Milton Rugoff - The Gilded Age

By 1868, when General Grant became president and the Gilded Age was approaching full flower , the world of the thirteen colonies and the early republic was gone forever. The America of the early 1800s had been mainly a rural world, a land of farms, hamlets, and vast wilderness areas, of handcraftsmen , homesteaders, small merchants, country lawyers, clergymen, and landed gentry. Its pace was set by the jog trot of a horse, the lurch of a two-wheeled ox cart, the drift of a canal boat; its work tempo set by a man plowing, a woman at a spinning wheel. It was no Golden Age, but life was linked to the cycle of the days and the seasons rather than to a clock, a factory machine, or a railroad timetable.

It was a world in which most Americans earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, provided their own food, made their own clothes. If anyone was not content, there was always virgin land to the west, the moving frontier where opportunity was forever renewed. There were few poor and few rich. Pleasures were simple, and the material temptations were limited. In New England, life was generally narrow and hard, with much loneliness, and a harsh stifling of natural impulses. The farmer was far from being a noble husbandman - the Brook Farm dreamers notwithstanding - and his life was hardly a rural idyll. The farmer leads the meanest of lives, said Thoreau. He knows Nature but as a Robber. Nevertheless, very few people lived by someone elses labor. There was self-reliance, a respect for the individual, and a concern , often fearful but sometimes transfiguring, for a persons soul and destiny.

Even in the eighteenth century, there were those who lived opulently, especially among the planter and merchant aristocracy of Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. But theirs was truly a peculiar institution, based on tobacco, rice, or, later, cotton and the labor of slaves - a backwater that never entered the mainstream of American life.

In the North, America was just emerging from theocratic domi nation. Some citizens could still recall the spell woven by Jonathan Edwards, whose impassioned voice had exhorted humanity to submit to the will of an inscrutable God, to climb to heaven on a ladder whose rungs were impossibly far apart. Calvinism was still hu manitys govern ment, moral law, rule of behavior, spiritual guide . But there was a central paradox in Puritanism: It condemned luxury and worldliness, yet decreed that work was holy and wealth a sign of Gods grace. In time, the descendants of the Puritans resolved this paradox: They lost their distrust of worldliness and acquired an ever-increasing respect for prosperity.

Although vestiges of Edwardss influence were still evident, that of Benjamin Franklin in the role of Poor Richard had grown apace. Protestants and especially Quakers had always made a virtue of thrift and industry. It is ironic that Franklin, the cosmopolite, the freethinker in religion and love, and not so parsimonious himself, should have carpentered such bourgeois ideals into a code that set up a lad der leading not to heaven but to comfort and success. As early as 1808, John Adams said, with a surprisingly modern accent, We have one material which actually constitutes an aristocracy that governs the nation. That material is wealth. Talents, birth, virtues, services, sacrifices, are of little consideration with us.

In the Revolution, the colonists had gained not only political freedom but also the license to exploit their new world as they pleased. It sharpened an appetite for land that would grow until all but the remotest strongholds would be staked out. This braving of frontiers would give those who shared in it a brash self-confidence and aggressiveness. The heroes were Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Mike Fink - trailblazers, huntsmen, Indian fighters, river giants. As the West developed, bold, buoyant, and materialistic, New England, increasingly ingrown and conservative, stagnated.

The industrial revolution brought the steamboat and the railroad to hurry men across the land; cotton gins and mechanical reapers to speed work; factories and mills to multiply the product of hands. The railroad brazenly proclaimed a new force in the world. It was the conqueror of space, iron Pegasus, tamer of wilderness, in its irresistible forward motion the perfect symbol of progress. As a person took a first ride, he or she passed into the age of technology. Only a few suspected that this god might be in part a demon, one that would spatter the landscape with squalid factory towns and dark imprisoning mills. It was a lonely voice that cried from Walden Pond, We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.

Up to that time, the owner of a business had worked in it, had been responsible for it. Now any enterprise could be owned by unidentified people called stockholders; behind a corporate shield, they could profit without producing. Just when Jacksonian democracy had completed the social leveling process, making the common person as good as a king, a new elite took over - the wealthy .

In the years between 1840 and 1861, the dreams of the idealists - at Brook Farm, New Harmony, Fruitlands, and the other Utopian communities - went out like snuffed candles, and the Concord of the Transcendentalists gave way to the Lowell of the cotton mills. The ideal of progress as envisioned by the philosophers and poets of the Enlightenment was soon appropriated by those who taught America to measure it in terms of goods and profits. Progress became the magic wand that justified every exploitation.

To the race for free land was added the scramble for gold, contributing two new possibilities: something for nothing, and luck is crucial. When Indians or Mexicans stood in the way, they were crushed. America, the young Bunyan, was something of a bully. It was the individualist, proud of his or her independence, scorning pomp and pretension; but sometimes lawless, violent, and predatory. By the 1850s, settlements everywhere were turning into towns, and towns into cities. There Americans were no longer self-sufficient. They needed factories; factories needed workers ; in the cities, workers huddled more and more in slums. Gone was the dream of a Puritan commonwealth, visions of an agrarian democracy, sons of toil amid pastoral plenty. The day of the dynamo had come, and humanity was as unprepared to deal with it as it had been in year one. The preacher who had a century earlier moved in the van of colonial society was thrust aside, relegated to the role of a commentator listened to only on Sunday mornings. The Puritan had lost out to the Yankee.