Leon Fink. The Long Gilded Age

Anyone who has ever taught a college history course on the so-called Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the U.S. will likely empathize with Leon Fink’s efforts to recast the period from 1880 to 1920 as a “Long Gilded Age” in which continuity rather than discontinuity prevailed. The older title, suggests Fink, conjures an artificial image of a yawning chasm between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the nineteenth-century side, unbridled industrial capitalist and urban expansion, laissez-faire economic thought, labor violence, and government corruption abounded. On the twentieth-century side, a modern citizenry awoke to the problems created by Gilded Age excess and sought to solve them through positive and pragmatic government intervention and reform. Although historians have often acknowledged that this portrait is overly simplistic, problems of disjuncture inhere in the assumption of two distinct periods within an era often taught as a single course. Fink tries to resolve this problem by emphasizing several unifying themes for the era that he develops in five “discrete but overlapping essays” (1). In accord with current trends in the field, he also insists on the importance of viewing American experiences as part of a broader international pattern.

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