Reimagining the "Lost Men" of the Gilded Age:
Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth Century Presidents

Charles W. Calhoun
East Carolina University

For much of the twentieth century, scholars treated the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as starkly contrasting phases in the unfolding of the American story: the post-Civil War dark ages followed by the bright light of the early twentieth century. More recently, historians have recognized the oversimplification if not downright wrongheadedness of that dichotomy. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a variety of topics with coverage dates roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. Most of these newer works underscore the continuities between the two periods and the relatively seamless evolution of forces and institutions.	1
New research has begun to apply this sort of revisionist analysis to the American presidency. Among the hoariest stereotypes in United States history was the notion that the turn of the century somehow marked a great watershed in the development of the office. After a period of leaden inertia in the nation's chief executives during the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era presidents wrought a profound transformation in the office, making it not only "modem" but also the undeniable and indispensable center of American political life ever after. The underlying premise of this semi-miraculous metamorphosis, of course, was the debility and weakness, if not utter political impotence and ineptitude, of the late nineteenth century presidents.	2
Although twentieth-century scholars recognized a growing presidential activism in foreign relations during the Gilded Age,1 in domestic affairs, the principal concern of the present article, they tended to see the chief executives as weak, isolated, and ineffectual. To a considerable degree, these views sprang from the negative judgments of contemporary observers in the Gilded Age itself. In 1885 the young political scientist Woodrow Wilson published his first book, Congressional Government, which argued that Congress had come to dominate national policymaking and that the presidency was concomitantly feeble. Although the president's business was "occasionally great," it was "usually not much above routine." Compared with the majority-based leadership the British prime minister exercised, Wilson said, the president's "usefulness is measured, not by efficiency, but by calendar months.2	. . .