How technology and capitalism shaped America after the civil war

The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. By Richard White. Oxford University Press; 928 pages; $35. To be published in Britain by OUP in October.

“THE Oxford History of the United States” is one of the great achievements of modern historical scholarship. The series, which began appearing in 1982 and has since won three Pulitzer prizes, includes some exceptional individual volumes, such as James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom”, about the civil war, and David Kennedy’s “Freedom From Fear”, which covered the Depression and the second world war. It maintains a consistently high standard of excellence throughout and is notably better, on average, than the “Oxford History of England”. David Kennedy, the current series editor, deserves the highest praise.

Fans of the series have been waiting for the latest volume with particular eagerness. The era from 1865 to 1896 is obviously interesting in its own right: it takes America from the end of the civil war, when the South lay shattered, to the height of the gilded age, when America was taking over from Britain as the world’s mightiest economy. It is also interesting because of the parallels with our own times. This era saw the rise of great entrepreneurs who refashioned the material basis of civilisation with the discovery of efficient methods of producing steel and oil. It also saw a growing tension between the country’s egalitarian and individualistic traditions on the one hand, and its emerging business empires on the other. This tension gave rise to radical new political movements, such as populism and progressivism, and wild pendulum swings of political fortunes.

Richard White is well qualified to cover this tumultuous era. As the author of a fine book on America’s railways (“Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America”), he knows as much as anybody about the most important technology of the era. As a professor at Stanford University, he can see the era from the perspective of the west coast as well as the east. Three great themes run through this sprawling narrative, which moves back and forth between politics, economics and political thought.

The first is that capitalism was never as triumphant in this era as its apostles claim. Contemporaries such as Ida Tarbell did a good job of demonising John D. Rockefeller and other tycoons as “robber barons”. Mr White applies the same technique to companies that those barons created. Alfred Chandler, the doyen of American business historians, and his followers argued that the great story of this era was the establishment of giant corporations, with their mastery of the logic of scale and scope, at the heart of the American economy. Mr White argues that these groups were deeply flawed. They were run by insiders who milked them for excess profits. They gained advantage by bribing politicians as well as producing new products.

The march of capitalism left a great deal of destruction in its wake. The settlers massacred both the Native Americans and the buffalo that had made their homes on the great American plains. The robber barons built their factories and railways without regard to the quality of the air or workers’ safety: in just one year, 1893, 1,567 railway workers were killed and 18,877 injured. The “creative” side of creative destruction did not necessarily compensate: Americans who were born during the gilded age were shorter and had a briefer lifespan than those born half a century earlier.

The second theme is the conflict between America’s conception of itself as a land of equal and self-reliant citizens and the reality of post-civil-war America. The North took up arms against the South in order to universalise the ideal of a republic based on free labour. It passed a succession of measures such as free land for settlers (provided they worked the soil for five years) and public support for education in order to give the ideal flesh. But reality pulled in a different direction. The Confederacy all but re-enslaved the blacks in the iron cage of Jim Crow and prejudice. Giant organisations crushed small independent workshops. Some of the best passages in this book look at how Americans struggled with the contradictions between what they believed about the world and what stared them in the face.

The third theme is the unification of the country, as Americans gave up saying the United States “are” and began to say the United States “is”. The country became both bigger and smaller. Bigger because eastern settlers pushed ever westward, from the prairies to the Great Plains over the Rockies to the west coast, as epitomised by “American Progress”, which John Gast painted in 1872 (pictured). Smaller because the railway and the telegraph shrank distances. In 1865 it took months to travel from east to west. In 1895 you could make the same journey in days. At the same time the country turned on its axis. In the first half of the 19th century the flow of American trade was north-to-south via the coasts and river systems. In the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the arrival of the railways, it was increasingly from east to west.

At times, Mr White is so keen on exposing the destructive side of capitalism that he downplays the creative side. During this period America replaced Britain as the world’s most important economy. Great companies seized on new technologies and innovative management techniques to reduce the price of basic commodities, sometimes by as much as 90%, as in the case of steel and oil. And millions of people, many of whom came from Europe in boats, were given the chance of achieving the republican dream of a house of their own.

“The Republic for Which It Stands” should be read alongside more positive accounts such as Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, which argues that productivity gains in this period laid the foundation of America’s mass prosperity. But most of all Mr White’s book should be read—not just because it has so much to say about the latter part of the 19th century, but also because it casts light on America’s current problems with giant companies and roiling populism.