National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
center of power shifted from the democracy to the money-makers, an era of exploitation that he
called the "Great Barbeque." 15
Matthew Josephson continued this line of interpretation with his substantial and
scathing history, The Robber Barons, The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. 16 Focused on
the industrialist giants of the period, among them Jay Gould, John Jacob Astor, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Jay Cooke, Josephson, on his opening
page, accuses these men of acting "without those established moral principles which fixed more
or less the conduct of the common people of the community." 17 Josephson described
Vanderbilt in particular as "the most astonishing of all the famous parvenus" with a contempt
for the law, a "sharp wharf-rat's tongue," and a practice of raising "rates without pity, to the
lasting misery of his clients." Others suffered equally under his pen. As with many such
histories, 1901 served as a critical point in time. This year saw both the creation of U.S. Steel as
the country's first billion-dollar corporation and the assassination of the President of the United
States, William McKinley. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, engaged the corporate trusts and
led the federal government towards a public policy agenda that would address the social
dislocations resulting from industrialization. 18
In 1957, Samuel P. Hays' The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, marked a significant
reinterpretation of the period that focused on the dramatic changes in American life wrought by
the forces of industrialization rather than on the captains of industry. Hays calls this period the
"Populist-Progressive Era," a label that represents his interest in labor issues, women's activism,
popular politics, reform, and agrarian unrest. 19 Ray Ginger's synthetic Age of Excess falls within
this transitional historiography, influenced as it is by Hays, Kolko, and Robert Wiebe's early
essays. Ginger emphasized both economic and social change, including within his analysis
groups such as labor, Native Americans, and black Americans. Robert Wiebe's remarkably
influential 1967 book, The Search for Order, 1877-1920, argued that a fundamental
organizational shift occurred that transformed a nation of disjointed "island communities" into
a national bureaucratic society administered by middle-class professionals who mediated
between everyday life and the impersonal world. Wiebe's synthesis transformed historians'
understanding of the period and continues as a staple in the historiography. 20
In more recent work on the period, John Whiteclay Chambers' Tyranny of Change
focuses on social problems exacerbated by the emergence of an industrial-urban society. The
15 H. Wayne Morgan, "An Age in Need of Reassessment: A View Beforehand," in The Gilded Age, A
Reappraisal, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), 2-3. Vernon Lewis
Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920, vol. 3 of Main Currents in American
Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930).
16 Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934).
17 Josephson, Robber Barons, 1.
18 Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government, Governance from the Cleveland Era to the
Present (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995).
19 Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
See also Richard L. McCormick, "Public Life in Industrial America, 1877-1917," in The New Social
History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
20 See Kenneth Cmiel, "In Retrospect, Destiny and Amnesia: The Vision of Modernity in Robert Wiebe's
The Search for Order," in Reviews in American History 21(1993): 352-68 for a recent re-evaluation of
Wiebe's work.
4