Customer Reviews

The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (American Century)

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This is an early (well, mid year) front runner for best book I've read all year. It is also one of the first books I've read that I purchased solely based on an Amazon.com recommendation. Kudos to you Amazon.com, faceless computer program you may be, but you DO recommend good books. I'm quite sure I could have lived the entire rest of my life and never had any one recommend this book to me in causal (or non-casual) conversation.

Trachtenburg, a Professor of American Studies, picks up where authors like Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith left off: Trying to analyze the ways in which America became the nation it is today. Like Smith in "Virgin Land" and Marx in "The Machine in the Garden", Trachtenberg ranges across disciplines (literature, economics, sociology, etc.) to develop a nuanced thesis. Although he approaches his thesis ellipitcally (in true American Studies fashion), it is hard to deny the power of his observations. In its simplest terms, Trachtenberg attempts to show the way in which the corporation became the dominant force in shaping American identity.

Importantly, he does not treat this development as a foregone conclusion. THrought the book, he develops the idea of a counter definition of America, one that draws on the tradition of Indian culture and American Populism, to show how much the corporation had to overcome in order to dominate America's definition of itself.

Along the way, he tackles not only the history of the corporation itself, but the way business took over the political system and the way corporate america co-opted the artistic elite. It is this last observation, which Trachtenberg describes via his incredible analysis of the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair, that I found most revelatory.

Check this book out! And thanks to Amazon.com for recommending it to me!

This book revolutionized the debates on naturalism and realism of the later part of the nineteenth century. It is one of the best interpretations I have ever read about how the formation of corporations were inaugerated in the 1870s with growing mechanization, industrialization, labor strife, and depressions. I have no idea what the prior review means that Trachtenberg looks too much at literary history in that the book only devotes one out of its seven chapters to the writers of the times. The book is mainly concerned with showing the interactions between labor and capital, the formation of the new cities, the effects of Westward expansion (once again, I have no idea what the prior reviewer means by having the initial chapter play such a pivotal role since Trachtenberg does not make the claims that the reviewer makes), the growing of populism, and the 1893 Columbia Exposition.

Regardless if one studies history or literature of the late nineteenth century, this book is one of the most important written about the times and offers a wide range of marginal perspective that are usually overlooked in such texts.

Trachtenberg sets out to examine the effects of the corporate system on American culture and values during the three decades following the Civil War. Specifically, he explores how the changing forms and methods of industry affected the average American's lifestyle and attitudes. He then demonstrates how industrial mechanization and the resulting expansion of the marketplace radically changed labor, education, domestic habits, city life, politics, and mass media.

The author's central argument is that the incorporation of American business on such a massive scale following the Civil War wrenched society from the moorings of its traditional values and propelled Americans into previously uncharted cultural waters. Trachtenberg specifically asserts that corporate power wrested control of the mythical West from the Indians and displaced the landed gentry of rural Jeffersonian America, replacing both with "great cities" like Chicago (epitomized by the White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition). Moreover, corporate America profoundly changed America's culture and behavior patterns with the introduction of factory labor, department store shopping, mass-media advertising, business-oriented educational curricula, and household consumerism.

The results of this influence can be seen today. Examples include workplace rules and regulations, political influence peddling, the feminization of family relations and consumer habits, the role of universities in preparing students for business careers, the standardization of newspaper reporting and its dependence to advertising revenue, the antagonistic relationship between capital and labor, the replacement of skilled artisans with untrained wage laborers, and the rise of the industrial middle-class.

Furthermore, the author effectively makes the case that industrial mechanization alone did not account for these profound changes. Rather, it was the subsequent expansion and transformation of the marketplace that ultimately replaced the tradition of familial self-reliance with a life centered upon impersonal transactions with merchants. As a result, women's work evolved to mean wise and efficient shopping instead of industrious making and canning. From a place of labor and self support, the home became a place of consumption. Voluminous newspaper ads and giant department stores soon exceeded the social influence of school and church. And the city became the principal site of these transactions, where workers labored to assemble the products, where families lived and utilized factory wages to purchase the products, and where news dailies advertised the latest products.

Trachtenberg follows a pattern of narrative and analysis, liberally sprinkled with figures of speech, tropes, images, and metaphors. Trachtenberg claims that these figurative representations are necessary to clarify the dialectic between mind and world, which I found insightful and illustrative.

The author's sources range from newspapers, historical monographs, and great works of fiction. His book is topical and thematic, with each chapter addressing a specific feature of the era's social history.

In this dense, highly illuminating effort the author explores the profound social and cultural impacts that accompanied the rise of huge corporations that increasingly came to dominate the US economy by the late nineteenth century. It is not the formal corporate structure that is the author's primary concern, although the distant, anonymous, and non-liable ownership is part of his theme. He focuses on the broad cultural mystification, obfuscation, manipulation, powerlessness, and exploitation that were a result of corporate-controlled developments in such areas as the rise of great cities, Western land utilization, the vast railroad network, colossal buildings, mechanization, communications, the political process, scientific management, advertising, retailing, etc. Much of this was only vaguely recognized at the time: the Gilded Age was a "period of trauma, of change so swift and thorough that many Americans seemed unable to fathom the extent of the upheaval."

Corporations were once chartered to perform only specific tasks for the public good, but private, for-profit incorporation by the end of the Civil War had essentially become a right. However, according to the author "incorporation wrenched American society from the moorings of familiar values, ... the process proceeded by contradiction and conflict."

Corporate-led developments essentially scaled daily life beyond the understanding and control of individuals. The independent artisan and farmer, considered essential to a Jeffersonian, virtuous political order, could scarcely contend. The idea of an individual rising on his own merits, by his own labor - the so-called free-labor ideology - gave way to internal corporate bureaucratic, hierarchical control and the exterior power to force compliance with corporate demands. Wage labor was no longer the "imagined nightmare of independent artisans, but was the typical lot of American workers." Ironically, the myth of the virtuous, deserving workman was preserved by the success of the captains of industry.

The large, grandiose downtown department store is symbolic of the era. Workers and citizens, now designated as "consumers" in the new incorporated world, found themselves overawed, manipulated, and enticed by magnificent displays of goods for the home and personal use that sent the subtle message that those items were needed for a respectable middle-class life. The dazzling displays left little room to reflect on the labor or process to produce those goods, despite the fact the purchasers were themselves often laborers. The political process also was transformed into election "spectacles" orchestrated by corporate-backed political parties; again, an artificial emphasis obscured the actual workings of an institution or process. "Like advertising, the party system produced an illusion, which disguised its character, its alienation of political power from the very producers of the wealth that supported the system."

As the author suggests, these extensive cultural changes in American life, combined with the economic deflation and depressions of the era, produced strong reactions from workers and farmers, at times violent - for example, the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Square affair of 1886, a fall out from the eight hour movement. The Knights of Labor, the largest labor organization of the times, sought to counter capitalism through producer and consumer cooperatives. Perhaps the greatest reaction to the corporate control of the economy came from the Populists, who originated from the farmer alliances in the south and southwest and were the last and greatest of the third-party movements after the Civil War. They advocated for significant government oversight and ownership but were ultimately no match for the powerful forces arrayed against them.

The author suggests that the "political battles and ideological campaigns in the Gilded Age took the appearance of struggles over the meaning of the word `America,' over the political and cultural authority to define the term and thus to say what reality was and ought to be." Furthermore, "In the antithesis between `union' and `corporation,' the age indeed witnessed an impassable gulf of troubling proportions, for it remained unsettled on which side lay the true America."

The author concludes his analysis with an examination of the "White City," or the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. It was literally a glittering exhibition of the latest corporate technological developments. Its message was that a "beneficent" future could be had "through a corporate alliance of business, culture, and the state." It was evidently absurd that mere farmers and day-laborers could run such a complex and benevolent system. But not more than a year later, the huge Pullman strike beginning in Chicago shut down rail traffic throughout the nation. Pullman too was a planned community, where workers supposedly had access to amenities to which the rich were accustomed. But, in fact, with the pleasantness came rules and restrictions. One critic referred to the example of Pullman as "well-wishing feudalism" with the pretense of providing for the happiness of the people but with the real agenda of authoritarian control. At least in this instance, the cultural veneer proved to be insufficient in disguising the exercise of power and in teaching obedience.

"The White City seemed to have settled the question of the true and real meaning of America. It seemed the victory of the elites in business, politics, and culture over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks, and women." "But the ragged edges of 1894 implied that even in defeat advocates of `union' over `corporation' retained their vision, their voice, and enough power to unsettle the image of a peaceful corporate order." The author is surely correct in pointing out that these tensions continued to resonate over the next four decades.

As said, the book is a very tightly packed look at the rise of corporations in America and the cultural hegemony that they began to impose. It is well written but is slow going due to the very detailed analysis of the author. This review hardly touches on the many areas of life that the author demonstrates were impacted by incorporation. In the modern era, corporate culture and control are simply assumed - actually not even noticed. In the nineteenth century that was not the case. A significant minority in that era sensed that the future would be tremendously changed and not all for the good. And they were mostly right.

THE INCORPORATION OF AMERICA: CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE GILDED AGE was first published in 1982 and is re-issued in an updated 25th anniversary paperback edition here for any collection strong in American history, whether it be a high school or college holding or a public lending library. Trachtenberg's analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the late 19th century and the cultural changes that accompanied it provides historical essays key to understanding both the era and capitalist efforts.