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If you want to understand America’s Gilded Age in books, start here. During the roughly fifty years separating the Civil War from the First World War, the United States underwent a profound metamorphosis: newcomers from overseas poured into expanding urban centres, emerging factories turned the nation into an industrial giant, so-called “robber barons” built enormous wealth off exhausted labourers, plenty of elected officials averted their gaze, and crusading reporters filled the void, invoking the country’s stated principles.
- Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel captures 1870s upper-class New York, where ritual and narcissism masked immigration, industrialisation and urbanisation.
- James Green on Haymarket in May 1886 and Richard White on Reconstruction show a violent, corrupt establishment yielding only slowly to change.
- Ron Chernow on John D. Rockefeller, plus Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair, trace monopoly wealth and the tenement and slaughterhouse reporting that forced reform.
Gilded Age — the final decades of the 19th century, when gilt over a decaying structure masked urban troubles created by immigration, industrialisation and urbanisation.
High society under glass: The Age of Innocence
The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. Barnes & Noble; 336 pages; $8.95. Penguin Books Ltd; 336 pages; £8.99.
Prior to issuing fiction, the writer covered design, especially domestic spaces. Released in 1920, this novel renders with precision the cramped drawing rooms and formal dinners of 1870s upper-class New York.
That setting is the Gilded Age, the final decades of the 19th century. The fashionable set’s narcissism and exhausted rituals resemble gilt over a decaying structure, masking urban troubles created by immigration, industrialisation and urbanisation. The writer reveals how even the 1% succeeded in stifling themselves.
A reviewer of the time cautioned that the “uncanny” book would hurl readers backward half a century into that suffocation and inertia — “the total loss of life in upholstered experience”.
Violence and its memory: Death in the Haymarket
Death in the Haymarket. By James Green. Knopf Doubleday; 400 pages; $17.95. Random House; 400 pages; £15.99.
Scholars slice centuries into periods. Those labels usefully group connected happenings, yet they can hide the simple reality that contemporaries did not know which “age” they inhabited.
In May 1886, when socialists and anarchists were winding down a gathering at Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a bomb was hurled and officers discharged weapons. From today we can recognise those radicals as reacting against Gilded Age abuses. But the author’s vivid storytelling recalls that Americans following the reports had another historical frame in mind: the civil war.
The Haymarket drama gripped the nation partly because it revived dread, in the words of a Chicago theologian, that this was only “the first explosion”.
How Reconstruction failed: The Republic for Which It Stands
The Republic for Which It Stands. By Richard White. Oxford University Press; 941 pages; $28.99, £21.99.
This history of America’s late-19th century likewise takes the civil war as its starting point. It opens at Abraham Lincoln’s burial. Across the next 900 pages it describes how the president’s principles — freedom, integrity, equality — appeared to be interred with him.
The writer places responsibility for Reconstruction’s collapse firmly, and in some critics’ view severely, upon Lincoln’s Republican Party, which presided over subsequent decades of graft and disgrace. Wealthy elites prospered while successive financial panics and depressions battered the nation. Ordinary people saw their quality of life deteriorate.
Drawing on data, the writer demonstrates that Gilded Age Americans stood shorter and died younger than 18th-century predecessors. Lincoln’s pledge of “a new birth of freedom” would take long to fulfil.
The ultimate robber baron: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. By Ron Chernow. Random House; 774 pages; $30.
John Rockefeller embodied the classic American tale of ascent. Born to a swindler, Rockefeller assembled a monopoly through pitilessness, cunning and shady methods. He rose to become the planet’s wealthiest person, and perhaps its most detested.
Enormous philanthropy failed, as he had wished, to erase his misdeeds while he lived, though it polished his family’s reputation after his passing. Then Mr Chernow arrived. His massive life story supplies an unmatched window onto the flinty interior of among the most secretive, enigmatic personalities in recent business and financial history.
It serves perfectly to comprehend both the ascent of American magnates and giant corporate dominance — plus the rise of liberal critics who confronted them.
Muckrakers who forced reform: How the Other Half Lives and The Jungle
How the Other Half Lives. By Jacob Riis. Barnes & Noble; 304 pages; $9.95. Penguin; 256 pages; £8.99. The Jungle. By Upton Sinclair. Barnes & Noble; 400 pages; $9.95. Penguin; 448 Pages; £12.99.
Investigative crusaders sought to reveal business avarice and spotlight unfairness. Scarcely anyone surpassed these two writers. Jacob Riis’s volume, issued in 1890, presents grim, occasionally posed images from existence inside crowded New York tenements. It spurred changes improving protection against fire and mandating apartments include amenities such as windows.
Upton Sinclair’s novel concerns immigrant labourers grinding inside Chicago slaughterhouses. It grew from seven weeks he devoted to on-the-ground reporting in that neighbourhood. The plot turns extremely sentimental and, like Riis’s pictures, blunt. Still, it worked, helping bring food-safety statutes — though not workplace protections.
“I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair conceded, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
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