"Good news history has weakened Americans’ critical faculties...

[rodeodance]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706u/gilded-age

INTERVIEWS
The Dark Side of the Gilded Age
"Good news history has weakened Americans’ critical faculties... We need less consolation from history and more truth." —Jack Beatty, author of Age of Betrayal

[Demeter]

1. I Haven't Heard Any Good News! Have You Heard Any Good News?

Things have been downhill all my adult life. And any time a Democratic government made any progress on the budget, the environment, public health and safety, or education, the GOP would trun around and make everything worse than it was when the effort started.

[Double T]

2. More like: 'The dark slide of the tarnished age'.

[GeorgeGist]

3. Rubbish ...

history has exposed American's uncritical faculties.

[KoKo]

4. A Good Read! .....a little from the article:

And the goods were more affordable thanks to scale-and-scope production. In the words of the late Alfred D. Chandler, the dean of business history, scale and scope constitute "the dynamics of industrial capitalism." They make it go. Everything depends on them. By making more of something, you can make and sell it cheaper—that’s economy of scale. And from the same processes of production used to make one thing, you can make another—that’s economy of scope. The railroad, in Emerson’s phrase, was the "magician’s wand" that released scale and scope, and transformed America from a commercial-agrarian nation into the world’s leading industrial power in fifty years.

But the dynamics of industrial capitalism destroyed the viability of the free-labor dream. In the book I instance an Akron, Ohio, butcher. He fits Lincoln’s ideal: a small proprietor who slaughters local beef. Then one day Armour, a pioneer in scale-and-scope production at its Chicago meatpacking plant, drives a refrigerated car into Akron, and holds a sale in the railroad yards, underselling the Akron butcher by a factor of magnitude. He can’t compete. Scale and scope have put him out of business. If he takes a job at Armour’s slaughter-house, he moves down the class and opportunity scale from free labor to wage labor. He can still rise—but within the working class and only through collective bargaining. But for that he’s got to wait until the New Deal and the rising tide of the postwar boom. Cheated expectations fed the violent strikes of the era, including the largest strike anywhere in the world in the 19th century, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which I chronicle in the book.

Scale and scope transformed not only manufacturing but farming. Mechanization brought continuous production to agriculture, and the railroad connected the farmer to the city and to the world market. Returns went to scale—to bigger and bigger farms. Lincoln’s farm laborer could not "put enough by" to buy his own farm—everywhere the railroad bid up the price of land. He could not rise. He stayed a farm laborer—or quit the farm for the city.