Having finished Grant,about which I recently wrote, I am now slowly but steadily plowing through The Republic for Which It Stands, a massive history of the Gilded Age, from The Oxford History of the United States, written by Richard White. I highly recommend it. You could build an entire semester course around it.
I don’t know if it’s still true that the Gilded Age (defined for purposes of this book as 1865 to 1896) is fly-through territory when American history is taught in our schools today, but I suspect that it is. In my day they taught us that those terrible carpetbaggers were put in their place and, eventually, so were the monopolists, but we were spared the gory details. We skipped from war to war, and the war against Native Americans didn’t count, so there wasn’t much to say about this period.
As I’ve been reading this book, I’ve been struck more than once by the parallels between then and now. So, since this is my blog, and no one reads it anyway, I’m thinking of writing a few posts about those parallels.
One surprising thing I’ve learned, and I am surprised I’ve never run across this before, because I’ve read a lot of history, is the change from then to now in what it means to be a “liberal”. A liberal in 1876 was, roughly speaking, a Paul Ryan type, right down to his willingness to sacrifice other alleged principles in the cause of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. I don’t know when the meaning flipped, presumably it was a long, slow evolution. Anyway, it is somewhat jarring to have to mentally readjust when I see the word “liberal” in this book.
First, one minor difference between the two periods. It truly was a pundit heaven, because Both Sides Really Did Do It! Nowadays, one party has the sole monopoly on race baiting and immigrant hating (plus a dollop of LGBT hate, which the Gilded folks pretty much swept under the rug), but in the Gilded Age, the parties split the pie. Democrats hated black people. Republicans hated Catholics and immigrants. Everyone hated the Chinese. So, just about all black men (sorry girls, no vote for you) were Republicans, and just about all Catholics and immigrants were Democrats. The Chinese simply were not allowed to vote. Give the Democrats their due, they at least gave some of the fruits of the endemic corruption to their immigrant base, while the Republicans pretty much abandoned their black supporters (who continued to support them in the North until at least the Great Depression) in 1876.
I’m on page 406 as I write this, meaning I’m not even half way through, but so far, there are no heroes in this book, and many dimly known, but generally favorably viewed figures, have feet of clay. Actually, some of them are all clay. The cartoonist Thomas Nast, for instance, was a perfect pundit for his times. He didn’t play favorites. He was a racist and anti-immigrant, thus landing safely on Both Sides. Even Wyatt Earp, it turns out, was a “a pimp, probably a horse thief, an embezzler, an enforcer at bordellos, and a gambler”, before he went into the law enforcement business, which was, at the time, more of a protection racket. Once again, it looks like the Landmark Books let me down. I don’t remember any of that, and I’m pretty sure I read one about Earp.
I’m going to return to this occasionally, for some more specific compare and contrast. It’s worth pointing out that it sort of turned out okay, at least to a certain extent. The Progressive Era reversed some of the excesses of the Gilded Age, the New Deal others, and the Civil Rights movement, others, though over the course of the past 38 years (i.e. since the election of Saint Ronnie) many of those gains have been reversed or nullified, leaving us where we are today. There’s always hope that this repetition of history will be succeeded, as was the Gilded Age, by a somewhat more enlightened and less corrupt period. It remains to be seen whether that can be done in an age in which mass propaganda can be so much more effectively disseminated.
Stay tuned for part two. If I ever actually write it, I’ll get down to cases.
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