Leon Fink has been studying the Gilded Age since before that period was cool. He has produced a steady stream of important books and articles on labor, the law, and intellectuals during this period, beginning long before the idea that we are living in a “new Gilded Age” become commonplace.Footnote ¹ His edited Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (1993) has sustained many teachers of the GAPE period, including this one, with an excellent and broad selection of primary source documents and secondary essays. For some time now, Fink has also been a pioneering proponent of what an edited book of his calls “the transnational turn in labor history,” and his pioneering 2003 book The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Neuvo New South, as well as his more recent work on merchant seamen, have shown the benefits of this approach.Footnote ²

The Long Gilded Age combines Fink's interests in the crucial period between roughly 1880 and 1920 with his call for transnational approaches. He does so through a reappraisal (and to some extent a reperiodization) of the Gilded Aga and Progressive Era through a comparative lens. Largely a work of synthesis, the result is a fresh and thoughtful reinterpretation that magnifies the importance of the era not only in light of the present but in relation to the broad sweep of twentieth-century U.S. history, and also in the context of contemporary solutions to the “labor question” that were proposed in other countries (most of Fink's examples are drawn from the Anglo-American world). Indeed, Fink emphasizes counterfactuals, with a focus on alternatives that were available (but since forgotten) as minority points of view in the United States or in other countries. Fink thus rejects the teleology that often accompanies treatment of the Gilded Age and Progressive period: problems posed in the Gilded Age and solutions proffered in the Progressive Era.

A series of linked essays with chapters on “ideas, actions, institutions, policy, and political movement culture,” the book focuses on labor and capitalism in what Fink calls “the long Gilded Age” (8). Fink eschews the label of the Progressive Era and treats the period from roughly 1880–1920 as a coherent unit, with a lasting shadow beyond. This allows him to discuss not only capital's assault on labor and the nascent union movement but a variety of organizational responses, often considered “progressive,” at the level of institutions of state and civil society, such as the research university and the National Civic Federation. For Fink, the legacy of the Gilded Age looms large for the rest of U.S. history, not least because so many important Progressive thinkers came of age in these decades—a time of an “intellectual, political, and even spiritual world of heretofore unsurpassed international and cosmopolitan influences”—and carried the possibilities of their youth into their adult activities (121). In some ways, his is an argument about the rise and persistence of what we might call, following the example of Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle's famous example, the “Gilded Age Order,” which is a powerful set of political and economic arrangements that shaped not just the period itself but its extended aftermath. This is an increasingly popular formulation.Footnote ³ At the same time, I wish Fink had more fully fleshed out his justification of this framing and considered alternatives, such as Richard Schneirov's persuasive periodization in this journal of the Gilded Age as running from 1873–1898 or of Michael McGerr's treatment of what we might call the “long Progressive era,” which, in his view, extended back in to what we usually call the Gilded Age, and that many other historians have extended forward into the New Deal.Footnote ⁴

Fink begins with an examination of the meaning of “free labor,” an idea initially associated with working-class liberation that became a “codeword for wage slavery” (13). How did a concept associated with a proud tradition of producerism become a license for “arbitrary dismissals, anti-strike injunctions, and a general loss of control at work” (13–14)? Fink argues that for labor the problem was not so much the dominance of market culture but “market deformations,” such as convict labor, which workers rejected. In contrast with many other historians of the period, he highlights what he calls labor's “confident use of market oriented thinking” (32). Fink argues that the fight for a “free labor identity” (32) continued to matter for the labor movement, but also notes that “its industrial and political antagonists lay continuous claim to alternate interpretations of the same ideals” (32–33), and ultimately won this public relations battle.

The second chapter revisits three canonical strikes—the Homestead lockout of 1892, the Pullman boycott and strike of 1894, and the anthracite strike of 1902—in order to understand the constraints that the strikers faced and to question the strategy that some leaders chose, particularly those, like Eugene V. Debs, who have been largely lionized by labor historians at the expense of “business unionists” such as John Mitchell, who led the 1902 strike in ways that Fink finds admirable. Given what we now know about the hostile legal environment that organized labor faced, Fink suggests that labor leaders did not fully recognize this constraint and acted incautiously and counterproductively.

In chapter 3, Fink, building on his previous pioneering work on Progressive intellectuals, turns attention to the university and particular to the circle around the University of Wisconsin's Christian socialist economist, Richard T. Ely.Footnote ⁵ Fink shows that Ely and his students, most famously John R. Commons, challenged the view that markets reflected “natural law” and understood taming industrial capitalism as the most important task facing the nation. This group played an important role in shaping not only the Progressive Era but the New Deal. This example teaches us, Fink writes, that “a vigorous, scientific search for truth may well precede the formation of progressive legislation,” and that “some degree of collaboration among social investigators and reform-minded politicians, together with a popular mandate, is also crucial” (89). In highlighting the social significance of an institution, the research university, aimed at the young, Fink introduces a subtheme mentioned elsewhere in the book.

Chapter 4 examines and rehabilitates an “alternate path” that has been “largely lost to posterity,” namely, compulsory arbitration rather than “no holds barred collective bargaining” (91). Fink delves into the strengths and weaknesses in the “Australasian solution,” characterized by “statist regulation of labor-regulation of labor-management relations and workplace standards” in which state intervention in support of labor was more forceful than in the United States. The “historical record suggests that organized labor fared better—in both workplace density and public presence—in countries where it was incorporated in state-based collective bargaining or arbitration systems than in the US where it was left to struggle on its own,” Fink concludes (116).

Chapter 5 explores the “intellectual, political, and even spiritual worlds of heretofore unsurpassed international and cosmopolitan influences” (121) upon American socialists at the turn of the twentieth century. American labor radicals regularly connected with ideas, people, and movements beyond the borders of the United States. They were also, Fink reminds us, a young group, open to new ideas and experimentation in social life and politics; the only table in the book charts the age in 1900 of sixty influential socialists to demonstrate the relative youth of this influential cohort. The tone shifts in this chapter; and the emphasis on social experimentation and the “Left Opposition's romantic appeal” (129) reminded me of the argument made by Christine Stansell in her underappreciated study of urban bohemian radicalism, American Moderns.Footnote ⁶

The Long Gilded Age is too episodic and narrow in its focus to offer a fully coherent reinterpretation of the period. While it offers a useful synthesis and critique on the labor question, the case studies have a hermetic quality, as they don't speak to the broader political culture, to the contemporaneous rise of Jim Crow, to the burgeoning popular culture, and even, in spite of Fink's acute global vision, to the rise of U.S. imperialism. Although the word “capitalism” is in the title, Fink spends little time defining it or explaining what capitalism meant in this period and says very little about important aspects of the new capitalist economy, including mass consumption. Still, Fink offers an instructive and thoughtful history with original reflections on “recurrent opportunities to better align labor strategies with the power of government, and where possible discover points of overlaps with sectors of the business community as well” (152). Fink's historical and comparative insights suggest that a social movement perspective on labor history is limited and that institutions, particularly the law, matter a great deal in historicizing and assessing success and failure.