National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
Frederick and Louise Vanderbilts' lives, their houses, lifestyle, and interests cannot be
divorced from the major political, economic, social, cultural, and demographic events of the
time. Their estate at Hyde Park needs to be interpreted not just within the context of others
more or less like it, but also as part of the seamless web of American society and its history.
When focused on the Vanderbilts and other elites, it is easy to lose sight of just how rarefied
their lives were when compared to that of the vast majority of Americans. Data shows that there
were 125,000 families in the United States in 1890 with annual incomes over $50,000. The
wealthiest one percent of families in 1890 owned 50% of the real and personal property. 10
However, most workers at the time earned less than $800 per year with many, especially
servants and industrial laborers, earning less than the $544 yearly income that marked the
poverty line. 11
Class definitions are not based on income alone. Race, ethnicity, occupation, education,
and religion shaped class identification as well. For example, teaching, while paying far less than
industrial jobs, still conferred middle-class status. Elite behavior sought both to set cultural
standards and to separate itself from other classes of people in ways that perhaps could be
emulated but certainly not replicated. And, as Kathy Peiss has demonstrated in her study of
working class women in New York City, cultural transfer worked both ways, from the bottom
up as well as from the top down. 12
For most contemporary historians, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era together span
a period from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction to 1920, but where the one ends and
the other begins is a question of perspective and perhaps it is not the most important question.
The development of history itself as a profession is bound up in this period. Up until about
1890, most historians worked in the tradition of gentlemen-amateurs. The development of the
modern American university produced a new class of historians, trained in scientific methods of
objectivity whose careers were tied to academic employment. 13 These "New Historians,"
represented by Frederick Jackson Turner, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Carl
Becker, came of age during the great economic depression of the 1890s and thus were shaped by
what Hofstadter called this "turning point in the American mind." Their ideology and
methodology turned away from past histories of moral and constitutional argument and Civil
War to a systematic critique of capitalism and capitalists. 14 Vernon L. Parrington's influential
1930 assessment of the Gilded Age painted a national picture of crass materialism where the
10
Ray Ginger cites the 1893 population at 67 million. (Ray Ginger, Age of Excess, The United States From
1877 to 1914 [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1965], 36.)
11
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon, The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1987), xix-xx. Painter cites United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States (1975) and Charles B. Spahr, An Essay on the Present Distribution of
Wealth in the United States (1896).
12
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements, Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
13
Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1968), 35. See also Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, "The Heroic Model of Science," in Telling
the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994); and Peter Novick, That Noble
Dream, The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
14
Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, 41-3; Novick, That Noble Dream, 92-5.
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