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Why We Might Just Be Living in a Second “Progressive” Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Eli Cook
Eli Cook*
Affiliation:
Haifa University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ecook@univ.haifa.ac.il
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Abstract

The recent framing of our current era as a “Second Gilded Age” has been closely linked to economist Thomas Piketty's empirical findings regarding income inequality patterns in American history. Yet if we take a closer look at both the inequality data at our disposal as well as the broader social forces that have led to widening wealth gaps in recent decades, it becomes apparent that our current neoliberal era of rising inequality is far more similar to the Progressive Era than the Gilded Age. After arguing why the Progressive Era is a more apt historical analogy, this article will seek to explain why our contemporary moment has nonetheless been framed as a Second Gilded Age.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 253 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) 2020

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References

Notes

1 Linda Yueh, “Are We Living in the Second Gilded Age?,” BBC News, May 15, 2014; Stephen Marche, “The Literature of the Second Gilded Age,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 16, 2014. For other recent examples directly linking inequality to the “Second Gilded Age,” see Paul Krugman, “Why We're in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014; Richard Feloni, “The United States is undergoing a second gilded age, and it shows the same struggle has defined America for 150 years,” Business Insider, Sept. 12, 2018; Edward T. O'Donnell, “Are We Living in the Gilded Age 2.0?,” History Stories, June 1, 2018; Rick Hampson, “America's Second Gilded Age: More Class Envy than Class Conflict,” USA Today, May 17, 2018; James Fallows, “Elizabeth Warren on the Second Gilded Age,” The Atlantic, May 19, 2016; Paul Starr, “How Gilded Ages End,” American Prospect, Apr. 29, 2015.

2 Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (Feb. 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The one major exception to this is Piketty's wealth (as opposed to income) inequality graphs. Yet here—as addressed later in the article—Piketty's data jumps from 1870 to 1910. See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 348.

5 On the great deflation, see the still-relevant Mitchell, Wesley Clair, A History of Greenbacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903)Google Scholar; Stapleford, Thomas A., The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On the Second Industrial Revolution, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 On the Gilded Age as an era of labor victories, see Livingston, James, “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late Nineteenth Century American Development,” American Historical Review 92 (Feb. 1987): 69–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

7 Cook, Eli, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the vastly improved state of the American worker in the Gilded Age, see Gordon, Robert J., The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 On the past forty years, see “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” Economic Policy Institute, updated July 2019, www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap (accessed Jan. 1, 2020).

9 James Livingston, “The Myth of a Second Gilded Age,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 31, 2016; Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); 173Google Scholar; Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 348.

10 For the best up-to-date data, see the World Inequality Lab's yearly “World Inequality Report,” https://wir2018.wid.world (accessed Jan. 1, 2020).

11 See www.measuringworth.com. The industrial wage series is taken from Officer, Lawrence H., Two Centuries of Compensation for Production Workers in Manufacturing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. GDP data is based on the well-known series from 1790 to 1929 constructed by Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson; my economist grad student and I divided both wages and GDP per capita by GDP deflator to account for inflation.

12 “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” Economic Policy Institute.

13 On capital-labor relations in this era, see Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Populists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Green, James, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

14 On the possible paths of the era, see Thomas, John L., Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Sklansky, Jeffrey, Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fink, Workingmen's Democracy.

15 Holmes, G. K., “The Concentration of Wealth,” Political Science Quarterly 8 (Dec. 1893): 589–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edward Wolff's data is from Peter H. Lindert, “Distribution of Household Wealth: 1774–1998,” in Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition Online, table Be40, https://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb (accessed Jan. 1, 2020).

16 Little has been written of post-populism farming in the United States. For an overview, see Danbom, David B., Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) 159–83Google Scholar. The claim that racism got worse in the Progressive Era is a well-trodden field that goes back to Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903)Google Scholar, and later, Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955)Google Scholar. See also Southern, David W., The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform: 1900–1917 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2005)Google Scholar. On class consolidation, see Beckert, Sven, Monied Metropolis, New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. For a recent look at the worsening problem of inequality in Progressive Era New York, see Huyssen, David, Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

17 I'd like to thank the first anonymous reader for this crucial point on the foreclosing of possibilities.

18 Davis, Lance E. and Cull, Robert J., International Capital Markets and American Economic Growth, 1820–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5–6Google Scholar. For the still-classic linkage of corporate concentration and global imperialism, see Williams, William Appleman, The Contours of American History (New York: Verso Books, 2011)Google Scholar.

19 On the depolitizication of money in this era, see Jeffrey Sklansky, Sovereign of the Market. Voter turnout is taken from “Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, 1828–2012,” the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnout-in-presidential-elections (accessed Jan. 1, 2020).

20 Zunz, Olivier, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 39Google Scholar; Ott, Julia C., When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Hudson, Peter James, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philippon, Thomas, “Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive,” figure 1, in Blinder, Alan S., Lo, Andrew W., and Solow, Robert M., eds., Rethinking the Financial Crisis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012)Google Scholar.

21 Berle, Adolf A. and Means, Gardiner C., The Modern Corporation & Private Property (New York: Transaction, 1932), esp. 14–15Google Scholar; Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 On this liberal narrative of the Progressive Era and its critics, see Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Idea in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Cohen, Nancy, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.