Political Economy in the Gilded Age: The Republican Party's Industrial Policy

Abstract

The nature of party contention and public discourse in the late nineteenth century is one of the least understood and most elusive subjects in American history and historiography. In the period itself many critics condemned the intense partisanship of the two major parties as a sham battle, aimed more at filling offices than fulfilling ideals, and all too often tainted with corrupt motives and methods. In the classic formulation of Englishman James Bryce, “neither party has any principles…. [P]oints of political doctrine … have all but vanished …. All has been lost except office or the hope of it.”