The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics

Worth Robert Miller
Southwest Missouri State University

The rambunctious world of Gilded Age politics, with its boisterous partisan rallies and three-hour long declamations on the finer points of tariff schedules and monetary policy, passed from the scene of American politics rather abruptly about a century ago.  Despite its superficial similarities with politics today—sex scandals, corporate influence, and partisan gridlock in Washington—the spirit and substance of Gilded Age politics was quite different from political discourse today.  Politics was a national obsession to nineteenth century Americans.  Partisanship was open and vigorous because common people believed the issues were important and political parties represented divergent viewpoints.  Men (and in a few places women) of every ethnic and racial background, and from every walk of life, overwhelmingly participated in America's democratic experiment.  This made Gilded Age politicians some of the greatest heroes and villains of the era.1	1
The popular stereotype of Gilded Age politics, that corruption, demagoguery, and meaningless issues were its primary characteristics, came from both contemporary sources and the professional scholarship of the early twentieth century.  Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, which lent its name to this period, emphasized get rich quick schemes, vote buying, and every imaginable corruption.2  It seemed that those credited with noble deeds of sacrifice during the Civil War suddenly turned into greedy, unprincipled scoundrels afterward.  Another critic of the era, the acerbic Henry Adams concluded that "one might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little but damaged reputation."  In what other era of American history might one hear a United States Senator credited with defining an honest politician as "one who when he is bought will stay bought"?3	2
Gilded Age politics fared little better at the hand of the Progressive historians of the early twentieth century.  Matthew Josephson, in The Politicos, claimed that there were no significant differences between the major parties.  Both eagerly served corporate interests.  Partisanship devolved into sham battles over meaningless issues designed to divert the masses from the very real problems emerging from industrialization.   Vernon Louis Parrington called it the "Great Barbecue," to which all were invited, except for inconspicuous persons like farmers and laborers.4  Historians, of course, are heavily affected by the events of their own lives.  Josephson was a Marxist writing during the depths of the Depression of the 1930s when establishment politicians, and even capitalism itself, appeared to have failed.  Parrington was an ex-Populist refighting the epic battles of his youth.	3
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