Gilded Age Discussion
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Our discussion of the Gilded Age was fantastic. I put students into groups of 4 to 6 and explained to them that they were a family coming to the United States (or moving within it) during the Gilded Age. Where would you decide to move? Each group was to use as many documents from Major Problems as they could and the contextual information from Hist and lecture to make their determination.
I put them in “families” because I wanted them to consider that such choices weren’t so much individually made, but rooted in family dynamics. Moreover, I wanted them to use their collective reading wisdom (which may mean some didn’t read at all … and could free ride for the discussion a little). The result was fascinating: when each group defended their location of choice, they did so by referencing why other locations were far worse.
One group selected Chicago; it was a growing city, they explained, rising to a status just behind New York City. They referenced the high numbers of immigrants moving there and the attention the city was getting from reformers like Upton Sinclair. But then they turned to negative references. Look at how bad New York was in the pictures of Jacob Riis. California was awful, if you heard the experience of Lee Chew, a Chinese immigrant.
Another group of all women selected Utah and they would marry Brigham Young. They were excited about the protection and camaraderie they would enjoy as a collective bunch and that they wouldn’t have to endure a father who ate the best food (as in the selection from Bread Givers) or be attacked by the Klan (as was Lucy McMillan’s experience).
Another group thought California would be rad. They used historian Donald Worster’s essay on the West as on the forefront of capitalism to make their decision. They wanted to be where there were new innovations, new movements, and new hopes. And finally, one group selected Kansas, because of an ex-slave’s recollection of it being far better than the South.
Then I asked the students what I believe is the central problem of how American historians represent the Gilded Age. If America was so bad (racist, sexist, classist, violent, hate filled, greedy, and destructive, which it was, just ask the bison), then why did 25 million immigrants move to the nation between 1880 and 1920? In total numbers, that’s about the American population in 1860 in the entire country! Is it the case that historians present the United States as gilded, but there was some real gold there?
So we got talking, and we viewed the Major Problems sources in new ways. We looked at where the sources came from or how could we read into them why the United States was desirable. Some of the documents came from Congressional hearings. When Thomas O’Donnell lamented the plight of workers, he was doing so before a Senate committee on relations between capital and labor. Some Senators wanted to know his experiences, and he was heard. When Lucy McMillan spoke about Klan attacks, it was to another federally-sanctioned committee. At least some members of the U.S. govermnent wanted to know what happened to her. Only years earlier, the Supreme Court had said she had no federal citizenship rights. And finally, why would young Asian men and Slovenian men be enticed by American boosters? When they heard of opportunities, such as wealth, jobs, and citizenship, why was that compelling enough to move? The push factors were significant. Perhaps it meant that Lee Chew didn’t believe he had any of those possibilities in China, but there was hope he could have them in the United States. Of course, that did not work out according to plan.
The overall point became not that the United States was so great in the Gilded Age, but that it certainly wasn’t as overwhelmingly bad as we easily characterize it. As I try to move my classes from melodramas of good versus evil (where the United States is typically evil, or just a little less evil than others – like Nazis), I think we get a little bit closer to sympathy and understanding for the past. It also provides a global perspective so we can know a little bit about what was going on in those other parts of the world.
My questions to you are: do professional historians overdo the “tragic” or “evil” focus of American history, particularly the Gilded Age? And, are there other documents from the Gilded Age that you would include that would show positive aspects of the nation?
Ed,
you raise some very profound and important questions, especially asking about why many immigrants would come to the US if it was so bad (and your urging us to move beyond simply noting some of the negative “push” factors in their countries of origin). I suppose a simple answer would be our need to focus on the fluidity of American society. Obviously, this is all relative to where people are coming from and contingent upon particular ethnic and racial groups (and, for that matter, whether one is in the South, the urban centers of the North or midwest, or in the West). You’ve given me a look to think about as I’ve tried to think about this more deeply when I’m designing a general course on American religion (as you know, my area of teaching) from 1865 to the 1920s. For example, if I had students read a section of James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” students would not fail to note the horror of a man witnessing a lynching, but right before that graphic scene they get to see a powerful evocation of the pageantry and drama exhibited in black revival service. In other words, a hope-filled religious event in the midst of harsh circumstances. A people who are able to worship among themselves and celebrate their freedom, constrained as it may appear to us. One more point: what I have found challenging beyond your general and compelling critique of how “tragic” or “evil” we may tend to see this period, so many of the sources (here I speak of religious texts) from the period tend to see in a crisis mode: Charles Taze Russell writing his “Plan of the Ages” in the late 1890s, with a dour view of American society; Social Gospel leaders writing about the perils of the city and the new immigration (remember Josiah Strong!); even secular individuals like Henry Adams expressing grave doubts about America’s future and present; etc. Ironically, among the Social Gospel and liberal Protestant leaders who expressed optimism about cultural progress and the advance of what they saw as the Kingdom of God (given their view of God as immanent in history), we’ve often regarded them as naive, viewing them primarily in the aftermath of the tragedy of the First World War (and, as Bill Hutchison and others reminded us, through the lens of Christian “realism” as espoused by Reinhold Niebuhr and other critics). So I think there are a complicated set of reasons why we view this period as tragic, though you quite rightly urge us to attempt to see what immigrants in particular imagined as a land of opportunity and freedoms that they were willing to risk so much to gain.
Fascinating post. I think a lot of our skewing of the Gilded Age results from the long legacy of the Progressives (both the historians and the actual reformers). If middle-class WASPish goo-goo types are your heroes, it’s worth making the Gilded Age look as big and nasty and rapacious as possible – both in the early 20th century, and in the history books. And, while we’re on it, my students find Progressives a colossal bore…
As to why millions of people came if it was so terrible, I have used this short piece from Nicholas Kristof on present-day sweatshops to help students relate to contemporary parallels: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html – the basic point of the column is: yes, sweatshops are not the ideal, but in many poverty-stricken countries, they are better than the alternatives, and a route out of poverty. Do we see the Gilded Age too much through presentist, post-industrial eyes?
Finally, on the good v. evil narrative and teaching the “tragic” topics – I think many Americanist professors are still working on the assumption that students have been indoctrinated in school with a whiggish patriotic narrative that paints the U.S. as a bastion of liberty and progress, and that therefore it is our job to shake (shock?) them out of their mindless patriotism. The problem is, I don’t think high school U.S. history is taught like that anymore. Your average HS textbook devotes ample coverage to the horrors of slavery, massacres of Indians and land grabs, and the exploitation of all sorts of groups. I’m okay with that – obviously it’s a needed rebalancing – but I wonder if we have moved into a generation of freshman who arrive on campus ALREADY quite cynical about concepts like equality, democracy, or government in general, and who are old pros at sneering at the shortcomings of Americans of the past (“Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite. He owned SLAVES, dude!”). If this is true, we’re just feeding them more of the same. Are we reminding our students that Thomas Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence, and helped establish and lead the freest nation in the early modern western world? If we want engaged, thinking citizens in our society, I hope we are showing them what we love about America, too, and what we see in American history that helps us envision and work for the future we want.
Whew, much longer than I expected!
ABC
So many literary tropes envelop the teaching and writing of history – it can hardly be any other way since we deal with narrative. I guess what I’m looking for is a new trope for the Gilded Age … one that Henry May offered long ago was a coming of age story for the U.S. in this time period. I like that one – because it offers both joy and sadness, confusion and certainty, excitement and fear. Americans didn’t seem jaded during the Gilded Age … they seemed hopeful and frustrated that their hopes weren’t being realized as they would have liked. That strikes me as quite different from other time periods. And of course, I’m lumping like crazy here. But why else was there so much utopian fiction from the time.?!?
During class today when you asked us about living in time periods and if we thought the Gilded Age would have been a good time or a terrible time to live, I couldn’t help but think that it would have been like any other time. There were new technologies coming out that was advancing society, but there always are in every ‘age.’ People were moving around trying to find a place for themselves to prosper and earn a living and life for themselves, but people are always doing that! It’s just not as apparent because there are more people in every different place there is to go to in our nation now. And of course people had a lot of complaints about the government and about society and so many other things, but that is completely how our society works. In my opinion, historians tend to remember the bad about times and write that down for people to learn way more often than they write down something fabulous or something good. We see so much bad through our nations birth and its development because people expected everything to go perfect and when it didn’t they just wanted to complain about it instead of just dealing with it and making it the best they could. I personally don’t think that life is any ‘better’ now per say than it was then. Yea we have iPod’s and iPhones, which are pretty cool, but we think those are cool because its new to us in our age. The things that were new to people then were probably just as awesome, but everyone living now takes those types of things for granted because they have ‘always been there.’
I think professional historians focus a lot on the negatives of the Gilded Age because a lot of the negatives were documented. In Jurgis Rudkus’s “Discovers Drink in The Jungle” in 1905 there is so much negativity! It talks all about the terrors of the meat packing industry (and I know those were real so not putting that down at all!) but, needing to drink to forget the horridness of your day is a very horrible thing! And its in text, its in writing, that obviously makes it legitimate… right? Reading that made me feel like it must have been really hard to have been in position to deal with a life like that! Which totally reinforced the fact that everything I’ve ever learned in history classes was putting down how America founded itself.
And of course because of all this delirium that was going on people would want to think overly positive, hence the emphasis on Utopian society theories. In “A Slovenian Boy Remembers Tales of the Golden Country,” written in 1909 the author writes, “I remember that, listening to them, I played with the idea of going to America when I was 8 or 9…” (pg.81). People had these enormous fantasies of America, and when they got here and couldn’t make all those dreams they had put on a pedestal happen, they immediately assumed that America was bad and wasn’t fulfilling the promises or dreams it had given to people.
Thanks
Rebecca Arbino
I remember the most difficult part of the group activity was thinking as a family and not as an individual. For instance I felt that I could relate to Lee Chew’s document of his experience in America since he was “about sixteen years of age” and worked on his own since he the Chinese “are not allowed to bring wives here from China, and if they marry American women there is a great outcry” (p.72-3) But I knew his document was the only one that consisted of an individual experience since all of the other personal documents consisted of someone who had a family that relied on them or that themselves relied on.
What also made it difficult to think as a family was what kind of family was I in? Was my family a group of immigrants from Europe that lived off of $133 a year such as Thomas O’Donnell, or were we a family of ex-slaves that were able to find a nice place to live in Kansas and have the women be able to go to school such as Bill Simms’ family. Our group decided to become the family of ex-slaves in Kansas since Simms’ account of working at “$35 a month” and having his “two girls graduated from Ottawa university” (p.49-50) made it seem like the best place for a family to live during the Gilded Age.
When you asked us to do this assignment, my first thought on where to live was California. I imagined that it would be the ideal place to live because it was a growing area. It seemed like a fresh start apart from the cities that were filled to their capacity, with many issues such as disease and jobs where having your fingers chopped off was normal.
When I grouped up with other students to create a family, I immediately became a child who had no say in where to live because many of the members were already set on residing in Chicago.
Although I was only seeming to be a child in the family because I never spoke up, I kept my mouth shut and listened to what they had to say about every place to live. Absolutely no one wanted to live in Utah because none of us wanted to be Mormon. New York was crossed out next when the idea of tenements and poor water source were presented. And the South didn’t seem too popular to live in because of all the hate crimes.
As I write my thesis paper, I can’t understand why I didn’t speak up about the West. It was rapidly expanding and things such as the Homestead Act made this happen. In our textbook, Hist, it says that the Homestead Act was the result of almost 400,000 farms. That’s AMAZING! Although getting to the West was a bit of a struggle, especially for families, there weren’t many other issues once people got there.
Kalina G.
For this assignment, my group discussed the answer but we didn’t really participate when you asked us where we would want to live as a family. However, our decision was to live in New York City. It might seem odd to a lot of people because of the tenements and the bad living conditions that could be seen evidently in a photograph from Document 4, Chapter 3. The place looked filthy and unfit for human beings. But to take a second look, everywhere else was as bad in other perspectives. For example, the West sounded very promising but where would we find the money, as a family, to move together? As immigrants, we could hardly even feed ourselves, so there would be no way we could find some financial assistance to move to the West (this could be supported by a section called “Too Poor to Go West” of Document 3, Chapter 3). In addition to that, everywhere we could go, we would experience the same discrimination that the society had placed upon us, so why not stay in New York City? Jobs in the factories were dangerous but they guaranteed some amount of money to let us survive, while it was an unknown question to us if we could find jobs in other places. When staying in New York City, there was another advantage, which was to keep the culture that we had. Along with other immigrants, we could form a small community that shared the same language and culture to protect each other. Therefore, even with the bad living conditions that the tenements presented, we would rather stay together as a family in New York City. This could also explain why the majority of immigrants during this time period were crowded at there. They probably were either scared of the “unknowns” in new places or too poor to move anywhere else.
Duyen T.
The document I have chosen that relates to the Gilded Age, is document seven from chapter 3 titled “A Slovenian Boy Remembers Tales of the Golden Country, 1909.” I chose this document because of its unique view point. The excerpt is narrated by a boy who was only nine years old. He recalls memories of times when men from his village would travel to America, usually fleeing from economic “desperation.” Upon his return, the traveler would be the talk of the entire village. As the boy puts it, “to say that he thrilled my boyish fancy is putting it mildly.” What I find fascinating about this document is the way America was portrayed to other countries. Even though America had just been torn to shreds from the civil war, and reconstruction was not a complete success, our country was still desirable to immigrants. The Slovenian boy states that “In America everything was possible.” Although our country was going through major trials and errors, America’s economic stability was attractive to other people. Settlers from foreign countries were not treated equally compared to native born Americans. They would live in tenement houses, and work for extremely high risk, yet low paying jobs. From an American’s viewpoint, an immigrant had no value, but from the immigrant’s eyes, opportunity was overwhelming.
The questions I have about this document seem to be fairly obvious to me. How poor were the conditions in Europe that caused economic disaster, and why did they choose America? Did they not know how poorly they would be treated when they got to Ellis Island, and eventually to their tenement home? This excerpt was written by a nine year old, so I question its authenticity. Did Slovenian adults feel this same way about America, or was it just a child’s fantasy? Lastly, the boy mentions at the very end of the excerpt that him and his mother laugh often together. Is he hinting at the fact that as he grew older he realized that his dream of being American was foolish? I’m not quite sure.