From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age

In the wake of civil war, American politics were racially charged and intensely sectionalist, with politicians waving the proverbial bloody shirt and encouraging their constituents, as Republicans did in 1868, to “vote as you shot.” By the close of the century, however, burgeoning industrial development and the roller-coaster economy of the postwar decades had shifted the agenda to pocketbook concerns—the tariff, monetary policy, business regulation.

 

In From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail, the historian Charles W. Calhoun provides a brief, elegant overview of the transformation in national governance and its concerns in the Gilded Age. Sweeping from the election of Grant to the death of McKinley in 1901, this narrative history broadly sketches the intense and divided political universe of the period, as well as the colorful characters who inhabited it.