This collection of original essays reflects the author’s long consideration and detailed knowledge of foundational developments in United States capitalism and culture during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Aiming to detect unrecognized continuities between what has long been titled the U.S. Gilded Age and the “New Gilded Age” underway since the 1970s, Fink places in a transnational context key U.S. beliefs, structures, and processes of that earlier era. Taken together, his five keenly honed discourses on working class culture and ideals, the great strikes, the role of university in industrial reform, labor and the law, and youth movements in international times offer as well an extended reflection on the theme of American exceptionalism.
In support of the exceptionalist argument, Fink’s essay titled “The American Ideology” recounts how white male Americans throughout the 19th century celebrated the ideal of ‘free labor,’ which made independence, initially seen as ownership of one’s own farm or shop as the basis of citizenship, the ideal to strive for. He skillfully summons up the array of contradictions that separated the lived reality of American workers from this ideal—among them not merely the wage system defined formally in Justice Stephen Field’s 1886 dissent in the Slaughterhouse Cases as “freedom of contract” but even more starkly the degrees of compulsion experienced in prison labor, convict leasing, and subcontracted work by women and children. Following legal historian William Forbath, Fink stresses the failure of U.S. law and governance to support the collective actions of workers either toward political redress (Knights of Labor) or toward recognition as legitimate partners with capitalists in collective bargaining (American Federation of Labor). Though a few unions retained market power based on skill, mechanization of production forced many male workers to reframe free labor yet again, as the family breadwinner’s individual manliness, even as an emergent social state in France guaranteed workers a minimum of economic security as a right of citizenship.
With the onset of the Long Gilded Age that supplies the book’s title, Fink repeatedly situates the U.S. working class in a transnational context to reveal how exceptional the U.S. worker’s position remained in the post-Civil War decades. He underlines this distinctiveness by searching anew the stories of the “Great Strikes”—Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, and the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902—whose violent clashes between strikers and police or militias echo down through the memories of American workers. Typically a response to unilaterally imposed wage cuts, such strikes bespoke the workers’ claim to representation and a collective voice in the conditions of their labor. Yet this goal, considered reasonable and actualized in various ways elsewhere, was in the U.S. case effectively both outside of and against the law. In sharp contrast, both the continental European pattern of building quite fulsome welfare states and the Australasian adoption of compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes placed workers and their unions inside these nations’ legal systems. Yet U.S. unions in their formative decades never obtained the freedom from civil damage suits or the immunity from injunctions against peaceful demonstrations that even their English counterparts enjoyed from the 1906 Trade Disputes Act down to the anti-union onslaught of the Thatcher years.
Building on the strike stories, “Labor’s Search for Legitimacy” offers glimpses of the ways that U.S. labor organizers were attracted, even against these odds, to the idea of winning fair contracts either through voluntary collective bargaining with progressive capitalists or under the protection of a stronger state role. Here Fink teases out efforts that can be seen as aiming to shift U.S. class relations in a more constructive direction—within limits imposed by exceptionalism. Thus, George Pullman’s clean and well-ordered company town had been modeled on foreign examples of paternalist worker uplift strategies even as his harsh rejection of interference in its governance by either workers or public officials conformed to tenets of American exceptionalism that exalted absolute property rights (pp. 46–49). Diminishing traditional heroes and building up villains, Fink credits Attorney General Richard Olney, who ordered troops into Pullman, with later endorsing the Pullman Strike Commission’s call for voluntary arbitration of railroad labor disputes! Eugene Debs, a hero among working class leaders, is faulted here for questionable judgment, both in agreeing to risk his infant industrial union by supporting the Pullman workers and, by failing to localize the strike, for inciting a massive law enforcement response to the provocative act of interfering with mail cars. Debs’ strategic errors should be seen, in this telling, as “a case where the materials and available choices might have been assembled differently to quite different effect” (p. 53).
On the flip side in this reweighting of contingencies, mineworker’s union leader John Mitchell earns high marks for preventing a proffered sympathetic strike by bituminous miners. Mitchell also worked effectively behind the scenes with Republican industrialist and king maker Mark Hanna to enlist J. P. Morgan and President Roosevelt as architects of a settlement that amounted to de facto union recognition. This agreement offered an effective demonstration of the kind of corporate/labor entente envisaged by the leadership of the National Civic Federation, whose Industrial Department Hanna led, Fink attests. But for Hanna’s early death (1904) and the rise of the National Association of Manufacturers (a competing alliance of business leaders whose aim was pure and simple union busting), Fink can imagine a future in which different contingencies might have produced an alternative model for U.S. industrial relations, and even a labor party, well before the New Deal.
In pulling the Old and New Gilded Ages in a Long Gilded Age, Fink bolsters the claim of historians who regard the New Deal as “the great exception” in a generally conservative, business dominated, individualist leaning American story. What then, is to be done with the progressives and with what others have framed as a Long Progressive Era in which activists won important, if limited reforms in labor standards regulation, antimonopoly, and family welfare. If Social Darwinism and laissez faire were hallmarks of the Old Gilded Age, then surely the likes of Jane Addams and Lilian Wald, Florence Kelley and Washington Gladden, W. E. B. DuBois and Hubert Harrison, H. C. Adams and the coterie of reformers who gathered at the Charitable Organization Society of New York City were of a very different moment.
In this period, others have argued, related developments in economic and social thought denaturalized laissez faire, challenged the efficacy of unfettered competition, historicized and recharted the potential of law and policy, and created public sector and societal institutions aimed to link investigation, knowledge, and policy. Thinkers in this vein, along with shapers of various reform cultures, formulated collectivist (or social) as against individualist approaches to social and economic action. Footnote 1
To this approach, Leon Fink answers “yes, but.” Can we say, he hazards, that those progressive, collectivist, social democratic, even moderately statist currents in the long run prevailed against the American individualist grain? Can we locate specifically American-grown individuals and institutions that “built the state,” that insisted a capable government should act in the name of the powerless and the poor? Did not the modest gains for the general welfare and the collective good spring largely from “foreign” sources and strike roots only so deep? Advocates for a social Christianity and the socialized state forms treated here were influenced profoundly, and in their youth, by foreign-inspired creeds ranging from Marxism to Fabianism. For enduring influence, Fink singles out two key structures that fostered stirrings for democratic reforms, including one—the American research university—that he frames as effectively a transplant. Like the University of Wisconsin that he takes as a type case, it was built in significant degree on the German model that inspired a generation of American men and women studying abroad in the 1870s–1890s. Seeking both learning and authority, these travelers emulated at home the historicism espoused by activist professors in the Verein für Socialpolitik who aided the construction of the modern German social insurance state.
Central here is the figure of economist Richard T. Ely as founder of the American Economic Association on a platform of avowed anti-laissez faire, as leading University of Wisconsin professor of economics from 1892, and as a builder of the Wisconsin Idea that made the university a bill-writing agency for a progressive state government. By right of intellectual succession, Fink submits, one can argue that key authors of New Deal social and labor legislation—among them William Leiserson, David Saposs, Edwin Witte, John Andrews, and Sumner Slichter—built the New Deal order largely on the Wisconsin-inspired intellectual and ethical foundation that they acquired when they were young. They thus figured as one of a cluster of youth movements from which, Fink argues, other reformist episodes linked by their opposition to corporate power have also regularly sprung, culminating with Occupy Wall Street.
Regarding this work’s overarching themes, questions of emphasis and inclusion enter in. Space limits prevent citing more than a few caveats. But for one, there is no room here for a New Liberalism that was a joint Anglo-American product of traffic in ideas: Toynbee, Hobson, Hobhouse, and Beveridge do not merit mention. Eldon Eisenach’s study of the “para-states” has offered a fuller list of generative ideas and institutions than we see here, ultimately blaming President Woodrow Wilson for cutting off in mid-stride the move toward ethical and legal nationalism launched by Theodore Roosevelt. Important studies of progressive reformers in the nation’s great cities (e.g., most recently of New York City by David Huyssen) suggest greater complexity and different emphases than those that the Wisconsin progressives and Milwaukee socialists made central to their activism. Footnote 2
But the benefits here are huge as well. Extending the transnational turn pioneered by Daniel Rodgers, they reveal just how far that additional lens can shed new light on long-simmering questions of periodization in U.S. political history and public philosophy. Against the view that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal implanted a radically new collectivism in the national consciousness, Fink’s sympathies lie with those who hold that—given the persistence of individualist anti-statism—we must count the New Deal Era, 1930s–1970s, as a Long Exception to the much longer durée that linked a durable individualist ethos and resilient anti-statist structures from the “Old Gilded Age,” 1880–1900, to the “New Gilded Age” of dominant business corporations, anti-unionism, great and growing inequality, and attacks on “big government” that have again dominated public discourse since the Carter-Reagan era.
