FORUM: SHOULD WE ABOLISH THE “GILDED AGE”?

Editor’s Note: This forum is a revised version of a roundtable from the 2007 Organization of American Historians meeting that may not make the participants popular with readers of this journal. In recent decades, much debate has revolved around the viability of the term “Progressive Era,” but people in the first two decades of the twentieth century did commonly talk about their time as “progressive” in roughly the same way that historians use the adjective. Close examination reveals “Gilded Age” to be the more questionable of the two period labels on the masthead. For sure, contemporaries knew Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, and especially the play based on it. And they did consider this story and its characters relevant as satires of their time. But as several historians have noticed, Americans in the last decades of the 1800s almost never used “Gilded Age” as a general label for their era; they almost always used it in direct reference to the novel or the play. The use of “Gilded Age” as a general periodization term dates from the 1910s and 1920s, when culture critics such as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford found it a useful motif for lamenting the alleged shallowness and vulgarity against which they were rebelling. From iconoclastic cultural criticism, the idea of a Gilded Age passed into historical writing by the 1930s and became so commonplace that its provenance was forgotten.

There are several ways to approach the revelation that a beloved periodization device is an historian’s construct with dubious roots in the years described. During the 2007 OAH forum, this editor—in part because he does not want to redo the stationery—took an agnostic position concerning what to call the late 1800s. He concentrated instead on the historiographic and intellectual history problem of what the notion of a Gilded Age says about how Americans impute moral and political meaning to their country’s past. Rebecca Edwards and Richard R. John approach the matter as a problem of historical analysis. If the late 1800s was not the Gilded Age, they ask, what was it? Edwards’s answer draws on the political trends and movements and policy innovations of those decades, while John derives lessons from the history of business, technology, and political economy. Of the two, Edwards is more determined to abolish the Gilded Age as a separate period; her argument is in keeping with a strong recent trend toward regarding circa 1870–1920 as a single period, perhaps a “long progressive era.” John seems amenable to considering the decades from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War as a distinct period if we can find a less heavy-handed and misleading label for those years. As he did in 2007, Richard Bensel, the historian of political economy, follows with a rueful comment on the challenge involved in moving U.S. historians to change the way that they divide up and label the past, along with a modest proposal for overcoming that inertia. This is the journal’s second forum in recent years on the problem of periodizing the late 1800s. For a vigorous case that the Gilded Age did exist as a distinct period, see Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” with comments by James L. Huston and Rebecca Edwards, in the July 2006 issue (5.3).