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American Environmentalism And The Visage Of A Second Gilded Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2020

Benjamin H. Johnson
Benjamin H. Johnson*
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: bjohnson25@luc.edu
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Extract

The moniker “Gilded Age” invokes questions of wealth, class, and political economy. When paired with a subsequent “Progressive Era,” as in the name of this journal and the society that sponsors it, the implication is that economic developments after the Civil War gave rise to pressing questions of workplace safety, income distribution, monopoly, and the like, which reform and protest movements rightly sought to rectify. Whether to invoke the Gilded Age to describe the current era of U.S. history also centers on such questions: it makes sense to say that we are living in a Second Gilded Age, Thomas Piketty and others have argued, because inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power echo those of the 1880s and 1890s; or, respond skeptics like Heath Carter, it is not a helpful comparison because the cultural and organizational forces contesting inequality are so much weaker now.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 246 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Heath Carter, “Why We're Not in a New Gilded Age,” Religion and Politics, Feb. 9, 2016.

2 See Paul Sutter's call for a field of environmental history that appreciates the emphasis on complexity and hybridity of the field's last generation, but nonetheless insists on engaging the “fearfully dramatic … scale, scope, and pace of environmental change” in recent history. Sutter, , “Nature Is History,” Journal of American History 100:1 (June 2013): 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879), 9

4 Henry George, Social Problems (1883), 9.

5 Johnson, Benjamin H., Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 32–37, 47–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 50.

7 Muir, John, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Yablon, Nicholas, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sachs, Aaron, Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 302, 305–6Google Scholar; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 38, 40, 43.

9 Muir, Our National Parks, 364–65.

10 Pinchot, Gifford, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910), 84, 114Google Scholar; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 96–99.

11 See Bartlett, Dana, The Better City: A Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: Neuner, 1907)Google Scholar; Rimby, Susan, Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

12 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 208, 205, 203–4.

13 Hersey, Mark, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 107, 219Google Scholar; Fisher, Colin, “African Americans, Outdoor Recreation, and the 1919 Chicago Race Riot” in To Love and the Wind and the Rain, eds. Diane Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 69Google Scholar.

14 Warren, Louis, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997Google Scholar; Spence, Mark David, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Jacoby, Karl, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

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16 See, for example, Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake (New York: Nan Talese, 2003)Google Scholar; Weisman, Alan, The World Without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007)Google Scholar; Jonathan Jones, “The Death of Culture: Apocalyptic Visions of Our Future Underwater,” The Guardian, Apr. 22, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/22/pablo-genoves-photography-death-culture-climate-change (accessed June 10, 2019).

17 Noah Smith, “Faster Growth Begins with a Land Tax in U.S. Cities,” Bloomberg Opinion, Oct. 24, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-24/faster-growth-begins-with-a-land-tax-in-u-s-cities (accessed Sept. 21, 2018); Peddle, Francis K., “Principal Concepts in Henry George's Theory of Natural Law: A Brief Commentary on The Science of Political Economy,” American Journal of Economics & Sociology 71:4 (Oct. 2012): 714–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See, among others, Anderson, Terry L. and Leal, David R., Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sachs, Jeffrey D., Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Penguin, 2009)Google Scholar.

19 Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 7)Google Scholar; Speth, Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

20 Kevin Baker, “Where Our New World Begins: Politics, Power, and the Green New Deal,” Harper's, May 2019.

21 Estes, Nick, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019)Google Scholar.

22 Sellers, Christopher, “Three Eras of Environmental Concern,” Modern American History 1:2 (2018): 363CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Sellers, Christopher C., Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

24 Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, 45. Although, as I argue elsewhere, many conservationists—Liberty Hyde Bailey, Charles Francis Saunders, and Stewart Edward White, in fact, had a less hubristic and state-centered approach to fostering a culture and policies of environmental protection. See Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 258.