The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink

      Societies, like individual souls, do not live by bread (or material reproduction) alone. Rather, they are sustained by belief systems backed up by a legal framework. In Chapter 1 I argue that the concept of “free labor”—vouchsafed by Union victory in the Civil War—has served as a key pillar of both modern-day labor law and social stability. Although the source of continuous contest among competing social groups, American freedom at the workplace, as crucially adjudicated by the Supreme Court, has overwhelmingly tilted towards individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. What this means in practice for the labor movement and the larger political culture, I try to illustrate by comparison with France, a society whose dedication to “liberty” was also sealed in revolutionary sacrifice.

      Another sort of sacrifice, this one demanded of the thousands of men and women involved in the great Gilded Age strikes, beckons in Chapter 2. Here, we can observe the contest over the nature and limits of American freedom played out in real time. In reconsidering a decade of iconic conflicts—Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, and the anthracite coal strike of 1902—I choose to focus on the strategic choices taken and not taken by the leaders on all three sides: business, labor, and the state. What were their motives? What were their options? What difference did it make? Based on comparative analysis with Great Britain, I suggest that the strike outcomes themselves helped define what social scientists came to think of as American Exceptionalism or the weakness of a U.S. working-class presence. While emphasizing the historical forces of agency and contingency, I also present a broadly revisionist view of all three battles based in part on reframing Andrew Carnegie as an ambivalent Scot, recasting Eugene V. Debs as an unnecessary martyr, and reevaluating conservative miners’ leader John L. Mitchell and Republican Party boss Mark Hanna as unsung but at least partially worthy working-class heroes.

      Chapter 3 steps back from the immediate industrial battlegrounds to explore the genesis of labor reform thought that became applied to the conflicts of the period. The subject confronts us with one of the classic sets of actors regularly identified with the Progressive Era: “middle-class” intellectuals. How did a generation of new social science professionals, in particular, respond to an era of class conflict, urban poverty, and mass immigration? In his monumental Atlantic Crossings, Daniel T. Rodgers makes the case for an Atlantic-wide world of reformers and public officials, eager to rebuild the city and modernize the countryside according to an international policy playbook. Supplementing Rodgers’s analysis with particular attention to labor issues, I compare and contrast the sources of what might be called “radical reform” ideas in the U.S. with those in Britain and Germany. I suggest that among the most positive and unique aspects of American development was the rise of the research university, best represented in the social science fields by the “engaged” scholarship of labor economist Richard T. Ely and his colleagues and students at the University of Wisconsin. For an extended moment, I argue, the Wisconsin Experiment acted out the pragmatic, cosmopolitan and “social democratic” promise of an American progressivism otherwise and all too soon given over to technocratic elitism.

      In Chapter 4, I turn to legal and legislative chambers, where the labor movement and its middle-class allies as well as its antagonists worked out the institutional pathways of American industrial relations from the era of the Knights of Labor through the heyday of the American Federation of Labor. One question, I suggest, always bedeviled organized labor and its sympathizers: the question of legitimacy. Why, in short, could labor unionism not gain a surer foothold in American law and public life until the 1930s or, for that matter, even until today? Again, I suggest that a wider field of vision treating divergent development across societies resting on a common-law legal heritage (thus encompassing the UK, Canada, and especially the territories of Australia and New Zealand, or what the British, due to their global juxtaposition, call the Antipodes) offers new insight. Essentially, I suggest, the door of industrial jurisprudence in the English-speaking world was open, at least for some time, to a number of variations. For lesser-skilled, more easily replaced industrial workers—whose ranks in the U.S. were overwhelmingly composed of new immigrants—some support from the state proved essential to assure them a place at the bargaining table with their employers. Despite considerable internal debate and discussion, however, the dominant AFL-defined labor movement opted for a relatively anti-statist “British model.” when it might have been better served by the examples of Australia and New Zealand that combined state-sanctioned systems of union recognition with industrial arbitration of disputes.

      Another form of Long Gilded Age internationalism is represented by the construction of the Socialist Party of America. As a political ideology drawing explicitly from European roots and as a social movement originally defined by its varied immigrant advocates, socialism carried both the promise and the peril of its inherently transnational presence. In Chapter 5 I try to recover the spirit behind the “golden age” of American socialism. Its very un-American-ness, I insinuate (contra much recent labor history scholarship), was part of the appeal of socialist doctrines to a young generation itching to taste the forbidden fruits of a wider world. Just as the post-adolescent American upper class ventured on its grand tour and new urban émigrés explored the thrills of Coney Island, so did other means of travel, both figurative and literal, summon those eager to break with Victorian norms. From social democracy to revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism to socialist feminism, and radical secularism to Christian socialism—the insurgent political tendencies of the age all beckoned in accents from across the globe. And a generation bred by this unspoken era of globalization—of study, travel, immigration, as well as international political solidarities—tried to take full advantage.

      Finally, in a brief Epilogue, I make an effort to connect the Long Gilded Age to the American labor history that succeeded it. The Long Gilded Age’s subtitle speaks of the “lessons” of its time period. By that word, I mean to include at once the morals drawn, for good or ill, by Gilded Age contemporaries, and those that, looking back, we learn by considering events over a longer stretch of time. Where, in particular, do we see points of continuity, or perhaps even a second chance to come at old problems with new insights? To be sure, we live in a very different world from the one described in these essays. Yet, the urge to understand, and by understanding renew, continues. What, then besides world wars, devastating depressions, and a loss of confidence separate the promise of their times from our own?