Wall Street and the Fruited Plain: Money, Expansion and Politics in the Gilded Age (review)

James T. Wall’s Wall Street and the Fruited Plain offers a conventional overview of American history in the years 1865–1901, the Gilded Age. Bereft of footnotes and with a slender bibliography of cited works, it is long on descriptive detail and short on analysis. The author clearly intended this work for the general reader.

The Gilded Age was, of course, the time when the United States experienced profound demographic and economic growth. American industry achieved world leadership in the 1890s, while the Spanish–American War and its aftermath dramatized the nation’s new international prominence. Social change was equally as transformative as Americans increasing left the farm and moved to the city to engage in manufacturing. Henry George understandably bemoaned the paradoxes of the age in his classic Progress and Poverty (New York: Doubleday, 1920). It was indeed the “best of times and the worst of times.” Knowledge and productivity grew exponentially, but race relations reached a post-slavery nadir and class conflict threatened social cataclysm.

Wall covers many of the familiar themes and topics. I, however, found his emphasis a bit perturbing. He has devoted seventy pages to westward settlement and less than twenty to cities and some ten to the Second Industrial Revolution. The “Fruited Plain” of Katherine Lee Bates’ 1893 paean “America the Beautiful” has trumped Wall Street and politics in Wall’s treatment of the period. Neither Henry George nor Edward Bellamy appears in the index nor does the name Frederick Winslow Taylor. On the other hand, there are innumerable listings for obscure cowboys and miners. Moreover, in some cases, as with George M. Pullman, the page cited in the index (241) is incorrect.

Professor Wall has authored and edited several books. Most seem to be with the same publisher as this work. At least in this instance, they do not seem to have provided much in the way of copyediting. On page 124 it is noted that “sixty million [bison] roamed the Great Plains before the coming of the European.” But on page 129 he seemingly contradicts this figure. Citing works that give the number as thirty million, while adding in parentheses that some uncited estimates are up to sixty million. On page 185, Adam Smith in an obvious typo is referred to as if Adams is the surname. More importantly, a good editor would have guided Professor Wall in eliminating many of the innumerable digressions that distract the reader.

Wall has placed many, although far from all, of his digressions into sidebars that often go on for pages and extend well beyond the time frame and purview of his subject. In his section on the Miners’ Frontier, for example, he offers a three-page synopsis of the Broadway musical “Paint your Wagon” (1951) and the 1964 play and movie “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” The end result is that much of this book reads like rambling lecture notes rather than a carefully edited manuscript. Wall Street and the Fruited Plain is filled with interesting nuggets of facts, but unfortunately few significant insights into a critical period of American history.