Sean Dennis Cashman - America in the Gilded Age

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America in the Gilded Age

THIRD EDITION

ALSO BY SEAN DENNIS CASHMAN AND PUBLISHED BY NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

America, Roosevelt, and World War II

African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights, 1900-1990

America in the Age of the Titans:
The Progressive Era and World War I

America in the Twenties and Thirties:
The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

America Ascendant:
From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR

From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

THIRD EDITION

SEAN DENNIS CASHMAN

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

Copyright 1984, 1988, 1993 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cashman, Sean Dennis.
America in the gilded age : from the death of Lincoln to the rise
of Theodore Roosevelt / Sean Dennis Cashman.3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-1494-3ISBN 0-8147-1495-1 (pbk.)
1. United StatesHistory1865-1898. I. Title.
E661.C38 1994
973.8dc20 93-12999
CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free
paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6

for Piers Mackesy

PART ONE
The Sight and Sound of Industrial America

PART TWO
Politics and Discontent

This volume, the third edition of America in the Gilded Age, a history of the United States from the assassination of Lincoln in 1865 to the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency in 1901, has been planned in conjunction with two projected sequels: America Ascendant, covering the rise of the United States to world preeminence in the first half of the twentieth century, and a later volume, America in the Atomic Age, covering the years of the Cold War from 1945.

When the first edition of America in the Gilded Age was published in 1984, there was little thought that it would be the first of an occasional series. However, publication of four subsequent histories, albeit for different readerships, and the response they received provided an opportunity for Colin Jones, director of New York University Press, editor Niko Pfund, and me to reflect on and plan new editions in a series with a standard formatgeneral histories covering a specific period of American history with chronological chapters on politics and separate thematic chapters on business and industry, immigration, and labor.

We were helped by professional historians who kindly took the time to respond to questions at the book fair of the May 1991 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Louisville, Kentucky. The questions covered such subjects as the nature and time frames of different historical periods; the sorts of subjects usefully covered in integrated chapters and those usefully covered in separate thematic chapters; the optimum length of books required in university courses; and the different uses of bibliographies, primary sources, and illustrations. There seemed to be a consensus that the period from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century does constitute a clearly defined historical period; and there was a preference for separate treatment of certain thematic subjects in the Gilded Age, for bibliographies that provided lists of books arranged alphabetically by topic, and for judicious selection of illustrations. Accordingly, the third edition of America in the Gilded Age has an extra chapter on the American Renaissance and extended chapters on immigration, labor, cities, and the West.

Colin Jones, Niko Pfund, and I reviewed copy on the American Renaissance of 1876-1917 in America in the Age of the Titans: the Progressive Era and World War I (1988), and decided to incorporate it in a fuller and more elaborate treatment in the third edition of America in the Gilded Age. Among various guides to the American Renaissance, the most persuasive were the planners of an exhibition, The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, seen in Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco, and Denver in 1979 and 1980. They also provided an attractive commentary in an accompanying book of the same title (1979) by Richard Guy Wilson, Richard N. Murray, and Dianne H. Pilgrim, and this meticulous account has served as stimulus and basis for this chapter. I have added material about the impact that the American Renaissance had on city design to the close of the preceding chapter on American cities.

We also reread the longer, original manuscripts of the chapters on immigration and labor for the first edition of America in the Gilded Age in their hitherto unpublished forms. They included some discussion on women and African-Americans in the labor movement. Given the answers of historians at the Louisville meeting and the preferences they disclosed on these subjects, the editors agreed to incorporate some of these original versions into what are now more substantive chapters in this third edition. Moreover, we have placed these two chapters with their related themes of workers seeking economic opportunity in apposition to one another. The chapter on the West takes note of revisionist histories of the region.

The ground swell of city and state progressivism from 1890 onwards is as central a part of American history at the close of the Gilded Age as are Populism and imperialism. Thus in the second and third editions of America in the Gilded Age, we added a chapter on progressivism as well as a revised chapter on the robber barons. Iain Halliday, formerly of the Universities of Manchester, England, and Catania, Italy, undertook preliminary scholarship into the Progressive movement. Dr. J. A. Thompson of Cambridge and Princeton Universities read what I had written and offered constructive criticism. This last chapter now includes information on the campaign for womens suffrage in the nineteenth centurya few paragraphs that have also been borrowed from America in the Age of the Titans.

Thus two new and several revised chapters have been introduced since America in the Gilded Age was first published. Since the first edition of 1984 terms for certain subjects have changed in standard speech and in writing. In the new edition we have almost always used the term African-Americans, rather than blacks, and the new English transliteration of Chinese place names but, depending on context, have used both Native Americans and Indians to describe descendants of the first peoples of the Western Hemisphere.