Commentary on Gilded Ages, Now and Then
Robert Paynter
0
) Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst
, Amherst,
MA 01003, USA
The skyrocketing separation of the richest Americans from the rest amidst a political and cultural discourse that celebrates the individual and the unquestioned wisdom of the free market has many commentators comparing our time to the Gilded Age of 100 years ago. It is an apt comparison. W.E.B. Du Bois's (1935) assessment of this era, found in the chapter from his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America 18601880 titled The Counter-Revolution of Property could also describe our era, with lives lived amidst the products of mass production, the domination of politics by corporations, economic booms and busts, labor markets divided by race and gender, and misery in this world of plenty. Painter (1987, p. xx) reports that in pre-federal income tax 1890 the top 1 % of families owned 51 % of the real and personal property, a figure that resonates with today's 99 % Movement. Given the contradictions and crises we face in the early twenty-first century it is not surprising that historical archaeologists are interested in this earlier period. This earlier Gilded Age, like ours, was comprised of complex array of forces shaping life. Symptomatic of this complexity is that different scholars of the first Gilded Age, including authors in this collection, provide different date ranges to encompass these processes, depending upon which they foreground: a short politically defined Gilded Age (1876-1914), a longer Gilded Age from slavery America to imperial America (1865-1914), or an even longer phase of the social and ideological consolidation of capitalism (1789-1914) (Wallerstein 2011). Among the forces a century and more ago were: the tremendous growth in the production and consumption of manufactured goods unleashed by the incorporation of America, a growing and increasingly urban population,
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labor markets reorganized and segmented into hard lines of color/ethnicity and
gender,
struggles for citizenship that accompanied these hardening color- and gender-lines,
classes differentiated by where one lived and worked as well as by the every-day
etiquettes of mass consumption,
a new phase of settler colonialism as the Native resistance in the U.S. turned from
military confrontation to survivance,
the demolishing of space by railways, steamships, and the telegraph,
the struggles over the segmentation of time into work and leisure,
the imagining of colonial pasts and futuristic utopias as ways to make sense of
the interplay between competitive individualism and collective interdependence,
and, one could go on.
A number of the authors remind us of some of the enduring ideological fragments
that resonate into our era, including that the phrase Gilded Age was coined by Mark
Twain and Dudley Warner (1874) in their novel satirizing the superficiality of the
periods immersion in the cult of ostentatious display, activities akin to gilding the
lily. In addition, the social sciences gained the concept conspicuous consumption in
Thorstein Veblens (1899) study of the arrivestes of the era. The 1893 Worlds
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois is mentioned by a number of the authors
and Graff devotes an entire article to its symbolically rich materiality.
All the articles recognize the complexity of the era, and none seeks a single causal
relation. However, each of necessity foregrounds one or two, which gives this issue a
focus on three major themes: the tensions of capitalism, the tensions along the
colorlines, and theories of materiality for this new age.
Labor strife in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania is the focus of Shackel and
Rollers study of the Lattimer Massacre. In 1897, workers struck the Calvin Pardee
Company, using among other tactics the time-honored resistance mode of a protest
march. The sheriff and deputies fired on the strikers, immediately killing 19 and
wounding 38 others, 6 of whom later died of their wounds. The lawmen were tried
and acquitted. The strikers were immigrants from Eastern Europe, members of what
Patterson (1995, p. 132) identifies as a not quite White buffer race. Thus, Shackel and
Roller parse this confrontation as reflective of class and racial contradictions. Their
discussion of this intersection of race and class allows them to provide the discipline
with a very useful primer on Gilded Age xenophobia. The study also complements
the Ludlow Collectives remarkable work on the Colorado Coalfield War of 191314
(McGuire 2008, pp. 88221; Saitta 2007). The two studies are archaeologies of
coalmining that use battlefield archaeology method and techniques to interrogate a highly
charged documentary record. They are both models of Saittas (2007, pp. 817)
insistence that a socially useful archaeology is explanatory about the past as a means
to realize emancipatory futures for all. And someday as recognition plans move
forward, Lattimer will have a place on the national historica (...truncated)