Michael Belding – A New Organizing Principle for the Gilded Age

Originally posted to the TR Center blog on October 28, 2019.
Some of our summer interns are graduate students in history, responsible for teaching undergraduate courses. In this blog, Michael Belding describes how hay fever and Theodore Roosevelt will help students make sense of the Gilded Age.

This semester I am teaching one section of my department’s survey course that covers the second half of United States history, since Reconstruction. I have been a teaching assistant for many years (twice for this course), responsible for grading and managing weekly discussion sections, but am busily writing my own lectures for the first time. My second lecture for the course begins to unpack the Gilded Age (after a one-lecture recap of Reconstruction).

For a while I have struggled with how to deal with the Gilded Age. History in general pulls in many directions simultaneously, but, unlike the first half of U.S. history, there is no clear opening salvo. There is no singular event of momentous importance, like Columbus’s voyage or the establishment of the colony at Jamestown. (This is not entirely true – the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 is where many people “begin” the Gilded Age, but I don’t like that definitive periodization that wilts before any investigative pressure.)

Thankfully – I never thought I’d say this – it’s hay fever season, and my eyes are itchy. Wondering about the history of hay fever some time ago, I prepared for a different course a lecture that followed hay fever through modern history and the way it signposts many important changes, especially industrialization. This, I think, is a perfect way to begin the Gilded Age. It will humanize me to my students, take us through a lot of the country instead of staying in one major city such as New York, and can further complicate the periodization of American history – not only between whatever came before the Gilded Age and the Gilded Age, but between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. In some ways, we should want students to leave wondering about the boundaries of these temporal containers, because then they’re thinking about why an event belongs to an era.

I will do that last by drawing on Theodore Roosevelt’s experience with asthma and his seeking of relief in natural history fieldwork, outdoorsmanship, sportsmanship, and, as he called it, “the strenuous life.” Roosevelt’s asthma is well documented by his biographers, so I will not repeat them. And, as exceptional as Roosevelt was in his education, position, and curiosity, his response to asthma was much like other “hay feverites” of his time – to seek a cure in some place more natural, less civilized, than the city. For example, Roosevelt wrote on a postcard to his mother in 1879 while on a hunting and camping trip to Maine, “The first night or two I was bothered by asthma, but entirely got rid of it by camping out.” In a longer letter about that same trip he wrote, “The first two or three days I had asthma, but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into camp.”

These are no great medical revelations, of course. Precise identification of allergies, asthma, and their causes and treatments eluded medical scientists for a few more decades. Nonetheless, as I will show now, the simultaneous trends and impulses of an era can be shown not only by one figure who interested himself in everything, but by a non-human element of life.

Nineteenth-century doctors considered hay fever and asthma to be occupational diseases, essentially, of the bourgeoisie. Industrialization’s concentration of manufacturing led to urbanization, which separated people from more healthful environments, and those people who did not labor themselves but who managed business concerns or lived by owning them acquired a nervous disposition that was upset by all this modern dust and commotion. The best way to avoid hay fever and asthma was to seek a different environment. There were simply too many respiratory irritants in cities packed with people, bustling with traffic, and polluted by industry. The best remedy was relocation to wilderness – an environment undisturbed by humans, unmarked by the disturbed soils of mining, logging, manufacturing, railroads, cities – and even agriculture. The search for what historian Gregg Mitman (Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes) has termed an “exempt place” inspired a revaluation of different types of nature. From the mid-eighteenth- to the mid-nineteenth-century, American political culture valued the middle landscape of the farm (or plantation) as virtuous and restorative. Agriculture, though, was part of civilization, and agricultural landscapes could be turned into industrial ones. They were already on the path to becoming a home for the “disease of civilization” that was hay fever. They were thus less valuable to a hay feverite.

Resorts in the White Mountains, Great Lakes, and Mountain West, one after the other, were built to accommodate hay feverites. Hay feverites colonized new exempt places as the development of one site after another allowed allergens to flourish. Further and further westward was the cure located. What such exempt places lacked in geographical similarity, though, they shared in class appeal. Like the European bath resort circuit, hay fever resorts offered to the leaders of American industrialization all the comforts of upper-class life to which they were accustomed at a distance from the discomforts their wealth created.

Roosevelt, of course, was different. As far as I know, he did not seek a cure for his asthma in this type of environment. But he did spend more time than any other American president in nature and wilderness seeking to understand and appreciate them and trying to improve his health. To a certain extent, Roosevelt’s interests were self-serving. His ranch in North Dakota was a business venture. To go on safari in Africa and explore South America after his presidency was to participate in the province of the upper class and therefore exhibit his membership in that group.

But in terms of aspects of the Gilded Age to unpack, Roosevelt just keeps giving. We already have bourgeois class consciousness and ideologies, such as laissez-faire capitalism. There is also industrialization, urbanization, migration and immigration, and the transportation revolution (the lived experience of the Second Industrial Revolution commissioned and directed by wealthy Americans). Then there are the various responses to bourgeois control – unionism and, in rural America, the populist movement of the Grange, Farmer’s Alliance, and People’s Party. Also at issue in the history of hay fever is the colonization of the West, interest in “wilderness,” and creation of environments that Euro-Americans considered to be wilderness by confining Native Americans to reservations.

Along with hay fever, Roosevelt’s deep interest in conservation and designation of many national monuments and parks gives greater specificity to the ways in which industrialization affected not only urban environments but far-flung places that were (and, to some extent, still are) wrongly conceived of as wildernesses. Hay fever and Roosevelt give to students of history something and someone specific to hold in mind as they try to bring some analytical order to the Gilded Age’s chaos.