Paper
Understanding Economic Change in the Gilded Age.
Published Jun 1, 1999 · B. C. Campbell
OAH Magazine of History
10
Citations
0
Influential Citations
Abstract
An announcement that the Gilded-Age economy is on the agenda produces pained looks around the classroom. These .signs of distress signal that the economic history of the late nineteenth century needs special handling. The first step in this task is to recognize the obstacles in teaching the subject. The chief impediments are the inherent complexities of economics, negative stereotypes about the Gilded Age, and the dual paths of economic change during the period. No single strategy can cut a smooth course through these brambles, but acknowledging their existence helps to avoid becoming entangled in them. Economics frightens many students. Some aspects of the subject are difficult, it is true, but our contemporary culture adds to these complications. Today's teenagers grow up in an affluent society. Most college students and a large proportion of high school students come from middle-class backgrounds, where abundance, not scar city, is their chief economic reference. The vast majority of young Americans do not earn their own living. Few know anything about budgets or accounting; still fewer have experienced the fear of bankruptcy. It's not that kids today are out of touch. They just have little personal basis for understanding the economic realities that faced adults in the Gilded Age. My strategy for coping with these challenges begins with posing some simple questions. I start by asking how people earned a living in the period. Answers to this inquiry not only describe the contours of the workforce, but also prompt questions about the goods that workers produced. One can follow up the answers by discussing how these items were made. I encourage students to draw on their own experiences and use their imagination in these exercises. A question such as "how did a person get a pair of shoes before malls existed?" can get the ball rolling. Profiling the workforce leads to questions about how much workers were paid and how they spent their earnings. At this point I introduce the concepts of standard of living and the distribution of wealth. Students tend to dichotomize Gilded-Age society into a few fabulously wealthy industrialists and a mass of impoverished work ers?a distorted image probably due in part to the period's nickname. While students have a general sense that the United States is today among the richest nations in the world, few know that the standard of living improved substantially for many Americans during the Gilded Age. Nor are they usually aware that the United States out produced all other nations on a per capita basis and in aggregate totals by the end of the nineteenth century (1). Here I take a brief detour into an explanation of "real" per capita Gross National Product (GNP) and the relationship between productiv ity and incomes. To interject realism into this exercise, I review the volatility of the Gilded-Age economy, which slumped into depression in the 1870s and 1890s. Describing the rise in bankruptcies and the travails of unemployment during these "hard-times" dramatizes how individual fortunes became increasingly interconnected with the overall health of the economy in the industrial age. The Gilded Age conjures up images of "robber barons," corrupt politicians, and laissez-faire government, and this is the second obstacle to learning Gilded-Age economics. The stereotypes contain elements of truth, of course. Bold entrepreneurs did accumulate great fortunes, and politicians did cooperate with businesspeople to block regulations. Yet historians can no longer let Charles Beard and Matthew Josephson monopolize the economic story of the era. Several generations of scholars have demonstrated that the plot was far more complex than these early "progressive" historians indicated. Nonetheless, the "robber barons" motif remains an entrenched stereotype about the period. The third impediment to understanding the economic history of the Gilded Age lies in its dual paths of development. These twin strands of growth give instructors a lot of ground to cover. One
Full text analysis coming soon...