Book Review

The Rich Getting Richer in the Gilded Age

Jon Sterngass

Rottenberg, Dan. The Man Who Made Wall Street: Anthony J. Drexel and the Rise of Modern Finance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xvii + 262 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-81-223626-2.

If you believe wealthy white men are neglected in the historical record, these two books are for you. Sven Beckert justifies his study of the Gilded Age bourgeoisie with the claim that "recent historical scholarship has produced few in-depth discussions on the nation's merchants, industrialists, and bankers" (9). Dan Rottenberg expresses astonishment that Anthony Drexel has escaped a biographer until 2001 and wonders "how many other significant figures, past and present, have escaped public attention" (xi). Neither of these authors show the expected obeisance to the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender that has held sway in the academy for the last twenty years. Rottenberg handily dispenses with all three, and Beckert criticizes historians' "infatuation with oppositional culture" even though he adopts class as his central organizing principle (341).

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Beckert organizes The Monied Metropolis around two historical themes: the ideological change that accompanied the transfer of power from antebellum manufacturers to Gilded Age financiers and the ultimate inability of the New York bourgeoisie to consolidate their power. Beckert claims that the antebellum manufacturing class "believed in the mutual interest of capital and labor, a belief that came naturally to a group of employers in close contact with their employees" (73, 93-94). Manufacturers often came from lower-class backgrounds and preached a free-labor ideology that envisioned their mostly native- born employees as only temporarily engaging in wage labor while on the road to greater economic independence. After the Civil War, these industrialists interacted with their commercial counterparts, who taught them that their employees were not co-workers in an American project but were of a lower order. As new inventions and industrial processes destroyed the craft economy, immigrants replaced native workers, and the wealthy created an ideology to support their self-image. Regarding African Americans, the economic elite abandoned the interventionist policies of Reconstruction and adopted "root, hog, or die" as a national motto. Free-labor mutated into free-market liberalism, and Social Darwinism turned the laws of the unregulated market into immutable laws of nature (279-85). The great railroad strikes of 1877 astonished and terrified New York's economic elite, and a bourgeois class coalesced around self-interest narrowly conceived, abandoning their antebellum belief in a socially cohesive society without class divisions. By 1896, their reform efforts often possessed a distinctly anti- democratic ring, evolving into attacks on immigrants and support for restricted suffrage in municipal elections. This is a story that needs to be repeated for every generation and Beckert tells it effectively.

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