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Introduction

One way or another, after 1875, there was growing skepticism about the effectiveness of the autonomous and self-correcting market economy, Adam Smith’s famous “hidden hand,” without some assistance from state and public authority. The hand was becoming visible in all sorts of ways.

—E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914

The Long Gilded Age encompasses a set of discrete but overlapping essays with three main themes. The first is that the arrangements and institutions that we now take for granted in American economic life depended, in fact, on a thick set of political ideas that were intensely fought over for decades before being consolidated in the opening years of the previous century. The second is that the question of workers’ power within industry lay at the center of many of these conflicts. Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, I argue for the internationalism of the processes at work across the prewar era. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that American outcomes offered but one set of variants within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and those determined to transform it according to socially defined ends, that American labor radicals and reformers were themselves intensely aware of the larger menu of historical and political possibilities of their age, and that the legacy of this earlier era of globalization offers possibilities yet to be fully tested in our own era, one famously baptized by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 as a new world order. ¹

My contribution adds but a new twist to a mountain of judgments previously proffered upon a time period that itself is regularly open to vigorous debate about its duration and very name. Classically divided into two segments, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as these years recede ever farther from the present, insiders have commonly lumped the two together into one un-poetic amalgam called the GAPE. Both names, we quickly note, convey invidious distinctions rare to the appellations of other aggregates of time (compare “Jacksonian” or “Civil War era” or even “Roaring Twenties” or “Long 1960s”). Typically, the Gilded Age (named after the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner) pejoratively conjures up a period of unbridled urban-industrial expansion, government corruption, labor conflict, and recurrent depression from 1877 to roughly 1900. The Progressive Era, on the other hand, self-named by some of its own reform-minded champions, is likely to summon up more positive associations as an attempt by a variety of actors across the first two decades of the twentieth century (stopping just before or after U.S. engagement in World War I depending on the interpreter) to reckon with the very excesses of the Gilded Age.

To be sure, historians themselves have never been happy with such simplistic dichotomization. Just as one can locate no shortage of creative reformers in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era also rings with scandal, corruption, and economic mayhem. Attempting to get beyond historical moralizing, a few scholars have famously ventured forth with more integrative conceptual tags for this period of national development, such as “the search for order,” “organizational society,” “age of modernization,” or, most recently, “new spirits.” With a more global view (and stopping at the watershed of the Great War), the masterful Eric Hobsbawm similarly unified the period in Marxian metaphor as “the age of empire.”

Personally, and for the interpretive emphasis of this volume, I like playing off the very judgmentalism inherent in the original categories. Within reason (that is, the standards of evidence-gathering and sifting that we assign to the historical craft), we look to history to understand our own place in time. That quest inevitably puts the questions asked of the past at the changing beck and call of the historian’s own times. We want to know what happened because it mattered in determining not only who we are but who we might have been—and thus what we can make of our own world. For that reason I currently prefer the option of “The Long Gilded Age” for the entire GAPE (for convenience, let’s round the years to 1880–1920). Critically inquisitive (if still inevitably somewhat pejorative), the phrase usefully refocuses attention on bursting social inequalities as well as the political management of industrial capitalism across a crucial and formative period of the nation’s development.

As regularly pointed out in U.S. history textbooks, the physical changes of the country in this period were stupendous and world-shaking. Carl Degler emphasized in what he called the “age of the economic revolution” that the rise of industry not only transformed how and where Americans lived but, by creating a near-unquenchable demand for labor, repeopled America with an industrial workforce drawn from the far corners of the globe. By 1890 the annual value of manufactured goods overtook the sum of agricultural commodities for the first time in American history, and within five years, the nation ranked fourth as of 1860 had become the world’s supreme industrial power. Likely the most tangible sign of the application of machine power to domestic and world trade was the railway grid: by 1890 U.S. trackage surpassed that of all Europe, including Russia. ²

To distinguish the turn-of-the-twentieth-century material changes from an earlier dynamic unleashed by textile manufactory and steam power in late eighteenth-century Britain, economic historians generally associate the Gilded Age with a “second industrial revolution.” Beginning with the Bessemer steel process, famously adopted by Andrew Carnegie in the mid-1870s, a leap in industrial productivity and consolidation depended on new technologies, including electricity, chemical engineering, as well as communications applications like the telegraph and radio. Bigness was both cause and effect of industrialization. By 1910, corporate consolidation had produced the Sugar Trust, the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, the Oil Trust, and the Money Trust; alongside Carnegie, meat-packers Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour, railroad giant J. J. Hill, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and mythical investment banker J. P. Morgan had become household names. ³ The science-and-technology base of American business preeminence by the early twentieth century equally depended on a new knowledge economy, manifest in a spreading network of research universities.

Geographically, the behemoth of the economic revolution was the industrial city: over one hundred cities grew by 100 percent or more in the decade of the 1880s alone, and by 1890 Chicago and Philadelphia had joined New York City as centers of more than a million residents. Whereas little more than a tenth of Americans lived in cities of more than 50,000 people in 1850, the “urban” population became a majority, as documented by the 1920 census. America’s urban-industrial revolution also entailed its own demographic upheaval. By 1910, immigrant workers—increasingly from southern and eastern Europe—dominated the labor force in coal and copper mining, iron and steel, construction, oil refining, as well as once proudly Yankee cotton textiles: as Herbert Gutman (with Ira Berlin) definitively concluded about the industrial landscape: “most American workers were immigrants or the children of immigrants.” ⁴

The material and technological changes of the era, dramatic as they were, have inclined us mistakenly to think of the Long Gilded Age as one where business, science, and economic interests mattered more than politics or ideas. Indeed, it is not uncommon to teach the GAPE as one where politics and culture (read, the Progressive Era) are struggling to “catch up with” economic and social change. Yet, this is surely a crude rendering of the inherent mutual dependence of the economic and political realms. As I hope to demonstrate in several of the succeeding essays, the law (as a reflection of both legislative and judicial processes) mattered a great deal in fashioning the peculiarities of American capitalism.

And nowhere, I suggest, was the particularism of American political development more in play than in the area of workplace relations between labor and management. Workers themselves, drawing at once on republican traditions of citizen action and on the yearnings of those yet to taste full citizenship rights, first took the initiative to demand a place at the economic table. Audaciously, the Knights of Labor used both the ballot box and the boycott to push for union recognition and the eight-hour day. The skilled trades and industrial unions like the mineworkers in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) likewise rebelled against wage cuts and the abuse of union representatives. Altogether, an era of titanic clashes in major industries including the railroads, coal, and steel as well as local strikes in manufacturing, urban transit, and construction placed the Labor Question (i.e., just what role should workers have in America’s new industrial economy?) front and center in political campaigns, legislative corridors, church pulpits, as well as social science scholarship.

Finally, I have become ever more aware of the provincialism of all nationally-confined chronological frameworks. This volume thus also self-consciously adds to a larger move by American historians (indeed, a move often made earlier by those outside U.S. history and especially by those writing about earlier periods) to see beyond national borders as well to situate what happens within those borders in a broader context or, as it is often now called, an America-in-the-world approach. This impulse was first formalized in the La Pietra Report issued in 2000 by the Organization of American Historians Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History: “If historians have often treated the nation as self-contained and undifferentiated, it is increasingly clear that this assumption is true in neither the present nor the past… . Both the nation and the other historical phenomena we examine must be resituated in larger contexts because the movements of people, money, knowledge, and things are not contained by single political units.” ⁵

Although it might be argued that any period of American history can benefit from a combination of comparative and transnational insights, the bona fides for the turn-of-the-century period are particularly compelling. More than ever before in its history, the U.S. economy was tethered to international forces, and the long-distance interactions—whether economic, political, or cultural—would not return to a similar state of intensity until our own times. A prior, mid-century transportation revolution—encompassing railroads, steamships, and construction of the Suez Canal—set the stage for a dizzying period of global movement, both human and commercial. By the late 1880s, for example, steamships were ferrying the majority of the world’s trade, and their plunging prices facilitated a new, mass steerage class of travelers. By 1914, Europe was importing more than three-quarters of its butter and wheat, and nearly half its meat—with the latter two products effectively fueling the North American farm economy. ⁶ Altogether, global trade as a share of global wealth would not reach its 1913 summit until 1970.

But the globe-trotting influences extended beyond the material and corporeal. As historian Thomas Bender has summarized, the global depressions of the 1870s and 1890s led many to question inherited economic orthodoxies. Like Daniel Rodgers before him, Bender points to the rise of an “awareness of the social,” or an environmental approach to the community’s welfare, that echoed among both academic and public policy elites. ⁶ Politically, it was a tendency that stretched from circles around the Catholic Church on the right to a reformed “new liberalism” of the center to out-and-out socialist revolutionism on the far left. Altogether, as British historian Charles Emmerson summed up the pre-World War I moment: “A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result.” ⁸ A political phrase-maker, indeed, might well have characterized the era a new world order.

One might have expected labor historians—particularly those post-1960s “new labor historians” who added demography, migration, as well as race and gender dimensions to the study of their working-class subjects—to have earlier extended the geographic boundaries of their field. But, I think there are at least two reasons why the transnational move in this arena generally proved no more advanced than in most other subfields of American history. ⁹ For one, new labor historians were, in fact, consciously resisting a putatively comparative framework that seemed to answer the important questions about the working class before they were asked: the American Exceptionalism Argument. As I summarized in a previous work, “One of the favorite tasks of American historians has been to explain why the United States, alone among the nations of the western world, passed through the industrial revolution without the establishment of a class consciousness and an independent working-class political movement.” ¹⁰ Not surprisingly, the verdict of this older comparative tradition, most commonly associated with Werner Sombart’s 1906 Why Is There No Socialism in America? thesis, did not appeal politically to a generation of historians looking for embers of insurgency under native soil. ¹¹ Beyond ideology, moreover, the method of the comparative approach favored by sociologists and political scientists, proved geographically as well as historically stilted. Whatever the focus—cheap land, the cult of individualism, early mass suffrage, a heterogeneous labor force, the federal separation of powers, application of brute force, etc.—exceptionalist arguments assumed the autonomy of action within the individual nation-state. In short, they assumed that what happened (politically) in Germany, England, and/or the U.S. stayed there, as irreducible functions of particular in-country configurations of power, ideology, and the like. In the end, once a new generation of social historians in Europe as well as America cast doubt on the ideal-typical “class-conscious” proletariat of classic Marxism—that is, it didn’t seem to exist anywhere—they also inadvertently undermined the motive for large-scale comparative work. ¹²

Aside from fending off a stultifying “internationalist” model of working-class development on the Left, the New Labor Historians had additional reasons, at once personal and political, to stress the indigenous nature of American labor and radical developments. Undoubtedly, the McCarthyism of the early 1950s cast a shadow of illegitimacy and conspiracy on any radical political project that was assigned a foreign origin, let alone sustained international inspiration. But there was something more. As intellectual historian David S. Brown emphasizes, the immigrant (and especially Jewish-immigrant) children who first advanced the new history “from below” were sensitive to their own distance from the American political heartland, and hence eager to bridge the gap. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, in particular, with deep roots in the nation’s progressive past, helped a new generation of students, including many “red diaper babies” from New York Jewish families, to redefine the central themes of American history around the democratic yearnings of ordinary working people. Not surprisingly, two journals closely tied to an emergent New Left scholarship—Studies on the Left (1959) and Radical America (1967)—emerged from Madison.

My own beloved adviser, Herbert Gutman, exemplified this trend. Raised in Queens in a radical Yiddish-speaking household, his pursuit of the American working-class experience, begun at Columbia University (where he completed an M.A. under Richard Hofstadter in 1950), did not catch fire until he transferred to Madison for his Ph.D. “The Madison years,” he would later recall, “made me understand that all my left politics had not prepared me to understand America west (or even east) of the Hudson River. Not in the slightest.” ¹³

For Gutman, as for a spreading host of New Labor Historians, the American industrial landscape itself thus proved a sufficiently broad and complex tableau to understand both the origins of Gilded Age labor conflicts as well as the source of ideological opposition (commonly identified with American “labor republicanism”) to the power of anti-democratic elites. These skillful social historians, of course, painstakingly documented the role of immigration in U.S. class formation, and they were not unmindful of the contributions of foreign-born socialists and anarchists in American-centered struggles. Yet, waging their own intellectual war against a consensus-minded generation of scholars who had preceded them, they focused on the domestic roots of popular resistance and rebellion. As James R. Green explained in a preface to his influential study of early twentieth-century radicalism in the Southwest, “One of the most important objectives of this study is to describe the forgotten men and women who made the movement such a strong indigenous expression of socialism.” ¹⁴

Politically, of course, the valence of nationalism/internationalism has shifted in the last few decades rather remarkably across the political spectrum. Pressed by multinational investment interests, nationalist walls of tariff protection, immigration restrictions, and, alas, labor standards as well, have all tumbled. Much weakened, the U.S. labor movement (together with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to which it attaches itself), desperate for alternatives, generally embraces internationalist cooperation and even global labor standard-setting as a response to the competitive “race to the bottom.” A purely nationalist and populist discourse is now far more common on the political Right than the political Left. ¹⁵ At the same time—and hastened by the “liberation” of formerly Communist state economies into the global capitalist marketplace—competitive pressures on European regimes have also narrowed the differences in labor and social welfare policies among the very countries whose relatively buoyant Social Democracy had once seemed to distinguish them from the free market American Exception.

However ambiguous the result from a political point of view, the current moment is a most auspicious one for rethinking American labor history through a more internationalist lens. By widening the camera angle spatially, we not only gain access to a comparative range of outcomes among contemporary national actors, but also can better zero in on the historical what, when, and why that made the U.S. record peculiar (if not outright exceptional). As suggested above, historians of all fields are helping to shape the contours of a more capacious transnational or comparatively internationalist history. My approach here tends to slither between transnationalist (how historical forces at any given moment crossed and/or superseded single-country boundaries) and comparative (how similar challenges received distinct treatment in different nation-states) analysis. What I hope I have kept consistent, however, is a “grounded globalism,” that is, attention to specific context at discrete moments in time. ¹⁶

This, at least, is my charge in the following set of essays. I say “essays” in the disparate plural rather than “book” in the unified singular, because it is a more accurate account of the genesis of the project. I spent an initial period of work combing through both older and newer historiography in labor, business, and political history looking for entry points that might prove at once productive and provocative in reexamining the distinctiveness of American institutional development. Based on my own tastes and tests of significance, I ended up with five research inquests that each took on a life of its own. While all the essays relate to central themes of American labor and working-class history—strikes, industrial relations, labor law and the state, radical and reform thought, political movements—they do so in new and perhaps unexpected ways. Each chapter, moreover, engages the “world” theme by a collective different angle; they focus, in turn, on ideas, action, institutions, policy, and political movement culture. In their very selectivity, of course, the essays inevitably slight other major themes of the period. Fortunately, readers will find excellent, and more pointed treatment of such subjects as race, gender, immigration, and imperial exploits elsewhere. ¹⁷

Societies, like individual souls, do not live by bread (or material reproduction) alone. Rather, they are sustained by belief systems backed up by a legal framework. In Chapter 1 I argue that the concept of “free labor”—vouchsafed by Union victory in the Civil War—has served as a key pillar of both modern-day labor law and social stability. Although the source of continuous contest among competing social groups, American freedom at the workplace, as crucially adjudicated by the Supreme Court, has overwhelmingly tilted towards individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. What this means in practice for the labor movement and the larger political culture, I try to illustrate by comparison with France, a society whose dedication to “liberty” was also sealed in revolutionary sacrifice.

Another sort of sacrifice, this one demanded of the thousands of men and women involved in the great Gilded Age strikes, beckons in Chapter 2. Here, we can observe the contest over the nature and limits of American freedom played out in real time. In reconsidering a decade of iconic conflicts—Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, and the anthracite coal strike of 1902—I choose to focus on the strategic choices taken and not taken by the leaders on all three sides: business, labor, and the state. What were their motives? What were their options? What difference did it make? Based on comparative analysis with Great Britain, I suggest that the strike outcomes themselves helped define what social scientists came to think of as American Exceptionalism or the weakness of a U.S. working-class presence. While emphasizing the historical forces of agency and contingency, I also present a broadly revisionist view of all three battles based in part on reframing Andrew Carnegie as an ambivalent Scot, recasting Eugene V. Debs as an unnecessary martyr, and reevaluating conservative miners’ leader John L. Mitchell and Republican Party boss Mark Hanna as unsung but at least partially worthy working-class heroes.

Chapter 3 steps back from the immediate industrial battlegrounds to explore the genesis of labor reform thought that became applied to the conflicts of the period. The subject confronts us with one of the classic sets of actors regularly identified with the Progressive Era: “middle-class” intellectuals. How did a generation of new social science professionals, in particular, respond to an era of class conflict, urban poverty, and mass immigration? In his monumental Atlantic Crossings, Daniel T. Rodgers makes the case for an Atlantic-wide world of reformers and public officials, eager to rebuild the city and modernize the countryside according to an international policy playbook. Supplementing Rodgers’s analysis with particular attention to labor issues, I compare and contrast the sources of what might be called “radical reform” ideas in the U.S. with those in Britain and Germany. I suggest that among the most positive and unique aspects of American development was the rise of the research university, best represented in the social science fields by the “engaged” scholarship of labor economist Richard T. Ely and his colleagues and students at the University of Wisconsin. For an extended moment, I argue, the Wisconsin Experiment acted out the pragmatic, cosmopolitan and “social democratic” promise of an American progressivism otherwise and all too soon given over to technocratic elitism.

In Chapter 4, I turn to legal and legislative chambers, where the labor movement and its middle-class allies as well as its antagonists worked out the institutional pathways of American industrial relations from the era of the Knights of Labor through the heyday of the American Federation of Labor. One question, I suggest, always bedeviled organized labor and its sympathizers: the question of legitimacy. Why, in short, could labor unionism not gain a surer foothold in American law and public life until the 1930s or, for that matter, even until today? Again, I suggest that a wider field of vision treating divergent development across societies resting on a common-law legal heritage (thus encompassing the UK, Canada, and especially the territories of Australia and New Zealand, or what the British, due to their global juxtaposition, call the Antipodes) offers new insight. Essentially, I suggest, the door of industrial jurisprudence in the English-speaking world was open, at least for some time, to a number of variations. For lesser-skilled, more easily replaced industrial workers—whose ranks in the U.S. were overwhelmingly composed of new immigrants—some support from the state proved essential to assure them a place at the bargaining table with their employers. Despite considerable internal debate and discussion, however, the dominant AFL-defined labor movement opted for a relatively anti-statist “British model.” when it might have been better served by the examples of Australia and New Zealand that combined state-sanctioned systems of union recognition with industrial arbitration of disputes.

Another form of Long Gilded Age internationalism is represented by the construction of the Socialist Party of America. As a political ideology drawing explicitly from European roots and as a social movement originally defined by its varied immigrant advocates, socialism carried both the promise and the peril of its inherently transnational presence. In Chapter 5 I try to recover the spirit behind the “golden age” of American socialism. Its very un-American-ness, I insinuate (contra much recent labor history scholarship), was part of the appeal of socialist doctrines to a young generation itching to taste the forbidden fruits of a wider world. Just as the post-adolescent American upper class ventured on its grand tour and new urban émigrés explored the thrills of Coney Island, so did other means of travel, both figurative and literal, summon those eager to break with Victorian norms. From social democracy to revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism to socialist feminism, and radical secularism to Christian socialism—the insurgent political tendencies of the age all beckoned in accents from across the globe. And a generation bred by this unspoken era of globalization—of study, travel, immigration, as well as international political solidarities—tried to take full advantage.

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?