"How a Raucous Democratic System in Which the Vast Majority of the Electorate Voted Gave Way to a More Sedate and Exclusionary Political Culture"

"Wolfe's four lost men may have lacked charisma and accomplished almost nothing while in office, but, Grinspan argues, Americans were far more passionately invested in national politics then than they are today. And if you think our current moment of hyperpartisanship, political polarization, abusive language, widespread efforts to suppress the right to vote, and violent clashes over electoral outcomes is unprecedented, think again. As far back as the 1790s, opponents called George Washington a British agent and Thomas Jefferson a lackey of revolutionary France. In the decades before the Civil War, not a session of Congress passed without punches being exchanged between lawmakers and knives and pistols being drawn in the Capitol. But the high point of this kind of acrimonious politics came in the Gilded Age."

Eric Foner at The Nation reviews Jon Grinspan's The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915.

"If You Think We're Not All in This Together, It's Every Man for Himself"

"OK, boomers, check out these meticulous, data-driven charts, in which Putnam shows how, starting in the '60s, America became less economically equal, less politically tolerant, less socially engaged, less altruistic, the era of me, myself and I, and many of you, too."

In a November 2020 story, Paul Solman at the PBS Newshour talks with Robert Putnum about Putnum's book, The Upswing.

"How Some People in the Middle and Upper Classes of the Gilded Age Regarded the Poor"

"These occasions allowed rich and middle-class people to dress down and enjoy it. Linscott's suggested invitation included rules for party garb: 'Every womin what kums must ware a Poverty dress and apern, er something ekelly erpropriate, an leave her poodle dorg to hum.' (I know, this stuff is hard to read. But these invitations are such interesting ephemeral examples of the Gilded Age's passion for the use of 'humorous,' 'colorful' dialect in literature; I must include it.)"

Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses nineteenth-century "poverty parties."

"So Perfect Is the Illusion"

"The cyclorama re-created the Battle of Gettysburg in stunning realism, with impeccable attention to the smallest minutiae. Yet it offered not a single clue as to why the battle had been fought. No matter how hard they looked, or how long they stared, no visitor would find in the painting any trace of the cause of the war. There was carnage. There was valor. But there was no purpose."

Yoni Applebaum at The Atlantic depicts the history of the Gettysburg Cyclorama.

"The Other Side of Progress Was Poverty"

"George was neither a socialist nor a communist; he influenced Tolstoy but he disagreed with Marx. He saw himself as defending 'the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.' He had a bit of Melville in him (the sailor) and some of Thoreau ('We do not ride on the railroad,' Thoreau wrote from Walden. 'It rides upon us.') But, really, he was a Tocquevillian. Tocqueville believed that democracy in America was made possible by economic equality: people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But he thought that speculative, industrial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible."

Jill Lepore in The New York Times recalls Henry George.

Searching for Order

"What Lears makes of that is clear from the quote he takes from Herman Melville at the book's outset: 'Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.' To summarize his sense of the transformation almost to the point of oversimplification: An earlier 19th century notion of 'manliness' gave way to an amoral militarism, which fused with a muscular new Protestantism and evolving theories of racial supremacy; these, in turn, conjoined with a new economic order in which capital made way for capitalism. All were able to meld because each began in the post-Civil War hunger for 'regeneration.' The result was an assertive, aggressive, frequently intolerant national identity."

Tim Rutten reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 in the Los Angeles Times.

Can't Live in a Tenement Yard

"He pursued his campaign with evangelical zeal. Riis believed that defective character led to poverty and that conscience-driven capitalism was the best solution. Although he pitied them, his reform crusade 'ascribed little or no role at all to tenement dwellers themselves,' Czitrom writes. This brand of noblesse oblige perhaps anticipated the public housing failures of Riis’s 20th-century admirer Robert Moses."

Matthew Power in The New York Times reviews Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom's Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York.

A Theory of Progress

"The Delmonico’s dinner, however, ended in disaster. Instead of graciously bathing in the torrents of tribute, Spencer told his admirers that they had got him seriously wrong. He did not approve of the culture of American capitalism, and, while he admired its material achievements, he was concerned that, for Americans, work had become a pathological obsession. Americans were endangering their mental and physical health through overwork, and many were turning gray before their time—ten years earlier than the British, Spencer believed. America needed 'a revised ideal of life,' he said, and it was time to 'preach the gospel of relaxation.' He went on, 'Life is not for learning, nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.' Having administered that slap to the face of national virtue, Spencer steamed off back to England."

In The New Yorker, Steven Shapin looks back on the life and work of Herbert Spencer.