The growth of economic incorporation during the nineteenth century fostered a superstructure of incorporation in America which was much broader and deeper than the national economy. Hierarchies of control were reinforced not only in the realms of business and industry, but also in cultural and social interactions. Alan Trachtenberg’s central argument in this book is that the events surrounding America’s economic incorporation disrupted a sense of national identity and fomented a cultural debate about the meaning of “America.” His chief task is to bring into relief the conflicting conceptions of American identity which arose during the Gilded Age, as well as to highlight the various cultural assertions of legitimacy in directing the surging energies of a rapidly-growing, modern industrial society. The Incorporation of America is an important achievement, not only because it embodies a creative effort to synthesize previous scholarly works on the Gilded Age, but also because it informs our current political, economic and cultural vocabularies. To come to a more intimate understanding of the Gilded Age is to become more conversant in the elements of modernity and post-modernity.
In seven chapters, Trachtenberg presents several conceptual venues in which competing perceptions of American identity played out. The West represents the triumph of opportunity and development over the preservation of natural resources; concurrently, the process of “civilizing” Native Americans became highly rationalized. Mechanization also prompted very different worldviews. To industrialists, it meant efficiency in production and the accumulation of wealth; the machine was an instrument designed for the benefit of humankind. To workers, it stood for the degradation of human labor and was a sign of things to come: a loss of human autonomy in work and possibly a society subjugated by mechanical tyranny.
For Trachtenberg, the struggle between capital and labor,...