The Incorporation of America

Alan Trachtenberg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, 2007.

Trachtenberg's study straddles the fields of history and culture, coming from a point of view which attempted to analyze the development of the United States in ways which transcended rigid interpretive frameworks. In the Preface to this 25th Anniversary edition he notes that when the book was first published in 1982, "American Studies" was then a more "transgressive enterprise." (xiv) Even now, the book has a breadth of reach which sets it apart from many more traditional historical monographs.

"Incorporation" is most commonly used in the context of creating a business, and while Trachtenberg is using the term in a much broader sense--both in the sense of creating a unity out of parts as well as the sense of creating a body or a "person"--he deliberately plays on that common understanding by saying that America was "incorporated" because in many ways the cultural transformation the nation and its people went through at that time were driven by the aggressive growth of industrial capitalism and attendant phenomena, including mechanization, urban growth, the rapid opening of western land to cash-crop based agricultural, the spread of railroads, the development of finance capital, and so on.

Trachtenberg depicts the people of the United States grappling with complex, sometimes logically conflicting, notions of identity and purpose. Their society still spoke the language of stable Republican virtue and the moral economy of self-sufficient producers, but they were being driven to participate in an aggressive capitalist cycle of dynamic, creative destructive, and towards becoming consumers of mass-produced goods which were advertised in ways which turned products into abstractions tied to personal desires and detached from the act of manufacture.

This was a country where politics became a matter of fierce partisan rivalry masking a complete detachment of the Federal government from substantive action in the national economy--as in so many other areas of American society, politicians found themselves being "incorporated" into an America where the big economic questions increasingly were addressed only from the outside, by dissident groups such as the Populists who struggled to articulate new grievances in language befitting the new order.