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All three articles for Thursday’s reading examine the ways in which we think about history and the lenses through which we examine it. Rebecca Edwards, of New Spirits fame, continues the thoughtful discussion that we have been having as a class about whether the moniker of “Gilded Age” is appropriate for the time period we are discussing. Rightly, she argues, as we have discussed, that the most prominent Gilded Age stereotypes do not fully characterize the era. To wit, she raises the Grange movement, the Populist party, the American Farmer’s Alliance, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and muckraking journalism, among other items.
Edwards’ ardent argument regarding historicization of the Gilded Age clearly emerges from a depth of knowledge, and I don’t seek to reject her interpretation out of hand; yet, I think that her frustration with existing perspectives on the Gilded Age comes from teachers and students, not from historians. The dominant narrative of the Gilded Age, which Edwards’ glosses in her opening paragraphs, does not, I believe, dominate the historical literature inappropriately. Rather, the nuance with which Edwards would like students of history to examine the Gilded Age is lost in the shuffle of high school classes which cover American history from colonialism to the eve of World War 2. Unfortunately, that lost nuance drives popular perception of the Gilded Age as one of pure corruption, crony capitalism and Jim Crow. Yet, serious students of history still examine these issues with the perceptiveness and depth which Edwards desires. It is simply not reasonable to expect that the nation as a whole will embrace a complex vision of each era of history when eras themselves tend to get reduced down to their very essence by teachers who must move through them in a week.
I fully agree with Price’s perspective that the Supreme Court’s conservative decisions during this period eviscerated the ability of reformers to make serious legislative progress. His analysis is also apt in that he acknowledges the inadequacies of Edwards’ argument regarding the significance of reform in this period. I would like to reiterate my own perspective: the dominant narrative of this period does not eliminate the possibility of the existence of counter-narrative occurrences; rather, the dominant narrative exists because is most accurately summarizes the dominant trends in Gilded Age society.