National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
period was a time marked by both incredible progress and, in equal measure, frightening social
dislocations. Chambers credits Progressive reform with idealistic, yet inspirational, reforms
meant to mitigate the effects of a "self-regulating" society through government intervention. 21
Nell Irvin Painter framed her study, Standing at Armageddon, The United States, 1877-1919
within a conflict between differing value systems, one championing prosperity, the other,
democracy. Painter argues that economic interests created an aristocracy that undermined
democracy, represented by a variety of competing interests located in labor, race, and gender
issues. Sean Dennis Cashman published his third edition of America in the Gilded Age, From the
Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in 1993. This edition is notable in the context
of this study for its attention to the American Renaissance, the high culture of the period.
Cashman states that the art of the Gilded Age would be that period's most enduring legacy and
interprets it as an agent of American nationalism. 22 As with the other recent histories of the
period, America in the Gilded Age seeks to tell a fuller story that integrates economic and
technological change with social history and its focus on labor, class, gender, and race.
In contrast to these studies which focus on social transformation and responses to
industrialization, another category of analysis looks more specifically at economic change and
the men who drove corporatization. The seminal work in this field is Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s
The Visible Hand, The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). Chandler describes
the railroad as the seedbed for the corporate shift to a managerial structure and as the model for
nationally organized corporations, including not just transportation networks, but also
production and distribution industries. Chandler's work chronicles the emergence of the
vertically-integrated corporation, but Naomi R. Lamoreaux's The Great Merger Movement in
American Business, 1895-1904 looks at the process of horizontal consolidation that occurred at
the turn of the last century. This movement resulted in the merger of many or all competitors in
an industry into a single, giant enterprise. Lamoreaux attributes the merger movement to "the
development of capital-intensive, mass-production manufacturing techniques in the late
nineteenth century; the extraordinarily rapid growth that many capital-intensive industries
experienced after 1887; and the deep depression that began in 1893." 23 William Cronon's
Nature's Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West analyzes the transformations of the late
nineteenth century as a relationship between economic and ecological forces, tracing the paths
between urban markets and the natural systems that supplied them. 24 The growth of Chicago's
rail systems, banking networks, and commodity industries such as grain, lumber, and meat,
opened the western regions to the process of industrialization and connected them to eastern
centers of wealth.
John N. Ingham looks at the social influence of the business elite who emerged as part of
these processes. The Iron Barons studies the rise of iron and steel magnates in Pittsburgh from
1874-1965. Rather than interpreting this story as a mythological "rags to riches" one, Ingham
traces the way in which a provincial upper-class secured positions of social parity not just with
the old-guard of a city like Pittsburgh, but also with established wealth in financial centers such
21
John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1900-1917 (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1980). Chambers published a second edition in 1992 that changed the title dates
to 1890-1920.
22
Cashman, 168-70.
23
Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187-8.
24
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1991).
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