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Response 1: "For We Had Hugged the Delusion..."
by James L. Huston, Oklahoma State University
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I wish to thank the editors of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for giving me a chance to react to Richard Schneirov's engaging article on periodizing the Gilded Age. I tend to agree with his generalizations and approach to the subject, having only some small qualifications to offer, largely concerning the quest for periodization, the timing of the break from one type of society to another, and the role of the Civil War. It seems that modern historians have revised somewhat the comment of George III to Edward Gibbons, "Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbons?" Now it has become, "Quibble, quibble, quibble, eh, Mr. Historian?" Well, such seems to be our fate. However, on one interpretation there is no quibbling at all: somewhere in the years called the Gilded Age came the mightiest transition that the society of the United States has ever experienced. The quote in the title of this short piece attests to the realization that such was the case: it is from the Brahmin historian, James Ford Rhodes writing about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877: "For we had hugged the delusion that such social uprisings belonged to Europe and had no reason of being in a free republic where there was plenty of room and an equal chance for all." The political economy inherited from the Revolution had failed, and it was beginning to be recognized that a new political economy was emerging.1 |
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Schneirov's discussion of the literature of periodization was quite informative (his footnotes 4 through 8) primarily because of my ignorance of its existence.2 Demarcating a society's experience into special units of time is a task the historian must engage in and is not a metaphysical intellectual enterprise akin to medieval scholars arguing about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. Rather, historians engage in periodization because societies live under certain economic, political, and social conditions that persist for years; an understanding of those conditions (once termed "forces") explains many of the choices societies do and do not make; the conditions under which a society operates describes in a statistical way the opportunity set existing for that society. Historians ferret out when these conditions arise, how long they persevere, and when they begin to mutate (or erupt) into a different form. American historians have long defined their intellectual role as investigating how American society has changed over time, and the phrase "change over time" has become their motto. But the search for change has now so dominated everyone's outlook that historians find change everywhere and continuity nowhere. The result has been severely truncated historical "eras" lasting ten or fifteen years, an emphasis on miniscule data, and the elaboration of a plethora of factors acting upon societies. It is hardly any wonder that there exists among historians of the United States a grand confusion of the basic "forces" operating in the American past.3 Within any demarcated time period, societies may react in a multitude of ways to the basic forces operating on them, and over a stretch of time, society may exhibit changes, adaptations, evolutions, or even cyclical movements—but they all take place within the basic framework given by the essential forces at work. |
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