Leon Fink's The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of the New World Order is a most welcome historiographic intervention. It gently pushes us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about how we tell the history of the United States from 1880 to 1920. For Fink, the “Long Gilded Age” was shaped by the corresponding forces of industrial turmoil and social reform, and it was thus both an age of upheaval and an age of possibility.
Possibility is the key term here. Fink wants us to see what could have been as well as what was. And he sees the limits to possibilities not in structural forces but in the political ideas and beliefs of men and women. Ideas matter in The Long Gilded Age, for, as Fink insists at the very beginning, what “we now take for granted in American economic life depended, in fact, on a thick set of political ideas . . . fought over for decades” (p. 1). And the holders of those ideas matter, too. Intellectual biography shapes all but the first chapter.
Fink sets these possibilities in a global framework as well. His use of both comparative and transnational frameworks shows alternative paths taken in Great Britain, France, and Australasia—alternatives that Americans could and did consider, adopt, or reject.
Fink's emphasis on possibility—and the centrality of individuals’ ideas—makes this book an exciting addition to the history of capitalism. Much of the new history of capitalism sees it as a controlling structure that is itself the primary agent of change—an argument Fink refutes. His frequent use of short biographies shows that capitalism is all too human; its path is never entirely predictable or stable.
We see both possibility and unpredictability in each of the book's chapters. It begins with a nimble intellectual history of the competing and conflicting meanings of freedom. Fink shows that free-labor ideology, and even freedom of contract, offered workers far more flexibility at the time than we have often noticed. By the end of the Gilded Age, freedom was narrowly limited to individual property rights, but American ideals of freedom were not preordained to head straight toward “extreme individualism,” as Fink's comparison of the different developments of “freedom” in the United States and France suggests.
In chapter 2, Fink examines three iconic strikes—Homestead, Pullman, and the 1902 anthracite coal strike—to show how competing ideas about freedom played out on the ground. Using short intellectual biographies of many of the key players, he suggests that individual ideas, beliefs, and decisions mattered in the outcome of the strikes. There were, argues Fink, “more open-ended opportunities in real time” than we usually acknowledge even from such unlikely sources (at least according to much historiography) as United Mine Workers of America president John Mitchell and Republican kingmaker Mark Hanna (p. 9).
Not all wrestling with the labor question happened in labor-capital conflicts, as chapter 3 explains. Social scientists leapt into the debate as well, offering opinions on public policy at the state and national levels. The German training of American economists, historians, and social scientists, Fink shows, pushed them to reject laissez-faire and promote state solutions to industrial and labor problems. But it was the actual institution of the university—most notably, the University of Wisconsin—that gave social scientists a platform for action. (In light of the current gutting of the University of Wisconsin and other public institutions, this chapter makes for especially poignant reading.) Under the leadership of economist Richard T. Ely, Wisconsin researchers and their graduate students helped reform state tax policy, institute worker's compensation, and pass health and safety regulations.
Chapter 4 begins with a deceptively simple question: “Why could labor unionism not gain a surer foothold in American law and public life until the 1930s or, for that matter, even until today?” (p. 10). A lengthy comparison of the United States with Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand helps bring into focus both the peculiarities of the American scene and the possible roads not taken. Americans paid careful attention to Australasia's embrace of compulsory arbitration, but ultimately, the British model of “collective laissez-faire” proved more palatable. Fink clearly regrets American labor leaders’ “principled but ultimately impractical aversion to a more thorough-going political strategy,” but he also shows how American ideas about freedom, so clearly laid out in chapter 1, made compulsory arbitration a highly unlikely road for the United States to follow (p. 116). Still, he refuses to let individuals off the hook. The American failure to follow the Australasian model, he insists, was not “overdetermined” by structural differences between the countries, though those certainly existed, but caused by individuals’ ideological and practical unwillingness to make compulsory arbitration happen (p. 118).
The book ends, as does Fink's Long Gilded Age, by looking at the young men and women who embraced international socialism in the first decades of the twentieth century. As individuals who had come of age between 1880 and 1900, they were already well-versed in the languages of the labor question, and they knew full well that no satisfactory answer had yet been offered. They turned wholeheartedly to international socialism to find better answers than their elders had. But their euphoric enthusiasms were short lived. World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution divided the socialists from one another and the movement, and young socialists moved on to other projects.
In the young socialists’ “disenchantment,” just as in the many disappointments of the Gilded Age, Fink finds a cautious optimism. No one person in the Gilded Age knew what the future would hold, but each struggled with the present to try to make that future. That might be the Gilded Age's lesson for us, Fink suggests. Like the Gilded Age intellectuals, from John Mitchell to Richard Ely, we wrestle with the present and hope for the future.
