|
|
|
Response 2: An Age of Incorporation?
by Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College
|
Richard Schneirov's call for rethinking the post-Reconstruction era is long overdue and most welcome. For reasons he lays out with admirable clarity and insight, recent approaches have not offered a satisfactory synthesis. A new narrative offers considerable benefits to historians of the era and the broader publics we serve. |
1
|
|
Schneirov makes a strong case for the starting date of 1873. The end date is a bit harder to pin down; Republican re-ascendancy clearly began with sweeping victories in 1894, but imperialism, William McKinley's assassination, and the transition to a so-called Progressive Era create a host of complications. For the moment—since defining the Progressive Era is a different, equally vexing question—1898 seems as good a choice as any. As Schneirov argues, political economy needs to be squarely at the center of our analysis. He makes good use of Martin Sklar's wonderful insight about "cross-class alignments" as agents of political change, and it is helpful to think of the Gilded Age as a period when, for various reasons, such alignments were difficult to construct. |
2
|
|
The regional structure of the US political system should, I think, receive more emphasis than Schneirov gives it. The Gilded Age was politically unstable in large part because it followed a unique crisis in which a key political and economic interest, Southern planters, seceded from the Union. It was and is unprecedented in US history for such a powerful interest to relinquish its bargaining power entirely. Republicans made vigorous use of their subsequent ten-year advantage, as Schneirov notes, to launch "a program conducive to rapid capital accumulation." It is hardly surprising that after 1873, as ex-Confederates regained power, politics was fierce and unstable. Those conflicts continued to be expressed as struggles between the industrial core and two resource-extractive peripheries. In New England textile districts, both workers and capitalists voted heavily for pro-tariff Republicans, while across the class spectrum a majority of Colorado voters favored silver coinage in the 1890s. Meanwhile, almost every swing state in national elections lay in the transitional Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.1 The regional structure of US politics must figure heavily in any explanation of how politics got "stuck" in the post-Reconstruction era. |
3
|
|
I have reservations about Schneirov's claim that antebellum family farmers were rooted in a "non-capitalist mode of production" and rejected the concept of "surplus value." Gallons of ink have been spilled over this subject, and I am a bit hesitant to wade in, but here are two brief objections. First, many small farmers employed not just family labor but also wage labor. In 1860, for example, about 23 percent of farm workers in Illinois and Iowa were wage earners. This very fact may have hindered agrarians' ability to forge alliances with labor. The Indianapolis Labor Signal, for example, scoffed in the early 1890s that the Farmers Alliance "is controlled by land owners of varying degrees,...and it is a fact that these are as a rule the hardest of taskmasters. Farm labor is the poorest labor to be found."2 |
4
|
|
Second, and more important, farmers treated land as an appreciating commodity. This was especially true on the frontier, where it is hard to draw any clear line between farmers and speculators. Paul Gates writes that in the antebellum period, "practically all classes of the population in frontier communities speculated in the public lands." In Ohio and Indiana in the 1810s, small-scale farmers assumed massive levels of debt in order to gobble up as much property as they could. "It was their hope," Gates writes, "that before the five years allowed for payment expired, good crops and fair prices might make it possible to meet their payments, or that they might be able to sell a surplus quarter at a profit which could take care of their obligations" (emphasis mine). In the 1850s, Iowa settlers "bought as much [land] as their resources permitted without regard to the possibility of utilizing the land they thus acquired."3 |
. . . |
There are about 1405 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
