The Encounter between Jews and America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia Diner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
American Society

The period after 1870 through the middle of the 1920s, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, coincided with the mass migration of Jews to the United States. Nearly three million Jews, primarily from eastern Europe, overwhelmed the numerically small Jewish community already resident in America. Of the Jews who left Europe in those years, approximately 85 percent opted for the United States, a society that took some of its basic characteristics from the particular developments of this transitional historical period. This essay focuses on five aspects of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America and their impact on the Jews. These features of American society both stimulated the mass migration and made possible a relatively harmonious, although complicated, integration. Those forces included the broader contours of immigration, the nation's obsession with race, its vast industrial and economic expansion, its valorization of religion, and its two-party system in which neither the Democrats or the Republicans had any stake in demonizing the growing number of Jewish voters.

The Recent Unpleasantness

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Jack M. Balkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
The Us ◽  
Difficult Transition

American politics appears dysfunctional because the country is going through a very difficult transition. Understanding politics in terms of recurring cycles can offer some hope in troubled times. There are three cycles at work: a cycle of the rise and fall of political regimes; a cycle of polarization and depolarization; and a cycle of constitutional rot and renewal. The United States is facing similar challenges as other constitutional democracies, but the US party system, institutional history, and constitutional structures affect the way that our politics processes these challenges. Hence there is reason for a guarded optimism. We are at the end of our Second Gilded Age, which will give way to a Second Progressive Era. Even in our bitterly polarized world, we can already see signs of how American politics will eventually depolarize, creating new opportunities for cross-party collaboration.

Comparative Perspectives on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ballard Campbell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Business Politics

Thanks to Richard Jensen, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Alan Lessoff and William G. Shade for helpful comments on this essay.Comparative perspectives on the United States have received increased attention in recent years, stimulated apparently by the rise in world history's popularity. David Thelen's sponsorship of transnational history as a subject of three special issues of the Journal of American History no doubt has contributed to the trend. The reprinting of C. Vann Woodward's The Comparative Approach to American History in 1997, the publication of George Fredrickson's essays on comparative history, and the report of the La Pietra Project reflect recent efforts to put United States history in an international perspective. While comparative history hardly has gained equal footing with nationally-centered studies, enough work on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has appeared over the last decade and a half to warrant an assessment. This essay takes note of scholarship on economics, business, politics and governance that has examined the United States within an international context during the 1870s–1914 era. My objective is to discern trends in the literature and suggest opportunities for future research rather than to provide a comprehensive bibliographical survey.

Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Considerable Doubt

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.

Mass Society, I

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-249
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter addresses how Europe became a mass society in the fin de siècle (1870–1914). Explosive population growth gave rise to major metropolises whose residents were divided by rank and religion, gender and class. The new conditions of the fin de siècle, mass migration from eastern Europe, and the rise of the new organized political anti-Semitism propelled Jews across Europe and in the United States to establish social welfare and civil defense organizations. The former practiced solidarity on a grand scale; the latter intervened to protect equality. The organizations' promotion of emancipation was predicated on Jews being a confession or religious group: by functioning under the guise of “welfare” and “civil defense,” they deliberately eschewed political claims. From the 1890s, new forms of mass Jewish politics emerged that contested that basic assumption.

Globalizing Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 408-430
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Short Period ◽  
European Jewish

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from small towns in Eastern Europe to the United States. Smaller groups went to other destinations in the Americas, Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. This chapter discusses the background and impact of that mass migration around the world. The global diffusion of Jews from Eastern Europe concentrated in three new Jewish centers: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. The Eastern European Jewish mass migration, however, did not ultimately lead to the formation of a distinct diaspora of Yiddish-speaking Jews, but rather became the driving force behind a dramatic transformation of the Jewish diaspora as a whole. The reasons for this can be explained by several factors: accelerated Jewish assimilation in these centers, the short period of the mass migration, the great diversity of the migrants, and the almost complete destruction of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

Strange Whims of Crest Fiends: Marketing Heraldry in the United States, 1880–1980

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-611
Author(s):  
FORREST D. PASS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

The Multiple and Material Legacies of Stephen Skowronek

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Test Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Books ◽  
Distinct Period

Stephen Skowronek’sBuilding aNew American Stateremains one of the most influential books in political science and history of the past two decades. In political science,Buildingengendered a set of deep disciplinary transformations that simultaneously sent scholars sprinting into the history books for new cases with which to ply and test theory, goaded them into rethinking what it meant for the United States to possess a “state,” and welcomed them in embracing the study of institutions as a worthwhile endeavor in political science. In history, Skowronek’s book challenged scholars to reconceive the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a fundamentally distinct period of governance, a peculiar challenge to the institutional forms that had dominated nineteenth-century American politics. Two decades later, historians and political scientists are still laboring to answer Skowronek’s call.

scholarly journals Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110318
Author(s):  
Matthew Flinders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Economic

Robert Putman’s The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) provides a powerful meta-analysis of American social, political, economic and cultural change throughout the twentieth century. What this analysis reveals is the existence of an almost perfect arc of social progress which begins from a low position around the Gilded Age at the beginning of the twentieth century and then climbs across all variables until reaching a highpoint around 1960. The Progressive Era, Putnam argues, engineered an ‘upswing’ against inequality, polarisation, social disarray and a culture of self-centredness. Since then, however, the data suggest that a severe downswing has occurred which explains the existence of deep divisions and polarised politics in the United States. Putnam’s core argument is simple: The United States has pulled itself out of a trough before and it can do it again. In a post-Trump context, this argument could hardly be more welcome which may explain the rave reviews this book has generally received. Nevertheless, the core weakness of The Upswing is that it arguably tells us far more about how the United States ‘came together a century ago’ but far less about how it ‘can do it again’ in the future.

American jokes about lawyers

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Davies
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Competitiveness ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
American Society

AbstractIn the 1980s, a substantial cycle of lawyer jokes appeared in the United States. Unlike earlier waves of American jokes, the jokes did not spread to Britain and Europe, nor did the peoples of these countries invent large numbers of new jokes about lawyers at this time. The dominant theme of the American jokes was that lawyers are canny—i.e. calculating, crafty, and fond of money. It is striking that such jokes should be told about a group so close to the very core of American society, a society defined by its laws to a far greater extent than the countries of Western Europe. The nearest comparison is with the jokes told about the stupidity of politicians and apparatchiks, the groups at the very center of the former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. The latter were an indication of the economic stagnation and irrationality of socialism, and the price of stupidity was collapse and failure. The American lawyer jokes relate to the price of American success, namely the intensifying of economic competitiveness that took place in America in the 1980s. American jokes about lawyers are often sadistic tales in which we are invited to rejoice in their meeting a painful death or being slain. Yet death threat jokes about lawyers have no serious counterpart; indeed it is because the jokes do not connect with reality that they circulate so freely. The relationships between our social frustrations and resentments, our choice of targets for “hostile” jokes, and our manifestations of real aggression are complex and uncertain.

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