Abstract
In this timely set of five essays, preeminent labor historian Leon Fink revisits what he calls the Long Gilded Age (1880-1920), an era of massive industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and government experimentation that transformed the United States into a manufacturing juggernaut and global power. Exploring the American version of “a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and those determined to transform it according to socially defined ends” (p. 1), Fink focuses on the contested place of work and workers in the rapidly industrializing economy. The result is five interconnected yet separate pieces on what contemporaries termed the labor question, each from a separate angle: ideas (the free labor ideology’s legacy), action (the era’s pivotal strikes), institutions (the rise of the research university), policy (the enduring problem of union legitimacy), and political movement culture (the Socialist Party’s appeal to the young). While these topics will no doubt sound familiar to students of the period’s labor history, here, they are illumined anew by the author’s revisionist approach, which combines a healthy skepticism for conventional historiographical wisdom, a wide-eyed appreciation of the open-endedness of the past, and a firm commitment to situating U.S. developments within an international context. Not only does this slim volume offer important lessons from a prior “new world order” for our own but it also asserts that history’s broader value is the reminder of the contingency of every political moment, including our current one.
Fink’s central claims are that intense political debates over economic arrangements and institutions suffused the entire era, the processes at work were global in nature (something appreciated by reformers and radicals), and the outcomes we now tend to take for granted might have turned out differently. Rejecting the traditional periodization of a laissez-faire Gilded Age followed by a reformist Progressive Era, Fink instead envisions a single “Long Gilded Age” characterized throughout by international flows of goods, ideas, and people; transatlantic debates over the rights and wrongs of workers; and a variety of peculiar nation-based settlements whose distinctiveness has too often obscured their overlapping origins and shared traits. By situating American developments within this transnational framework and by comparing U.S. outcomes in each essay with an industrializing counterpart (France, Australia, and others), Fink aims to throw assertions of American exceptionalism into the dustbin of history.
Fink largely succeeds on all counts, though his relentless revisionism is more effective at raising new questions than supplanting standard stories. For example, his essay on free labor ideology challenges the conventional tale of rearguard labor republicans fighting the encroachments of market mechanisms. Instead, recognizing “a wide, and messier, territory of workaday experience” (p. 19), Fink views workers’ opposition to convict labor systems, coal company towns, and merchant seamen’s workplace unfreedoms less as attempts to forestall market intrusions and more as attempts to prevent what they saw as distortions from a truer, and fairer, free labor market.
Similarly, in his essay, revisiting the era’s great labor conflicts, Fink probes the thoughts, actions, and reflections of participants like corporate titan Andrew Carnegie, railway union leader Eugene Debs, and U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney to restore both the complexity and contingency of particular political crises. Rejecting the standard melodrama pitting heroic workers doomed to fail, against heartless robber barons buttressed by inevitable government backing, Fink exposes multiple moments that might have produced divergent outcomes. Ultimately, in these cases and others, the author effectively muddies the waters of the past, exposing tried historiographic certainties; yet, he has not yet produced new authoritative portraits.
To be fair, Fink’s aim is not to produce a new synthesis of this pivotal period in U.S. (and world) labor history, but this suggests that the book may be of limited use for labor studies specialists or their students. Written more for scholars than a general audience, the author assumes a familiarity with the people, debates, and conflicts populating Gilded Age labor history. In other words, one should not turn to this book for an introduction to the Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly, the Homestead Strike of 1892, or the Wisconsin Idea, though each is featured extensively in separate essays. For those familiar with the period, however, this text offers excellent encouragement to rethink past orthodoxies, rehash historiographical debates, and remember the open-endedness of every historical moment. Most importantly, by restoring contingency to the conflicts that informed the “the new world order” of a century ago, Leon Fink reminds us of the unsettledness of the one we inhabit today, as well as the issues connecting the two. As he aptly asserts, “the legacy of this earlier era of globalization offers possibilities yet to be fully tested in our own era” (p. 1).