It is heartening to welcome new work that takes Gilded Age American politics seriously. Progressive-Era political scientists and historians wrote the first draft of the history of the period’s politics. Their interpretation—heavy on sham partisan battles, the absence of principles, and corruption—providing the before to the after of Progressive-Era redemption, has had remarkable staying power.

Broxmeyer does not minimize self-dealing, patronage, office seeking, and other sordid features that were the sum of Gilded Age politics in the Progressive caricature. Rather than decrying corruption (indeed, he asks good questions about what the term means) or, like an earlier literature on machine politics, finding it merely functional in cities with great need but no welfare state, he turns it into a key piece of a transformation in American political development. During the Gilded Age, covering roughly 1870 through the early 1890s, electoral capitalism—the fusion of private property, government, and parties—took shape. Politicians...

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