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Book Reviews
New Bottles, Old Wine: The Lost Political Culture of the Gilded Age
| SUMMERS, MARK WAHLGREN. Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv + 352 pp. Preface, coda, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2862-9; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5537-5.
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Gilded Age and Reconstruction history share a common trait in having to persevere against the tyranny of historiography. Yet while the Civil Rights Movement made untenable the Dunning School's racist interpretation of Reconstruction, no such revolution took place within the wider world of Gilded Age history. For historians writing at the turn of the last century, the Gilded Age was a period where economic interests dominated the political process, where corruption was rife, and sectionalism prevented the natural process of conciliation. New Deal era historians such as Matthew Josephson and Paul Buck only reinforced these assumptions. For historians of the pre-1945 era, the villains of the piece were Republicans. Yet while historical writing of an earlier era stigmatized Republican economic policies, it was the Republican insistence on African American political equality that marked them as political extremists and opportunists. Still, Republican political competitors did not fare much better, and the substance and structure of Gilded Age politics seemed simply a bad era that was eventually redeemed by the Progressive movement. While Gilded Age historians in the last sixty years have made considerable process in revising the dated picture of the Gilded Age, the old template still has managed to survive. |
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