Pullman was a planned community built by corporate capitalist George Pullman owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, the company that made cars for America’s railroads. It was, as Tractenberg notes, a planned community whose function was to provide a steady work, good morals, and peaceful environment for Pullman’s labourers. Pullman was a planned community of distinctive row houses with indoor plumbing, gas, libraries, and sewers. Pullman town was also an environment that was planned in such a way to assure that Pullman’s workers would be obedient toward their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, acquiesce to the knowledgeable guidance and cultural uplift of their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, cultural uplift that included instruction in the civilised arts of thrift, cleanliness, and happiness, thrift, cleanliness, and happiness in the way that George Pullman understood them. The company town of Pullman, in other words, was a paternalistic community meant to uplift “savage” workers and turn them into “civlised” and obedient employees.
>A second key symbol of the Gilded Age Tractenberg explores is the White City. The White City, as Tractenberg notes, was, like Pullman, a planned community, this one built, under the watchful eye of architect Daniel Burnham, for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, was one of a number of World’s Fairs that took place during the nineteenth century.
Tractenberg argues that as was the case with Pullman's worker town, there are a number of meanings that one can tease out of the White City that tell us a lot economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically about America's Gilded Age. On one level, Tractenberg argues, the White City was a map of the past. The White City was built on land that was once marsh and sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. The White City, in other words, was ordered out of the chaos of the wilderness just like, at least in the American imagination, America was in the 19th century.
On another level the White City was, according to Tractenberg, a map of the present. The White City was a private enterprise created by the state, in this case the state of Illinois, and run by a board of directors whose goal it was to serve the interests of and reward its shareholders, just like the corporations that dominated American economic life in the Gilded Age. The spatial arrangement and spatial divisions of the White City were hierarchical, as was Gilded Age America. It was segmented or fragmented into classes, upper class, middle class, and lower class. The order of the White City in contrast to the disorder outside the White City told those who visited it in visual form that America’s corporate elite had brought corporate capitalist order out of pre-Gilded Age proprietary capitalist chaos. The Midway Plaisance, which stretched form the White City west along what are today 59th and 60th avenues, was, thanks to its carnivalesque atmosphere and its exoticism, marked off as quite different from the White City. The World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which now houses the Chicago Institute of Art on Michigan Avenue at Adams Street in Grant Park north of the White City, and which was the site of a series of meetings on a variety of cultural topics including religion, was like the Plaissance, geographically and culturally or ideologically marked off from the White City core.
On still another level, Tractenberg argues, the White city was a map of the future. The White City was constructed around iron and steel skeletons covered in staff, a substance that gave the illusion that the White City was built out of marble. The material culture of the White City was symmetrical and harmoniously laid out and it was monumental. Its buildings generally reflected the neoclassical style of the baroque era but the style of the White City’s buildings was not meant to symbolise nostalgia for a golden past. Instead the White City’s monumental architecture symbolised a utopian future for America and for the world. It was a future that, the White City told those who visited, corporate America would dominate. The Columbia pediment at the eastern entrance to the Machinery Hall, for instance, depicted Columbia at its centre, Honour was on Columbia’s left, Wealth was at Columbia’s feet along with inventors and two lions, symbols of brute force, subdued by human genius, by American genius. America, in the form of Columbia, the pediment clearly said to those who gazed upon it, represented the economic and political future of the world. The White City was divided into departments that included agricultural, mining, transportation, invention, art, and cultural departments. In the exhibit halls of the White City one found exhibits brought to the fair by corporations from all over the world, artworks, mechanical wonders, and examples of the homes of the future, including a model electric kitchen of the future. In between the monumental buildings of the White City were monuments, statues, canals, lagoons, plazas, and a wooded preserve. The White City was lit by 10,000 electrical light bulbs driven by two dynamos telling visitors that the future would be bright. All of these, the buildings, the built natural environment, the sculptures, the pediments, and the exhibits, the dynamos, and the cultural lectures, together, symbolised, in its material culture, human material progress, human spiritual progress, human evolution from savagery to civilisation, and the progressive human future to come.
The modern woman had a place in the White City. The Women’s Building, which was designed by a female architect, was guided by a Board of Lady Managers, and included exhibits on mothers as homemakers, cooks, and teachers. There were lectures on women’s history at the Congress. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, lectured on suffrage, Susan B. Anthony lectured on women and politics, and Jane Addams lectured on housework and factory work. These lectures were, however, marginalised since they were given in the World Congress Auxiliary Building rather than in the Women’s Building. The modern woman, the domestic displays in the Women’s Building argued, was a homemaker, a comforter for her harried husband, and a teacher to her children.
The meaning of the White City was not only, Tractenberg argues, in what it clearly said but also in what it didn’t say. It was also in the White City’s silences, and in the White City’s exclusions, in other words. Blacks were excluded from the White City, save as menial labourers, and were denied permission by those who ran the White City to exhibit at the Exposition. The famous ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas did speak at the Exposition but to a largely Black audience. America’s contemporary First Peoples were excluded but the “savage” Indians of America’s past and their “primitive” modes of life, their “primitive” customs”, and their “primitive” arts, representing lower levels of human evolution, were displayed in ethnology exhibits at the Exposition. The old world “customs” and “folklore” of Africans, Asians, and Muslims were displayed along the marginalised and exoticised Midway Plaisance. All of these "savages" were, in other words, the “others” of incorporated corporate America, “others” who would presumably be uplifted by the progress the White City promised or simply be marginalised by progress.
In its material culture the White City said, in its interpretations of the past, that chaos had been converted into order by an alliance of America’s economic and political elite. It said, in its representation of the present that incorporation or corporatisation in America had brought hierarchical order to mass chaos bringing wealth and culture to America in its wake. It told the world that America’s corporate elite had led the world to the cusp of a mechanical utopia. It told the world that in the future the bounty of consumer goods, of wealth, of harmonious order, of marvelous inventions, and of uplift could be everybody’s if they simply copied or replicated America’s economic, political, and cultural models. The monumental structure and technological and industrial exhibits of the White City said that America was ready and willing to take its place among the great powers of the world thanks to its corporate society. Soon, of course, the US would fight a war with Spain, a war from which America finally emerged, as the White City seemed to predict, with colonies in the Philippines and Cuba.
There were in the Gilded Age and there still are, as Tractenberg notes, alternative visions of the future than that of the corporate elite who manufactured the White City. While the White City offered a monumental neoclassical and monumental future dominated by economic and political elite, architect Louis Sullivan advocated a national architectural style that was organic and represented, at least to Sullivan, democratic rather than corporate ideals. Sullivan’s skyscrapers, however, seemed to reflect the aspirations of the corporate elite they housed rather than any aspirations of a democratic society. Labour, which was not really present at the White City—those who laboured to build the White City were hidden and guarded during construction while the constructive power of labour was elided by the power of machines—also offered an alternative to the corporate culture of the White City. In 1894 unionised workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike against the company after their wages were cut by 30% to 40% while their rents in the company owned and run town where workers lived in were not cut. Eventually US Army troops and US marshals broke that strike. Farmers were not really present in the White City either. The Agriculture Building housed displays of weather stations and model farms, models of a corporate farming future, in other words. Farmers too offered an alternative to White City corporatism. Populism and its labour and farmer alliance together offered the model of another future, one that was associative rather than corporate, one that was grounded in the fellowship of farmers, workers, immigrants, and women, rather than corporate and hierarchical control. And while Sullivan’s and the Populist’s models were marginalised by corporate America they pop up now and again. They popped up, for instance, as Tractenberg notes, in the Great Depression, in the 1930s, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There you have it, the broad contours of the Gilded Age in a nutshell…corporate…mass capitalist…mechanised…hierarchical, economically, politically, culturally…oligarchic…ordered...spectacular in its consumption…citizens as passive spectators…paternalistic...women in the home…labour in the shadows…Blacks, largely excluded…corporate-politician-industrial-science alliance…racist...imperialist...utopian...America, Inc.
The Incorporation of America is one of the best social science books I have ever read. Tractenberg is attentive to the economics and politics of the Gilded Age and how incorporation, segmentation, or modernity, call it what you will, was woven into the new cultural forms of the Gilded Age. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how modern America came into being. I was a bit baffled by one thing, however, namely, Tractenberg’s lack of acknowledgement of Max Weber’s theory of modernity, a perspective that places modern mass supposedly rational and efficient bureaucracies at the heart of the modern world. Weber’s approach to modernity is very similar to Tractenberg’s exploration and analysis of the incorporation or corporatisation of America during the Gilded Age. The Incorporation of America has only a single reference to Weber’s, his exploration of the rise of the professional politician, something Tractenberg sees as arising during the Gilded Age. Go figure?
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