Anne Applebaum had an interesting critique of the Smithsonian’s “America’s Attic” approach last week.
It collects everything from first ladies’ gowns to family photo albums to old ballots. It owns, among other things, Helen Keller’s watch, Cesar Chavez’s union jacket, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, and a copy of Elvis Presley’s first album. Its current exhibits explore America’s campaign against the polio epidemic, the first 50 years of Disneyland, the impact of Brown v. Board of Education and the music of Latin pop star Celia Cruz.
Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn’t tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower.
I agree with her argument here — there is something odd about our confusion between artifact and history. But I’m also curious about her examples of the American story: Washington to Jefferson, Roosevelt to Eisenhower. Those periods are not by happenstance. In classrooms, in bestseller history books and in the popular imagination, the Federalist period and the mid Twentieth Century are the two American epochs par excellence, the first the nation’s origins, the latter its assumption of global power. But what of other parts of the story?
Lately, I’ve become more and more convinced that the last decades of the nineteenth century (”The Gilded Age”) in fact are far more pivotal and central time for our nation. A managerial revolution and widespread incorporation meant a second industrial revolution and set the basis of the economic systems we more or less have today. Political parties began to take modern form, including their responsiveness to narrow constituency interests. Railroads and telegraphy created national markets. Government began to have to adapt a liberal constitutional framework to an illiberal (oligopolistic) economy; and popular movements (Progressivism and Populism) first arose in the disjuncture. American foreign policy began an internationalist, sometimes imperialist, expansion. And whereas territorial acquisition of the first half of the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for Manifest Destiny, in many ways the Homestead act had far more immediate an impact in people’s lives than the Lewis and Clark explorations.
Yet this period is one of the most neglected, pedagogically and popularly. My high school history classes even covered Jacksonian revolution but skipped right over the period between the Civil War and World War I. (It was a Tennessee public school, so Jackson may have gotten wider play for it.) Even the policy and culture crucible that was Reconstruction got ignored in the face of Civil War obsessions — which I doubt is uncommon. It’s easy to surmise why: the “popular” periods have identifiable protagonists and national heroes, yet the changes of the Gilded Age are mostly large-scale in nature and proceeded despite the lack of wise leadership and the despite the presence of downright corruption and plutocracy.
But it’s partly because it shows how history proceeds despite “great men” that we should devote more attention to this period. That and the fact that so many of the questions we wrestle with today — regulation of industry or no? independent civil servants or no? — have a direct precedent to these years.
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