FREEDOM IN THE GILDED AGE ★^635Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy
The appearance of what Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson
called “a permanent factory population” living on the edge of poverty alongside
a growing class of millionaires posed a sharp challenge to traditional defini-
tions of freedom. “The great curse of the Old World— the division of society
into classes,” declared The Nation, had come to America. It became increasingly
difficult to view wage labor as a temporary resting place on the road to eco-
nomic independence.
Given the vast expansion of the nation’s productive capacity, many Amer-
icans viewed the concentration of wealth as inevitable, natural, and justified
by progress. By the turn of the century, advanced economics taught that wages
were determined by the iron law of supply and demand and that wealth rightly
flowed not to those who worked the hardest but to men with business skills
and access to money. The close link between freedom and equality, forged in
the Revolution and reinforced during the Civil War, appeared increasingly out
of date. The task of social science, wrote iron manufacturer Abram Hewitt,
was to devise ways of making “men who are equal in liberty” content with the
“inequality in... distribution” inevitable in modern society.
Among the first to take up this challenge were the self- styled “liberal”
reformers. (Their beliefs were quite different from those called liberals in mod-
ern America, who advocate that an activist government try to address social
needs.) This group of editors and professionals broke with the Republican
Party in 1872 and helped to bring about a change in northern opinion regard-
ing Reconstruction. But their program was not confined to the South. Gilded
Age liberals feared that with lower- class groups seeking to use government to
advance their own interests, democracy was becoming a threat to individual
liberty and the rights of property. Some urged a return to the long- abandoned
principle that voting should be limited to property owners. During the 1830s,
Alexis de Tocqueville had reported that opponents of democracy “hide their
heads.” By the 1870s, wrote one observer, “expressions of doubt and distrust in
regard to universal suffrage are heard constantly... [at] the top of our society.”
Social Darwinism in America
The idea of the natural superiority of some groups to others, which before the
Civil War had been invoked to justify slavery in an otherwise free society, now
reemerged in the vocabulary of modern science to explain the success and
failure of individuals and social classes. In 1859, the British scientist Charles
Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One of the most influential works
of science ever to appear, it expounded the theory of evolution whereby plant
How did the economic development of the Gilded Age affect American freedom?