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| Politics During the Gilded Age |
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Digital History ID 3114
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In recent years, it has become commonplace to characterize
politics in the Gilded Age as corrupt and issueless. The major
parties "divided over spoils, not issues" and over "patronage,
not principle," in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter,
and maintained voter loyalty by waving the bloody shirt (i.e.,
appealing to Civil War loyalties) and playing on religious, ethnic,
and regional divisions.
This view is quite misleading. An era of intense partisan fervor,
the Gilded Age had a higher level of voter turnout than at any
other time in American history. The federal government assumed
greater authority and power over banking and currencies, taxes
and tariffs, land and immigration. This period also witnessed
the rise of a number of highly politicized movements--including
the temperance and women's rights crusades and the Populist insurgency--that
sought to address the wrenching social transformations of the
age.
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