The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

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

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.

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.