Chapter XCIII: Part I: 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