National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

CHAPTER ONE
THE GILDED AGE AND COUNTRY PLACES
HISTORIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
The late 1890s, when Frederick and Louise Vanderbilt constructed their house at Hyde
Park, falls at the end of that part of American history commonly referred to as the Gilded Age.
The Vanderbilt residency spans the turn of the century into the Progressive Era, through the
First World War, the Twenties, and the Great Depression. Dividing history into periods such as
these is one of historians' most significant devices for trying to make sense of the past.
Historical periods are arbitrary hypotheses that depend on interpretation for their validity.
Thus, it is the topic of inquiry that lends credence to a particular periodization and helps us to
understand societies and how they change.
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's utopian satire, The Gilded Age (1873), lends its
name to the period that stretches from the end of the Civil War (1865) to roughly the end of the
nineteenth century. Sean Dennis Cashman relates that Twain and Warner took the phrase from
Shakespeare: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, / . . . Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." 1
And so in this way, the label invokes the wasteful indulgences of the late century's captains of
industry. Historians did not immediately or consistently make the phrase their own.
By 1948, Richard Hofstadter used the term unselfconsciously in The American Political
Tradition. 2 His 1955 Age of Reform, an interpretation of the Progressive Era, is periodized from
1890. When referring to the Gilded Age, Hofstadter specifically points to the "tycoons and
industry-builders" who emerged after the Civil War. 3 By the mid-1950s, the standardization of
the American history survey employed it to designate a period characterized by the larger than
life personalities of an emerging industrial state. To quote business historian Glenn Porter, "For
the first time, whole industries came to be identified with names of the powerful individuals who
dominated them - Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, and James J. Hill in railroads, Cyrus
McCormick in reapers, John D. Rockefeller in oil, J. P. Morgan in finance, James B. Duke in
tobacco, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour in meatpacking, Andrew Carnegie in steel." 4
While the nation's process of industrialization during the late nineteenth century still
serves as the dominant theme for interpreting this period, the use of the phrase, "The Gilded
1 Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age; From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore
Roosevelt, 3 rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 3.
2 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948; reprint, New
York: Vintage Books, 1989), 213.
3 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F. D. R. (1955, reprint; New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989), 140; 142; 232; 323.
4 Glenn Porter, "Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business," in The Gilded Age, Essays on the Origins of
Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1996), 9.
1