For my seminar this semester on Issues and Methods in American Studies (hello, grad school), I'm currently reading The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age by Alan Trachtenberg. ...It's more interesting than it sounds.
The book's project (as far as I can tell) is to define how, between 1850 and 1890, America transformed into Uhmercuh! -- in other words, how as the U.S. became an "incorporated" nation, economically as well as culturally. Trachtenberg uses evidence from the Reconstruction/"Gilded Age" period to explain why, for example, we all still see ourselves as rugged individualists despite all evidence to the contrary. (Thomas Edison, anyone?) It is an attempt to trace the origins for our seemingly-divinely-endowed, more-or-less-homogenized sense of what it means to be American.
But the most interesting thing I discovered in this book so far came in third chapter, entitled "Capital and Labor." While introducing the relationship between the laboring classes and the ruling Economy in the mid- to late-1800s, Trachtenberg quotes Walt Whitman in 1869:
"'If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years--steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of lungs or stomach--then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.'"
Well that rings a bell. As I read on, I began to stockpile pithy quotes that seemed to function as prophesy for 21st Century America's current wealth disparity problem. Here are some other choice excerpts that seemed, to me, to capture our current socioeconomic climate:
"Now, Whitman observed, the signs of 'exceptional wealth, splendor, countless manufacturers....' represented 'a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity.' But for [those] on the rise... Was not the successful businessman the very model of a 'healthy and independent' America? The poor had no one to blame but themselves. Workers, on the other hand, tended to agree with Whitman."
"...Political battles and ideological campaigns in the Gilded Age took the appearance of struggles over the meaning of the word 'America.'"
"...The ideology of free labor that promised independence and mobility for all honest, diligent laborers had developed into a justification of big business, and further, an implied insult to the cultural status of manual laborers."
"And more and more, as the industrial working class took on a distinctly 'foreign' cast with heavy immigration... the wealthy came to seem a homogenous group: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and Republican. 'The men who were getting to the top,' writes Carl Degler, 'even in the 1870's--that alleged era of the self-made man--had not been poor farm boys or uneducated immigrant lads starting at the bottom, but instead men who had been given rather exceptional opportunities to make the race to the top.'"
"We have to reckon, then, with the fact and the perception of a widening class rift."
History sure does repeat itself. Upon reading this, my first instinct was to post Whitman's statements up on Facebook or my blog in a spirit of indignation. Aha! I would cry. The U.S. hasn't changed since the 1860s! The underclasses today are the same as the laborers of the Gilded Age! The fight against the wealth gap today is exactly the same as the fight against late-19th century robber barons! It's so simple! Vote Democrat.
Of course, I never would have posted such partisan material, being constitutionally wishy-washy. But then came another thought: Is this what it's like to be in the Tea Party?
I've been mentally criticizing the Tea Party for months now for their ridiculous, zealous insistence that their cause channels the divine republican purpose of the Founding Fathers. Aside from a similar knee-jerk hate of taxation, it seemed transparently clear to me that the Tea Party of today is so fundamentally different from 18th century leaders, if only for the basic (and extremely important) fact that we live in wildly different conditions. What it means to have taxes and the concept of the "common good" are completely different today, in the age of globalization, modern corporations, and American post-colonialism, than it did back when George Washington was, himself, representing some colonies. It's not the same. Tea Partiers are not Colonial Patriots. Any idiot could see that.
Such apples-and-oranges parallels, however, manage to suddenly appear not idiotic when I find them embedded in a historical notion that I find emotionally resonant. Of course members of the Tea Party aren't like Jefferson. But laboring classes struggling against the uber-wealthy in 1860? Why, it's just like today! Here, let me show you this quotation from Walt Whitman.
I'm not trying to defend the Tea Party here. But my perspective has changed, in that I will no longer view their emotional allegiance with the Founding Fathers a product of purely right-wing irrationality and stupidity. I myself now know what it's like to look at people from a substantially incomparable time period and exclaim, "Look, it's me!" As difficult as it is to consider those I disagree with as legitimate debate partners--or to consider the fact that my methods of rationalization and argument are just as fallible as theirs--it occurs to me again that I should, at the very least, try.
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