Historians have described the rise of cities or corporations, the return of reform movements, and the sense of crisis itself as the force behind this gilded age turned “progressive.’’ The accomplished cultural historian Jackson Lears looks to the wars - not only the big ones that bookended the period but also the little ones that Americans seemed to seek at every turn.
Americans north and south, black and white, had embraced the terrifying destruction of the Civil War as a portent of rebirth, a baptism by fire. The notion of regeneration through battle, though, set the stage for a reunion without slavery or racial equality.
The Civil War also fueled a cult of manliness that slid easily into militarism. Confident that American imperial ventures would be different, American men took the experience of total war to the Plains Indians, and then abroad. Lears is both poetic and devastating on the self-serving aspects of the American creed in these years. Where others have seen a healthy idealism that ultimately found ways to address the harsh reality of the rich getting richer, he sees mainly self-justification and hubris.
A decadent, gilded age did not give way to an age of reform. Instead, the same culture that produced the Civil War found other outlets for its regenerative visions: Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, and finally, in 1917, Europe.
