The Middle Class Nation, Before the New Deal.
In United States history, the decades between the end of the War Between the States and World War I, or possibly between the end of Reconstruction and the creation of the independent regulatory agencies that sail under the rubric of the Progressive Era, drop into a kind of limbo of indistinguishable bewhiskered presidents, or perhaps of a dismissable-as-libertarian-dystopia Gilded Age: and the connotations that accompany those labels might be the condensed-more-than-Readers Digest summary of a cobble in the turning arc of History before that Shining Path to the Sunlit Uplands resumes.
Dear reader, it is nowhere near that simple, and Richard White's recent contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 tells a story that will reward careful study.
Professor White, who previously wrote Railroaded (which ought disabuse any reader of that Gilded Age as anything libertarian: the rent-seekers ye shall always have) offered a preview of Republic for Which It Stands at Northern Illinois some years ago, and what got me interested was his introduction of the notion of "a competence" as being the American Dream, rather than the more recent Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous version. "Professor White's analysis of the Gilded Age is going to come as a surprise to many. The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys."
Professor White develops this argument. Book Review No. 14 calls attention to much more, and I share the opinion of a number of the professional reviewers that there is really much that occurred during the Gilded Age that shaped, or that helps us come to terms, with the current state of political and social life in these United States. If, as I have noted before, one metric for my engagement with a book is the volume of reference notes on the front flyleaf, the better to find flagged passages in the body of the text for use in these reviews. By that standard Republic is a hit. The wisest thing to do, dear reader, might be to buy it and dig in. I'll highlight a few things beyond the jump.
The republic of small freeholders developing their "competence" was present at the Founding, although the exigencies of combining the plantation states with the yeoman states involved a compromise over slavery; and the boundaries of the existing colonies became the boundaries of the founding states. The best Congress could do afterward was equalize to the extent possible the square mileage and the coastal or lakefront access of new states. By the Civil War, two independent countries, Texas and California, had become States, but on a take-it-or-leave it basis: and the electoral map still reflects the large colonies and the large States so created.
After the Civil War, though, the Republicans were in a position to push their vision of the free-labor, yeoman farmer Republic, and with the abolition of slavery, people who were three-fifths of a proxy for antebellum Democrats became full voters for abolitionist Republicans, a voting pattern that persisted well into the New Deal. Is anyone surprised that Jim Crow policies caught on among the former proxy-holders?
But the same emergence of mechanized mass production that made Mr Lincoln's armies victorious brought in train mass employment of factory workers in cities, a development not conducive either to that republic of free labor (which envisioned artisans in scattered settlements and yeoman farmers) or to the equalization of states on the basis of area or water access (it does Indiana no good to be about the same geographic size as Illinois when the harvester manufacturing and meat packing agglomerates in Chicago). There's a scholarly article to be written on the ways in which the economic development of the United States introduces complexities to a dialectic. The Old Confederacy was a remnant of feudal ways, but were the freeholders and their competences the rising bourgeoisie, or was that taking shape in the mills of New England and the nascent steel mills? Professor White does not get into those weeds, although there is much to structure an answer to a question I raised a few years ago, "Were the United States still a yeoman's republic of freeholders, on their farms or in their businesses, or were the immigrants in the rising factory a proletariat that would either inherit the earth (the Marxian view) or, because of their origins, were they material to be molded by Wise Experts?"
You really have to read the book. Check out page 329, where Thomas Nast illustrates the cover of Harper's Weekly with a disdainful view of freedmens' votes balancing immigrants' votes. Find out, on page 201, what magazine "demanded the disenfranchisement of the poor." Note, on page 281, somebody asking "Is this a 'government of the people, for the people, and by the people', or is it a government of a country which proposes to control all votes of the people by intimidation and violence?" I could go on, but I promised brevity.
As a summation, let me offer a musing by William Dean Howells, on a possible third term for President Grant. "His re-election would be almost a confession that popular government was near its end among us: when in time of peace only one man can save us, we're hardly worth saving." I'd add "in time of war," but then it's the faculty lounge types that ought renounce the cult of the presidency. It's also instructive to look at voter turnout during the years under study: record high voter participation rates. Higher participation follows controversy. Might the lower turnouts that the chin-pullers fret about not be an indicator of relative contentment?
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Dear reader, it is nowhere near that simple, and Richard White's recent contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 tells a story that will reward careful study.
Professor White, who previously wrote Railroaded (which ought disabuse any reader of that Gilded Age as anything libertarian: the rent-seekers ye shall always have) offered a preview of Republic for Which It Stands at Northern Illinois some years ago, and what got me interested was his introduction of the notion of "a competence" as being the American Dream, rather than the more recent Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous version. "Professor White's analysis of the Gilded Age is going to come as a surprise to many. The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys."
Professor White develops this argument. Book Review No. 14 calls attention to much more, and I share the opinion of a number of the professional reviewers that there is really much that occurred during the Gilded Age that shaped, or that helps us come to terms, with the current state of political and social life in these United States. If, as I have noted before, one metric for my engagement with a book is the volume of reference notes on the front flyleaf, the better to find flagged passages in the body of the text for use in these reviews. By that standard Republic is a hit. The wisest thing to do, dear reader, might be to buy it and dig in. I'll highlight a few things beyond the jump.
The republic of small freeholders developing their "competence" was present at the Founding, although the exigencies of combining the plantation states with the yeoman states involved a compromise over slavery; and the boundaries of the existing colonies became the boundaries of the founding states. The best Congress could do afterward was equalize to the extent possible the square mileage and the coastal or lakefront access of new states. By the Civil War, two independent countries, Texas and California, had become States, but on a take-it-or-leave it basis: and the electoral map still reflects the large colonies and the large States so created.
After the Civil War, though, the Republicans were in a position to push their vision of the free-labor, yeoman farmer Republic, and with the abolition of slavery, people who were three-fifths of a proxy for antebellum Democrats became full voters for abolitionist Republicans, a voting pattern that persisted well into the New Deal. Is anyone surprised that Jim Crow policies caught on among the former proxy-holders?
But the same emergence of mechanized mass production that made Mr Lincoln's armies victorious brought in train mass employment of factory workers in cities, a development not conducive either to that republic of free labor (which envisioned artisans in scattered settlements and yeoman farmers) or to the equalization of states on the basis of area or water access (it does Indiana no good to be about the same geographic size as Illinois when the harvester manufacturing and meat packing agglomerates in Chicago). There's a scholarly article to be written on the ways in which the economic development of the United States introduces complexities to a dialectic. The Old Confederacy was a remnant of feudal ways, but were the freeholders and their competences the rising bourgeoisie, or was that taking shape in the mills of New England and the nascent steel mills? Professor White does not get into those weeds, although there is much to structure an answer to a question I raised a few years ago, "Were the United States still a yeoman's republic of freeholders, on their farms or in their businesses, or were the immigrants in the rising factory a proletariat that would either inherit the earth (the Marxian view) or, because of their origins, were they material to be molded by Wise Experts?"
You really have to read the book. Check out page 329, where Thomas Nast illustrates the cover of Harper's Weekly with a disdainful view of freedmens' votes balancing immigrants' votes. Find out, on page 201, what magazine "demanded the disenfranchisement of the poor." Note, on page 281, somebody asking "Is this a 'government of the people, for the people, and by the people', or is it a government of a country which proposes to control all votes of the people by intimidation and violence?" I could go on, but I promised brevity.
As a summation, let me offer a musing by William Dean Howells, on a possible third term for President Grant. "His re-election would be almost a confession that popular government was near its end among us: when in time of peace only one man can save us, we're hardly worth saving." I'd add "in time of war," but then it's the faculty lounge types that ought renounce the cult of the presidency. It's also instructive to look at voter turnout during the years under study: record high voter participation rates. Higher participation follows controversy. Might the lower turnouts that the chin-pullers fret about not be an indicator of relative contentment?
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)