Research Articles

Transforming the Gilded Age Beach - Jamin Wells. Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 258 pp. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1469660905.

Transforming the Gilded Age Beach - Jamin Wells. Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 258 pp. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1469660905. - Volume 20 Issue 4

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

Robert Putman’s The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) provides a powerful meta-analysis of American social, political, economic and cultural change throughout the twentieth century. What this analysis reveals is the existence of an almost perfect arc of social progress which begins from a low position around the Gilded Age at the beginning of the twentieth century and then climbs across all variables until reaching a highpoint around 1960. The Progressive Era, Putnam argues, engineered an ‘upswing’ against inequality, polarisation, social disarray and a culture of self-centredness. Since then, however, the data suggest that a severe downswing has occurred which explains the existence of deep divisions and polarised politics in the United States. Putnam’s core argument is simple: The United States has pulled itself out of a trough before and it can do it again. In a post-Trump context, this argument could hardly be more welcome which may explain the rave reviews this book has generally received. Nevertheless, the core weakness of The Upswing is that it arguably tells us far more about how the United States ‘came together a century ago’ but far less about how it ‘can do it again’ in the future.

Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age. By Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 240p. $55.00 cloth.

Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age. By Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 240p. $55.00 cloth.

Space barons

My first encounter with what would become Richard Branson’s business empire was in 1981. BBC DJ John Peel played a track, “Act of Affection,” from the Wailing Souls’ new album Fire House Rock. I liked the song. Skeptical that I’d find the LP in my local record store, I bought it from Branson’s mail-order company, Virgin Records.I hadn’t thought much about Branson and his businesses until this past summer. On 11 July he and five others flew aboard Virgin Galactic Unity 22 to the edge of space. Nine days later, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made his own trip to the edge of space with three others aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard.Although Branson founded Virgin Galactic to make money taking wealthy tourists into space, he sounds genuinely proud of the hundreds of jobs for astronautical engineers and others that Virgin Galactic and its partner companies have created. Blue Origin also wants to be paid to take people and cargoes into space, yet Bezos’s space quest sounds visionary and altruistic. To quote a 2016 interview with him in Insider: “When it comes to space, I see it as my job to build infrastructure the hard way—I’m using my resources to put in place heavy-lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space…. I want thousands of entrepreneurs doing amazing things in space, and to do that we need to dramatically lower the cost of access to space.”Reactions to the rival space barons among the people I follow on Twitter and Facebook were uniformly negative. How could Branson and Bezos spend so much money to send themselves into space? Surely, there are more deserving causes. What about mitigating climate change, abolishing poverty, or eliminating tropical diseases?The indignation brought to mind my friend Patrick McCray’s feature article “The contentious role of a national observatory” (Physics Today, October 2003, page 55). Whereas in most rich countries, governments fund big astronomy facilities, in the US, many of the largest telescopes have been funded by rich benefactors.Real estate investor James Lick (1796–1876) left money in his will to the University of California to build what would become the Lick Observatory. Railroad financier Charles Yerkes (1837–1905) paid for the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory. The foundation established by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) paid for Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. More recently, the foundation established by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore (born in 1929) committed $200 million to help pay for the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a project led by Caltech and the University of California.In his article, McCray recounted how the privileged access of a few elite universities to the biggest telescopes retarded the development of equivalently powerful national facilities that could serve astronomers at all US universities. The conflict persists. Although the TMT and its rival, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), each have international partners, the two projects are essentially private, not national.Equity of access aside, is it a bad thing when rich people fund science? Without the largesse of Lick, Yerkes, Rockefeller, and their philanthropic successors, the big telescopes they funded might not have been built at all. Arguably, by not funding a TMT- or GMT-sized telescope, which each have a roughly $1 billion price tag, NSF could afford the equally expensive Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.Lick, Yerkes, and Rockefeller are numbered among the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Among the most ruthless and successful of them all was railroad magnate Jay Gould (1836–92). Unlike the trio of telescope builders, today Gould is known, if at all, only for his unscrupulous business practices and vast wealth.Compared with funding a giant telescope, taking a joyride in space seems frivolous, which might account for the negative reaction I found on social media to Branson’s and Bezos’s ventures. Perhaps compounding the image problem, science fiction abounds in sinister space corporations, such as Tyrell in Blade Runner, Weyland-Yutani in the Alien movies, Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer, and Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile in The Expanse.Still, our sun will eventually turn into a red giant and incinerate life on Earth. To survive, humanity will need a new, distant haven that only spacecraft can reach. In so far as commercial space travel will make that possible, we should commend it however grudgingly. Section:ChooseTop of page <<CITING ARTICLES© 2021 American Institute of Physics.

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

The Fresh Air Fund and the Floating Hospital were two charities that launched in Gilded Age New York City and flourished during the Progressive Era. Part of the fresh air charity movement, both organizations argued that impoverished children living in crowded tenement districts needed fresher air. But these reformers had strikingly different notions of what fresh air was and where to find it. The Floating Hospital cast fresh air as medicine that children could breathe in the city’s harbor, but urban air could never be fresh to the Fresh Air Fund. Using fresh air as a symbol of rural wholesomeness in contrast to urban deviance, the organization aimed to mold children into model citizens by exposing them to the countryside. Diverging ideas about cities and air impacted children’s experiences, determining whether charities treated them equally regardless of race or sex and whether reformers respected or tried to break familial bonds.

The New Gilded Age: We’ve Seen It All Before

Wealth distribution, corruption, the power of elites, and the marginalization of blacks in America today closely resembles the Gilded Age. What could go wrong?

Dendroarchaeological analysis of the Terminal Warehouse in New York City reveals a history of long-distance timber transport during the Gilded Age

The Gilded Age of the late 19th century marked a period of rapid development and urbanization in New York City, U.S. To accommodate the high demand in wood products during that time, the timbers used for development of the city were increasingly sourced from locations distant from the northeastern United States. The Terminal Warehouse in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City was one of many large buildings erected during this period of city expansion, and is an important symbol of New York City commerce during the late 1800s. To determine the history and provenance of timbers used in the construction of the Terminal Warehouse, we used tree-ring analysis on longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) joists that were original to the building. The ring-width patterns on the joists crossdated well internally, suggesting a common origin of the sampled lumber. Further, our Terminal Warehouse tree-ring chronology (1512–1891 C.E.) correlated strongly with existing tree-ring chronologies from western/central Georgia and eastern Alabama, indicating that the timbers were extracted from this region of the southeastern United States. The provenancing and dating of the Terminal Warehouse timbers underscores the important role that southern pines played in the expansion and development of New York City during the Gilded Age.

Victor/Victorian: Gender and Aesthetic Idealism During the Italian Risorgimento

Henry James’ short story, Last of the Valerii (1874), articulates the author’s final assessment of the Anglo-American style. The marriage between the American heiress and impoverished Italian nobleman expresses the transition in the American economy from rural agriculture to one driven by industrial wealth and the creation of large estates. By making the Italian aristocracy the protagonists of his Anglo-Italian novels, James also provides a cursive acknowledgement of the restoration of the Italian aristocracy which was at the heart of the revolutionaries’ nationalist debate during the Italian Risorgimento. The creation of a unified and independent Italy in 1871 also included a king, Victor-Emmanuel II. The desire to acquire the habits and style of the genteel European nobility was grafted onto the new American interest in collecting the aesthetic treasures of Europe then being acquired by wealthy Americans to form the major museum collections of America. Towards the turn of the century, Anglo-Italian authors and artists lost their interest in the revolutionary cause of Italy and centennial America, and replaced this cause with a new pure aestheticism, lacking an underlying political and moral agenda. James’ novels articulate a new crisis in marriage in which men declare their independence from their dependent women. James’ reversal of the women’s movement issue approaches domestic gender roles from the male perspective. His protagonists are educated aesthetes who long for escapism from the confines of societal gender and marriage roles. The new wealth acquired by Americans towards the end of the century during the Gilded Age, afforded such perversions of traditional male duties, without overtly supporting the women’s suffrage movement and rehabilitation of women’s employment.

Racist Antitrust, Antiracist Antitrust

If the tumultuous 2010s yielded one consistent theme, it is frustration with inequality coalescing into collective action. In response, progressive enforcers and commentators have begun to explore whether the antitrust laws—enacted in an attempt to counter concentrated power during a previous Gilded Age—might play a role in addressing systemic racialized inequality. This essay contributes to that ongoing conversation by historicizing a pair of antitrust cases: Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association. The first is an admirable example of antiracist antitrust. The second is its opposite. Together, these two decisions represent divergent paths. Which has the contemporary antitrust enterprise followed? The Supreme Court’s most recent substantive decision in the area, Ohio v. American Express, suggests both room for hope and reason for concern. The essay concludes by offering four recommendations for how antitrust can retake the high road. Antitrust can and should help to address—rather than exacerbate—structural inequality.

On the Road to Empire

Scholars have long considered the transcontinental railroad as the hallmark of U.S. modernity. Historians have poured ink over the robber barons, industrial might, and the ability of railroads to shrink time and space. Yet, as the United States undergoes what might be a second “Gilded Age”—with the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth as well as anxieties over immigration and unrestrained corporate development—the transcontinental railroad evokes the excesses of the past and the present. American Studies scholar Manu Karuka argues the transcontinental railroad resulted from continental imperialism, a system that persists in the United States and the world. Empire’s Tracks features nine thematic chapters rather than offering a chronological narrative. One can read the book all the way through or pick and choose between essays that explore rumor and archive; case studies of Indigenous modes of relationships; or a global history of railroad colonization. The book concludes with an assessment of...

Opening the black box of conservation philanthropy: A co-produced research agenda on private foundations in marine conservation

In the ‘new Gilded Age’ of mega-wealth and big philanthropy, academics are not paying enough attention to private foundations. Mirroring upward trends in philanthropy broadly, marine conservation philanthropy has more than doubled in recent years, reaching virtually every globally salient marine conservation issue in all corners of the planet. This paper argues that marine conservation philanthropy warrants a dedicated research agenda because private foundations are prominent, unique, and under-studied actors seeking to shape the future of a “frontier” space. We present a co-produced social science research agenda on marine conservation philanthropy that reflects the priorities of 106 marine conservation donors, practitioners, and stakeholders who participated in a research co-design process in 2018. These “research co-designers” raised 137 unique research questions, which we grouped into five thematic research priorities: outcomes, governance roles, exits, internal foundation governance, and funding landscape. We identify issues of legitimacy, justice, and applied best practice as cross-cutting research priorities that came up throughout the five themes. Participants from the NGO, foundation, and government sectors identified questions within all five themes and three cross-cutting issues, underscoring shared interest in this work from diverse groups. The research we call for herein can inform the practice of conservation philanthropy at a time when foundations are increasingly reckoning with their role as institutions of power in society. This paper is broadly relevant for social and natural scientists, practitioners, donors, and policy-makers interested in better understanding private philanthropy in any environmental context globally.

Playing Parrot: American Trompe L’oeil and Empire

American trompe l’oeil still life is full of global goods. Attending to this genre within a nexus of trade and colonialism in the Gilded Age can correct for an absence of empire in transnational scholarship on nineteenth-century American art. This context informs De Scott Evans’s trompe l’oeil painting of a parrot, an animal that by virtue of its mimicry could be imprinted with the history of its own colonial circulation. I argue that Evans and other painters deployed the logic of trompe l’oeil—a hyperillusionistic style often belittled by critics as mere parroting—to expose the politics of colonial goods.

Giving Them a Piece of Our Mind

Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention gives historical substance to the theory that advertisers are buying the commodity of audience attention. Attention, she maintains, was commodified as the American advertising business assumed its modern institutional form during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her study is notable for extending beyond print media to outdoor and direct-mail advertising. Based in trade publications and other primary sources, the study notes the complicated institutional relations among advertisers, agents, and media. These relations usually favor big-budget advertisers, but attention is a slippery commodity, difficult to measure or control. Sherman uses Karl Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities to explain attention as a phenomenon that is inherently ill-suited for full commodification.

The Birth of the Post-Truth Era: A Genealogy of Corporate Public Relations, Propaganda, and Trump

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the most numerous and well-funded institutions in the United States—corporations—used public relations to make widespread and fundamental changes in the way they constitute and regulate their relations of knowledge with the public. Today, we can see this change reflected in a variety of areas such as journalism, political outreach, social media, and in the claims that we live in “post-truth” society. This article traces practices of corporate truth-telling and knowledge production across three periods I call the personal, the legal, and public relations, which are roughly coincident with the antebellum period, the Gilded Age, and the twentieth century, respectively. In sum, what can be found in corporate propaganda and now broadly across society, is that relations of knowledge have come to be refigured primarily as relations of power, subordinating traditional epistemological concerns like justification and belief in favor of government and control.

McAlevey, J. (2016) No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age; Oxford University Press.

McAlevey, J. (2016) No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age; Oxford University Press.

Book review: China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption

Book review: China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption

Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age

It is heartening to welcome new work that takes Gilded Age American politics seriously. Progressive-Era political scientists and historians wrote the first draft of the history of the period’s politics. Their interpretation—heavy on sham partisan battles, the absence of principles, and corruption—providing the before to the after of Progressive-Era redemption, has had remarkable staying power.Broxmeyer does not minimize self-dealing, patronage, office seeking, and other sordid features that were the sum of Gilded Age politics in the Progressive caricature. Rather than decrying corruption (indeed, he asks good questions about what the term means) or, like an earlier literature on machine politics, finding it merely functional in cities with great need but no welfare state, he turns it into a key piece of a transformation in American political development. During the Gilded Age, covering roughly 1870 through the early 1890s, electoral capitalism—the fusion of private property, government, and parties—took shape. Politicians were not the toadies of big businessmen. They were in business—real estate and transportation especially, since these enterprises directly involved government—and many became rich in the process. Their business was turning votes into capital.The book uses New York’s state Republican machine and New York City’s Tammany Hall to demonstrate the links between property, officeholding, and policy. Four chapters present case studies within the larger case study. They cover Tammany, the Republican machine (fed by the supremely important New York Customs House) under Senator Roscoe Conkling, party-provided “poor relief,” the Henry George 1886 mayoral campaign, and anti-monopoly. Historians of New York politics are not likely to find much new in his account; the literature about Tammany, including its members’ business dealings, was already wide and deep, as is that on the state Republican Party. Indeed, historians might find the absence of references to those literatures frustrating. Broxmeyer’s treatment of parties, patronage, and the money to be made in politics before the Gilded Age is also thin. Although the scale of the economy and government in the late nineteenth century certainly made for enhanced economic opportunities, political professionals before that period knew how to take advantage of inside information to speculate in real estate and how to field both entitled and desperate appeals for office. Further precision about what changed later in the nineteenth century would have been welcome. Political scientists might also have appreciated a stronger statement about the book’s place in the literature about American political development and in older analyses of party development. Broxmeyer’s method, historical and archival, might leave those of a more economic and analytical bent wishing for a more abstract treatment of politics and capital.That said, bypassing the well-worn paths, Broxmeyer is able to offer a series of fascinating observations. In one of the few attentive readings of what comprises the bulk of the papers of nineteenth-century politicians and their associates (letters asking for jobs or financial assistance), he finds a public poor-relief system. In an original twist, he builds on that claim to argue that civil-service reform was of a piece with budgetary austerity measures championed by well-heeled anti-party independents. Notwithstanding that both historians and political scientists have conferred considerable attention on labor politics in the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer focuses less on the ins and outs of labor parties than on the peculiar appeal of anti-monopoly to upper-class reformers as well as to labor reformers who lost trust in the party system and, lacking the access that wealth offered, had to develop alternative tactics. The boycott of the New York Tribune once it made a hard turn toward respectability after Horace Greeley’s death is a case in point.Electoral Capitalism will provide historians and political scientists the erudition and inspiration to re-think the re-organization of party politics after the Civil War.

Covid-19 and social care: Union strategies to reshape a dysfunctional sector

In volume 120 of Theory and Struggle (pp. 124-33), I described Unison North West’s Care Workers for Change campaign and how our multidimensional approach to organising in the care sector was informed by the work of John Kelly (Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and Long Waves, 1998) and Jane McAlevey (No Short Cuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, 2016). The Covid-19 pandemic has subsequently brought unprecedented catastrophe and human suffering to vulnerable people and workers in our dysfunctional social care system. This contribution first describes the impact of Covid-19 on social care and union responses to it. The focus then turns to competing ideas about how the social care system might be reshaped and the role of unions in pursuing meaningful structural and institutional change that could win lasting improvements for care workers.

Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900

Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900