National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
business, politics, and culture over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants,
blacks and women." 52
This historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has focused on categories of
inquiry most relevant to understanding the Vanderbilt family and the Vanderbilt Mansion
National Historic Site. It is by no means complete, either in scope or depth. The citations in
both the text and the footnotes will serve as entries into the history of the period. This is an
extraordinarily complex time in history and as one can readily see, marks a watershed between
what is often perceived as America's traditional past and the modern industrial era. For the
moment, as social history dominates historical inquiry, the lives and culture of elites will be less
easily studied, but at the same time will be more readily seen in a balanced perspective. 53
MATERIAL CULTURE HISTORIOGRAPHY
The symbolism behind the popular styles of country houses served to reinforce class values,
to reflect life-styles, hobbies, and passions, and to suggest ideologies among architects.
Americans wanted an aura of history, a sense of permanence, a palpable connection to the
Old World. The symbolic universe of the country house provided the milieu for their
dreams of the good life. 54
Post-Civil War America witnessed a period of unprecedented economic prosperity.
Despite several acute depressions, including the Panic of 1893, this prosperity allowed the
creation of a new class of millionaire industrialists whose finances changed not only the ways in
which money was made, but more notably, in the ways that money was spent. Building large,
luxurious, expensive country houses was a prevailing trend that ensured a lifestyle
commensurate with the newly acquired wealth. These estates frequently included large tracts of
land, sometimes with farms, and often provided facilities for leisure activities for the new
millionaires. Gilded-age estates flourished during the 1890s, through the turn of the century
and were only seriously curtailed by the income tax amendment of 1913, and the beginning of
the First World War. 55
One of the most tangible links between the Vanderbilts' Hyde Park and the greater
subject of the Gilded Age is that it is representative of the best architectural and artistic abilities
of the time. The country estates built between the Civil War and World War I show the
Vanderbilts playing a central role. Frederick W. Vanderbilt's Hyde Park estate can be used as a
valid barometer by which to measure architectural style, cultural development, technological
and mechanical innovations of the period.
52
Trachtenberg, 231.
53
Examples of fields not addressed in this essay include: national politics; foreign affairs; imperialism;
immigration; African Americans; Native Americans; westward expansion; populism; machine politics and
reform; city management movement; scientific management; growth of government regulation;
environmentalism; growth of cities; labor movements; prohibition; journalism and muckraking; realist
literature; popular culture; intellectual currents; and education.
54
Mark Alan Hewitt, The Architect and the American Country House (New Haven & London: Yale
University Press, 1990), 92.
55
Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition, and Americans, rev. ed (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 192-
3.
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