The Incorporation of America Today

The Incorporation of America began as a challenge to myself: how to tell the story of an era—three decades—that would bring together key moments, figures, and developments without regard for conventional disciplinary boundaries, a periodized story that would touch important bases, show relations among them, and do so within a coherent structure. Historians take these decades, the Gilded Age, as a turning point in US history, and I assumed that any account of a turning point requires as broad a selection of evidence as one can reasonably manage. Hence the book's deliberate refusal to fall within any conventionally segregated category, literary or intellectual or socioeconomic or political history, but to draw freely from whatever sources I thought contributed to a whole picture. To exemplify the interdisciplinary as such was not part of the book's agenda, which aimed only to tell as complete a story as I could about a critical passage in the history of US society and culture.

"Critical cultural history" was how I described the project: "history" in the sense of concreteness and temporality, "cultural" in the sense of a totality of relations, a "whole way of life" ("whole" not as a unified homogenous field but as elements interrelated even where divergent and conflicted), and "critical" in the sense of skeptical, demystifying, contextual: cultural criticism in the act of becoming, in Adorno's words, "social physiognomy." Brook Thomas is absolutely right in calling attention to the influence of Raymond Williams, especially his Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). The Gramscian theory of "hegemony" was also part of the mix, as were, as David Leverenz and David Shumway observe, the American studies scholarship of Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx. The book emerged from an eclectic culturist theory of history with more than a dash of social history.

The term incorporation I adopted from political economy for obvious reasons—it names the prime engine of change in the period—but also for its paronomasia, the wordplay it invites. Pun laden, incorporation implicates and conjoins several realms at once. It gives a name to visible signs of change and to less than visible causes and agencies of change: both a descriptive and an explanatory term. It allowed me, so I hoped, to bring into a single focus tangibles and intangibles, the overt with the covert, the manifest with the latent. That hope appears in the braiding together ofseveral stories into a single narrative of change: colonization of the West, standardization of time, accelerated mechanization of the means of production and the circulation of goods, the rise ofmetropolis, of department stores, railroad terminals, and tall office buildings. Less tangible but no less material manifestations included new class formations and antagonisms, extreme polarization of the propertied and the propertyless, a changing middle group increasingly comprised of managers, office workers, and professionals—and not least, altered meanings of keywords such as land,work,city,civic, and incorporation itself.

In the first instance a form of capital in its postentrepreneurial stage, incorporation refers to an emergent form of ownership and control of private enterprise in which power is distributed inwardly along hierarchical lines and outwardly in new social configurations and cultural perspectives. While the book doesn't apply a strict base-superstructure analysis, it does assume that changes in the mode and relations of production have significant consequences upon the collective consciousness and expressive regime of the society, how people portray to themselves and to each other in word, image, stone and steel, their collective lives and their visions of a future. My focus was not only on change but on conflict and contradiction, tensions generated by the incorporation process among interested sectors of the society. Conflict to the degree of state-organized violence accompanied incorporation at virtually every stage: westward expansion and colonization on the graves of murdered, dispersed, and extinguished native societies; class-warfare in battles between workers and federal troops in the great railroad strikes of 1877 and...