Culture, Society, and The Incorporation of America

In his publicity blurb for the original paperback of The Incorporation of America, Henry Nash Smith gives Alan Trachtenberg high praise. "This book realizes an ideal often mentioned as the goal of American Studies but seldom achieved; it is a truly 'interdisciplinary' account of American culture at a turning point in our history. But Mr. Trachtenberg is not merely a scholar, he is a writer. Reading it is a pleasure, not a duty." Twenty years after Incorporation appeared in 1982, the MLA's Division of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature honored it byorganizing a panel combining a retrospective reassessment byitsauthor with critical analysis by David Leverenz and David Shumway. The essays that follow are slightly revised versions of those conference presentations along with a response by the historian James Livingston, who helped to spark a lively discussion by an impromptu comment from the audience. All four retain the tone of oral presentations. Written after the session, this introduction details some of the reasons why both the content and method of Incorporation remain worthy of sustained engagement.

According to Trachtenberg, the book grew out of his "effortto find appropriate words and names for the powers which transformed American life in the three decades following the CivilWar" (3). During this period of rapid industrial expansion, themodern corporate form of ownership came to dominate the American economic landscape. If before Trachtenberg's book historians had given ample attention to how corporations altered American society, Incorporation was the first to be "concerned chiefly with the effects of the corporate system, on culture, on values and outlooks, on the 'way of life'" (3). According to Trachtenberg,

[J]ust as my subject encompasses more than politics and economics, so my treatment of the corporate system extends beyond the technical device of incorporation in business enterprise. By "incorporation" I mean a more general process of change, the reorganization of perceptions as well as of enterprise and institutions. I mean not only the expansion of an industrial capitalist system across the continent, not only the tightening systems of transport and communication, the spread of a market economy into all regions of what Robert Wiebe has called a "distended society," but also, and even predominantly, the remaking of cultural perceptions this process entailed. (3)

Incorporation, in other words, is an example of "cultural studies" before it came to occupy such a prominent place in literary studies. Indeed, as important as Trachtenberg's book was—and is—it did not even warrant a mention in the 1982 summary of scholarship in American Literary Scholarship. Despite that neglect, it is well worth pondering what is distinctive about Trachtenberg's method. The best place to start is Trachtenberg's own description. He is concerned, he tells us,

with the realm of culture—our beliefs, our institutions, our social and intellectual life—in a period of great economic and social change, of political battles, of violent industrial strikes and continuing warfare against native Americans. This concern will show in my procedures.... As a student of culture I am drawn especially to the figurative language by which people represent their perception of themselves and their worlds. Figures of speech, tropes, images, metaphors: I take these as materials of prime historical interest, for which they are vehicles of self-knowledge, of the concepts upon which people act.... In each chapter I follow a procedure of narrative and analysis, setting image in relation to what we know of social fact, attempting to explicate and clarify the dialectic between mind and world, culture and society. (8)

The key to Trachtenberg's method is how he explores the dialectic between culture and society. Indeed, the full title of thebook is The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, which acknowledges the influence of Raymond Williams. Drawing on Williams, Incorporation's method was quietly—to some imperceptibly—innovative within the field of American studies. When we think of Yale at the time Trachtenberg was working...