National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
Age," is no longer seen as particularly precise in describing the dramatic shifts of the post-Civil
War era and the complexity of responses to them. The past forty years has witnessed a shift in
emphasis in the historical literature from elite politics and business on a national scale to social
history with its focus on the topical analysis of subjects like race, class, and gender, and mass
developments such as urbanization and consumerism. These issues find little relevance in the
artificial periodization as defined by Twain's "gilded age" with its limited reference to machine
politics and wasteful consumption. A brief survey of recent American history texts reveals that
historians have turned to an organizational interpretation that in part results from three
influential works, Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967), Alfred D. Chandler's
The Visible Hand (1977), and Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America; Culture and
Society in the Gilded Age (1982). 5 Thus, students learn about "The New Industrial Order,"
"Economic Change and the Crisis of the 1890s," "The Emergence of Modern America," and
"Nationalizing the Republic." 6 These broader categories encompass and integrate a greater
range of people into the historical narrative and open up new sets of questions about the
changes generated by an industrializing society and the diverse responses to them.
Both of these analytical structures are useful in studying the Vanderbilts and Hyde Park.
Older interpretations of the Gilded Age fit because of the Vanderbilts' elite economic status. Yet
their wealth also relied on the new organizational society, thus demonstrating both the
complexities of periodization and the continued utility of older interpretations when
synthesized with new works of historical analysis. Even though Frederick Vanderbilt's fortune
was a third generation inheritance, he nonetheless served as a director of the New York Central
Railroad and forty-three others. 7 Historians credit the railroads as the key to the establishment
of a national market and as the pioneer in the organizational innovations of big business. 8
Railroad practices contributed to labor unrest and political movements such as the Granger and
Populist movements. The progressive movements that sought reform in the face of corporate
hegemony also worked to the advantage of industrialists who lobbied the government for less
radical legislation favorable to their interests. 9
5 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand, The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press, 1977); and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America; Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
6 James West Davidson, et. al. Nation of Nations, A Narrative History of the American Republic, 3 rd ed.
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1998); Randall Woods and Willard Gatewood, America Interpreted, A Concise
History with Readings (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998); George Brown Tindall and
David E. Shi, America, A Narrative History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Bernard Bailyn, et. al.,
The Great Republic, 4 th ed. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1992). See also John M. Murrin,
et. al., Liberty, Equality, Power, A History of the American People, 2 nd ed. (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1996); and John Mack Faragher, et. al., Out of Many, A History of the American People, 2 nd ed.
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997).
7 Edwin Hoyt, The Vanderbilts and Their Fortunes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1962), 353.
8 Porter, 10-11. See also Chandler and Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1879-1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), both of which describe and interpret the rise of middle management in
large industries such as railroads and insurance.
9 Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age, Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998),
49. See also Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Re-interpretation of American History, 1900-
1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-
1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
2