The Long Gilded Age
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From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the United States experienced unprecedented structural change. Advances in communication and manufacturing technology brought about a revolution for major industries such as railroads, coal, and steel. The still-growing nation established economic, political, and cultural entanglements with forces overseas. Local strikes in manufacturing, urban transit, and construction placed labor issues front and center in political campaigns, legislative corridors, church pulpits, and newspapers of the era. The Long Gilded Age considers the interlocking roles of politics, labor, and internationalism in the ideologies and institutions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Presenting a new twist on central themes of American labor and working-class history, Leon Fink examines how the American conceptualization of free labor played out in iconic industrial strikes, and how «freedom» in the workplace became overwhelmingly tilted toward individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. He investigates the legal and intellectual centers of progressive thought, situating American policy actions within an international context. In particular, he traces the development of American socialism, which appealed to a young generation by virtue of its very un-American roots and influences. The Long Gilded Age offers both a transnational and comparative look at a formative era in American political development, placing this tumultuous period within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and social transformation.
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The Long Gilded Age
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Finally, in a brief Epilogue, I make an effort to connect the Long Gilded Age to the American labor history that succeeded it. The Long Gilded Age’s subtitle speaks of the “lessons” of its time period. By that word, I mean to include at once the morals drawn, for good or ill, by Gilded Age contemporaries, and those that, looking back, we learn by considering events over a longer stretch of time. Where, in particular, do we see points of continuity, or perhaps even a second chance to come at old problems with new insights? To be sure, we live in a very different world from the one described in these essays. Yet, the urge to understand, and by understanding renew, continues. What, then besides world wars, devastating depressions, and a loss of confidence separate the promise of their times from our own?
What saved the Jews the opprobrium visited on the Chinese was the deflection of the discourse of immigrant “degeneracy” to one of environmental degradation. In the case of the Russian Jews, a host of agents—German Jews, middle-class public-health and reform advocates, as well as the contemporary labor movement—effectively identified industrial capitalism (as exemplified by the sweatshop), not race, as the culprit. In the ensuing discourse of factory inspection, as championed by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the “modern” factory was contrasted to the sweatshop as a means to improve sanitation, eliminate degrading homework, and lift the overall cultural profile of the immigrant community. In the factory, or “model shop” as articulated by the industry’s union-management Joint Board of Sanitary Control after 1910, “the boss remained, but healthy male workers earned a family wage, while enjoying a host of comforts and conveniences… . Where the sweatshop enfeebled, the model shop cured.” Restore the working-class family’s “independence”—as effected by the male provider—the argument suggested, and the wolf of unfreedom could be kept at the door. It is worth noting that the “sweatshop debate” helped to cut short a more systemic discussion of the iniquities of free labor and the free contract. With proper control—in particular a place for unions in the negotiation of wages and conditions—workers, it seemed, could transform the sweatshop from Exhibit A of capitalistic iniquity into “a correctable problem of poor management.” 34
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