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Rejoinder to Rebecca Edwards and James L. Huston
by Richard Schneirov, Indiana State University
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I would like to thank Rebecca Edwards and James L. Huston for their thoughtful and challenging responses to my essay. Both these authors have thought deeply about periodization and synthesis, and for that reason it occurred to me to allow their responses to stand alone and go unanswered. But in the interests of sparking further discussion I would like to offer a few clarifications and additional thoughts with regard to periodization. Due to considerations of space I will not try to answer all the reservations and criticisms expressed and alternative views advanced but will focus only on a few points that bear on the thrust of my essay. |
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First, I want to draw attention to the fact that both respondents failed to address directly the central argument of the essay: the attempt to apply the concept of a developmental mix of different modes of production held together by market relations and political negotiation to the transition to the Gilded Age. In using that approach I made three larger points: 1) that capitalism must be distinguished from a "market revolution" and commercial agriculture; hence, capitalism was not yet dominant in the antebellum era; 2) that capitalism became hegemonic only during the Gilded Age but that triumph was not foreordained for it was predicated on the political transition that occurred during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and 3) that much of the Gilded Age can be explained by the crisis in the capital accumulation process that took the form of recurrent depressions and a resulting economic, social, and political instability. This framework is an alternative explanatory approach to Professor Huston's nineteenth-century agrarian republic and Professor Edwards' framework of regionalism. |
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Let me begin with Edwards' point that I have underestimated the strength of regionalism in the late nineteenth century. Regionalism was certainly a major fracture line in the American polity during the nineteenth century. However, it should come as no surprise that I don't use a regional framework to periodize the Gilded Age. There are several problems with regionalism as a periodization approach, at least as presently advanced. First, regionalism is a transhistorical factor in American history; that is, there have always been strong regional differences in American history. What must be determined is the changing nature of those regional differences, whether they were declining or increasing in importance, and how they characterized a particular period as distinguished from preceding and subsequent periods. Second, a regional analysis, such as the one found in Richard Franklin Bensel, tends to obscure complexities, differences, and conflicts within the region, both those of class, race, and gender, as well as those arising from different modes of production. Thus, a regional analysis obscures the fact that Northeastern and North Central states consisted of many pre-market, commercial, and advanced capitalist farms, which existed in complex relationships with other modes of production and the government both within and outside the region. Just as important, regionalism withdraws attention from the growing and ferocious nationwide class conflict that marked the Gilded Age. Finally, a regional analysis cannot account for the hegemony that capitalism as a social system had achieved not just in the Northeast quadrant of states but throughout the United States during the Gilded Age. In general, a mode of production analysis better comprehends the complexities of social reality in the Gilded Age, including the conflicts they generated and the ways they interpenetrated and amalgamated within and outside regions.1 |
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