Suchergebnisse

In October, 1963, Professor Vincent De Santis published a provocative revisionist essay on the realities of national politics in the United States during the Gilded Age. His perceptive comments and illustrations showed that the lion's share of the blame for the continuing misunderstanding of the politics of the period should be laid at the doors of Lord Bryce and Henry Adams. He demonstrated clearly that the distinguished, aristocratic Englishman and the Bostonian child of the eighteenth century were guilty of judging the passing parade of American political life by the standards of their own provincial and noncontemporary value systems. He went on to delineate the social, cultural and economic environment in which Gilded Age politicos functioned. These included the equating of democracy and capitalism, blind adherence to laissez-faire, cultural lag as to the theory of states' rights, the blight of two serious depressions, and a remarkably even balance of party and sectional power, especially after 1875.