The Gilded Age
I. The American Scene 7
I. Free America: Half a continent awaiting preëmption; new raw materials--oil, steel, copper, coal. A new technique of exploitation--capital, transportation, machinery. Philosophy embraced in three ideals: preëmption, exploitation, progress 7
II. Figures of Earth: The flowering of Jacksonian frontier spirit, simplified to the acquisitive instinct; a crude, dynamic energy 10
III. Politics and the Fairy Godmother: The struggle within the Republican Party; the gospel of Whiggery and the triumph of the American System, Henry Clay 17
IV. The Great Barbecue: How capitalism and agrarianism fared--the Homestead Act and railway grants. The shift from governmental to private control 23
V. Folk Heroes 26
1. General Grant 27
2. Jay Cooke 31
3. Charles A. Dana 43
II. The Culture of the Seventies: With the decay of aristocratic controls, a loss of unity. Three strands: aristocratic, romantic, frontier 48
I. New England in Decay: The Genteel Tradition and the drift away 50
1. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel 54
2. The New England Scene: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Sarah Orne Jewett; Mary Wilkins Freeman 60
II. The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman 69
III. The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain 86
III. Changing Theory: An agricultural people changing to an urbanized people. The railways hasten economic development 102
I. Winds of Economic Theory: The conscription of economics: The business man comes to the front 103
1. Henry C. Carey 105
2. Francis A. Walker 111
II. The Conscription of Political Theory: The democratic and plutocratic trends. Development of the democratic principle vs. the cult of the Constitution. New conception of the political state 117
1. Theodore Woolsey 120
2. [John W. Burgess] 124
III. [The New Ally: The courts: the police power and the fourteenth amendment; the injunction]
IV. [Buttressing the Democratic Theory]
1. A Democratic Economics--Henry George 125
2. [Supplementing the Democratic Political Theory--Henry D. Lloyd]
IV. The Beginnings of Criticism: The pessimists skeptical of democracy, the optimists calling for reform of the spoils system. No competent critics of industrialism 137
I. The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell Phillips 140
II. Morality and Politics--George William Curtis 147
III. English Liberalism and Politics--Edwin Lawrence Godkin and the _Nation_ 154
IV. Fiction Considers the State of the Country 168
1. The Political Novel: _The Gilded Age_; _Democracy_; _An American Politician_ 169
2. [The Economic Novel: _The Bread-winners_] 173
3. The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel: H. H. Boyesen 179