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

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
Eli Cook
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Historical Analogy

AbstractThe 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.

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.

Revising The Response to Industrialism: Changes in Perspective over Forty Years, 1955–1995

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Samuel P. Hays
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
The Way

When I retired in 1991 my first project was to revise The Response to Industrialism, which covered the years from 1877 to 1914. These, of course, are the years we call the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. When the University of Chicago Press asked if I would undertake a revision as part of their desire to update several books in the History of American Civilization Series, I readily agreed. I did so with some instinctive understanding that much about the book would undergo revision, but just what I did not have clearly in mind. Much had changed in the profession, and much had changed in the way I thought about that period in American history. As I worked my way through the first edition the details of those changes became more clear. And so I prepared an introduction to the revision that outlined for the reader just what had changed in my thinking over those forty years.

The Ordeal of Eugene Debs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The South ◽  
Panic Of 1893 ◽  
Labor Conflicts ◽  
General Strike ◽  
The U.S

The American panic of 1893 has its origins in the fiscal policy of the U.S. Congress. Within a year, the 1893 panic ushered in one of the most famous labor conflicts in American history. The American Railway Union's support for workers locked out of the Pullman Palace Car Company became a titanic general strike centered in Chicago. What began as international doubt about the dollar's convertibility into gold became by 1894 a test of Eugene Debs' new American Railway Union, then an abortive strike, then a collapse of the traditional two-party system. This story is often told differently by political scientists, labor historians, and scholars of socialism, the South, or the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. This chapter attempts to put some of those histories and historiographies together.

scholarly journals New Perspectives on Socialism II Socialism and Capitalism Reconsidered

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Richard Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socialist Party Of America

The July 2003 special issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era revisited the history of the Socialist Party of America during the Progressive Era. This second issue on “New Perspectives on Socialism” examines socialism largely outside the party context, thereby challenging the tendency of scholars and non-scholars alike to identify socialism with a party-based political movement. To the degree that the essays collected here examine party-based socialism, they focus on the gradualist or revisionist wing of the party, whose socializing and democratic reforms, programs, and ideas helped establish a context for the Progressive Era and thereafter, when a “social democratic” type of politics became intrinsic to the mainstream American politics.

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Zeidel
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Workplace Conflict ◽  
Robber Barons ◽  
Post War

This book explores the connection between the so-called robber barons who led American big businesses during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the immigrants who composed many of their workforces. As the book argues, attribution of industrial-era class conflict to an “alien” presence supplements nativism—a sociocultural negativity toward foreign-born residents—as a reason for Americans' dislike and distrust of immigrants. And in the era of American industrialization, employers both relied on immigrants to meet their growing labor needs and blamed them for the frequently violent workplace contentions of the time. The book uncovers the connection of immigrants to radical “isms” that gave rise to widespread notions of alien subversives whose presence threatened America's domestic tranquility and the well-being of its residents. Employers, rather than looking at their own practices for causes of workplace conflict, wontedly attributed strikes and other unrest to aliens who either spread pernicious “foreign” doctrines or fell victim to their siren messages. These characterizations transcended nationality or ethnic group, applying at different times to all foreign-born workers. The book concludes that, ironically, stigmatizing immigrants as subversives contributed to the passage of the Quota Acts, which effectively stemmed the flow of wanted foreign workers. Post-war employers argued for preserving America's traditional open door, but the negativity that they had assigned to foreign workers contributed to its closing.

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