Union victory in the Civil War promised and popularized, through the blood and sweat expended to win it, emancipation. But, even for the newly freed, this promise appeared unfulfilled in a country where political, economic, and social life was still defined by hierarchy instead of equality. Americans responded to the rampant inequality that surrounded them through collective means, rather than adopting liberation through individualism, and it is these movements that Charles Postel engagingly traces in Equality. These movements, for better and worse, responded to the inequality of the Gilded Age and reshaped the nation’s politics for decades to come, making this, as inequality persists into the present, a history worth knowing.

The language that Americans used to advocate for equal rights was rooted in a hatred of monopoly, which could be identified as the root of the inequality that defined American workplaces, households, and cities. This flexibility, however, also exposed the fractures within the egalitarian movements of the United States: where their imagination failed them, which is also a part of their historical legacy.

Farmers in the North and Midwest faced drought, competition, and an often-unfamiliar environment, while agriculture in the South now had to proceed without slavery. These shared difficulties for the success of a national confederation of a national confederation of farmer societies, the Grange. Setting the model for subsequent egalitarian movements, the Grange confronted economic monopolies through boycotts and mutual aid, combining grassroots energy with centralized leadership. The Grange also demonstrated where the fight for equality met its limits – women, despite their contributions, were restricted from leadership. In the South, the Grange was a mostly white organization, frequently used as a tool for reestablishing control over Black labor, excused by leadership in the name of ‘reconciliation’.

Women barred from civic influence found an alternative through the temperance movement and its national organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement. Prohibition proved a viable cause through which women, whether working-class or elite, could work (often successfully) as political actors. And while fighting the destructive “liquor monopoly” was always the core mission of the WCTU, its reach extended further: it advocated for universal suffrage, fought for better conditions for female convicts, and established kindergartens and coffeehouses. However, as with the Grange, the WCTU’s desire for reconciliation, and the prejudices of its leadership, marred its ability to fight for racial equality, which eventually fractured the organization.

An ally of the temperance movement was the labor movement, especially the Knights of Labor which, as with the WCTU, transformed from a grassroots effort into a national organization. Labor unions assailed the monopolistic power of corporations, varying by local conditions, fighting for an eight-hour workday, better wages, and unionization. The Knights were, at times, willing to organize women and Black workers. It would not, however, prevent white workers in the South from allying with management against Black workers. In the West, the Knights were the primary advocates of immigration restrictions targeting Chinese workers. As with the Grange and the WCTU, the fight for equality was not universal. The Knights earned praise internationally, but it was Henry George, the popular political economist, who made a domestic critique of American inequality (a country of plenty and poverty) popular across the Atlantic.

This wave of anti-monopolist movements, which started immediately after the Civil War, crested as it cohered into the People’s Party in 1892. While the party managed to win local and state elections, it could not overcome its internal inconsistency. Commitments to universal suffrage and temperance dropped from the party platform, the Knights had been in decline for years, and leadership traded cross-racial organizing for grievance. The grassroots movements of the Reconstruction Era, while never trading their popular appeal, succumbed to internal division and violent suppression. But the inequality they responded to did not disappear, and their descendants helped win the reforms that alleviated that inequality through the New Deal. Roosevelt’s coalition fulfilled the promises of the reform movements of the Gilded Age, organizing the American public to the collective goal of building a fairer world. But this also meant inheriting the failures of the 19th century, as the New Deal did little to address Jim Crow while encouraging a social hierarchy that placed male breadwinners at the top.

If we are entering into a second Gilded Age, one where environmental inequality and monopoly is a central issue, we might return to the past to understand how Americans organized to resolve it then. Underlying the anxieties of America’s urban and rural working-classes was a fear of precarity: drought, pollution, an economy that was destabilizing as it was globalizing – water and the environment were then, and are now, where the individual and collective damage of inequality is most evident. To better understand this, we spoke with Charles Postel.

At the end of Equality, you argue that we are entering into a second Gilded Age, another era marked by rampant economic, class, gender, and racial inequality and precarity. What would you consider areas where water rights and water justice (so, an even distribution of and fair access to water resources) would play a central role in social inequality in the period Equality covers, and is it useful for historians of our present Gilded Age?

In the decades after the Civil War, or the first Gilded Age, water rights and water justice played an especially significant role in the semi-arid and arid trans-Mississippi West. The conflicts over water focused on two fronts. The first front was the settler conquest of Native American lands, and the violent process of ethnic cleansing that led to the confinement of the Native Peoples on often arid reservations with poor access to water. Along with the destruction of food supplies (the buffalo herds), the U.S. Army and white settlers also used the deprivation of water, or pushing Native people away from rivers and springs, as a means of warfare. Patterns of expropriation and settlement pushed Native groups away from the water sources that had sustained them and up into higher and often dryer ground.

Meanwhile, farmers, miners, and other interests scrambled to claim and capture the water for themselves, draining lakes, damning rivers, and constructing irrigation canals in a process that the historian Donald Worster has described as the “hydraulic West.” In this process, highly capitalized miners, corporate landholders, and other capitalist interests gained the lion’s share of the water rights, squeezing out the small miners, squatters, and settlers.

These processes put in place in the late 19th century are still unfolding in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Native Peoples continue to press their demands for fishing rights (many of which are in formal treaties but often violated) in the courts and before public opinion. They have also demanded sufficient water to sustain and restore salmon and other fishing stocks, often clashing with the hydraulic systems controlled by corporate agriculture. Native People have also campaigned to protect the quality of the aquifers, including protesting mining pollution, farm chemicals, and oil drilling and pipelines, such as the Dakota oil pipeline, that threaten water supplies. The intensification of the climate crisis is deepening the conflict between corporate agricultural interests that control a disproportionate percentage of the water in the West, and needs of the environment and of urban dwellers.

The Gilded Age is most commonly associated with economic inequality as well as economic precarity, with exploitation along class, gender, and racial lines accompanied by an economy seemingly always reeling from a financial crash or recession. Many of the features of this part of American history are tied to the increasingly interconnected nature of the transatlantic economy. British investments in American railroads fueled a boom in agricultural exports that destabilized markets in central Europe, which in turn drove the European poor to migrate to the United States. Americans fighting for equality were not just responding to national conditions, but to the chaos of a globalizing world. If Equality were to center an Atlantic history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, how would it (have to) change?

Equality as presently written has multiple transoceanic threads, all of which could me made thicker. Many of the farmers, workers, and other subjects of the book were immigrants or children of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, China, and elsewhere, and the book might have looked deeper into the patterns of immigration and their impact. The ideological dimension of this might be the most significant as, for example, it discusses the interactions of the Irish Land Leagues and other transatlantic connections, but it could have taken this further. The book argues that the reform movements that culminated in U.S. Populism represented a form of the transatlantic social democracy but does so without exploring in any depth what that meant on the eastern shore of the Atlantic. There are also financial and commercial interactions that the book touches on but does not explore in depth, including the financial crisis of 1873, and the global patterns of the grain trade, and the international currency system. In terms of the latter point, the United States in this period remained a peripheral economy, and a greater emphasis on that reality might be of value.

A constant theme in Equality, especially noticeable in the discussion of the Grange, is how inequality produced economic and social precarity which Americans tried to alleviate through collective action. The Grange served as a tool against the precarity of the agricultural market, and as a device former planters in the South used to try and impose an economic order as close to plantation slavery as possible. Environmental precarity, as a product of broad inequality, was then and it is now a complex and important issue. If your book used water precarity (e.g., unequal access to water or unequal vulnerability to flooding) as a starting point for analyzing social and economic inequality, how would its geographic and organizational focus change?

One of the key demands of post-Civil War farmers was for equal access to national and especially international markets for farm produce. This story is usually told from the perspective of railroads, and the Grange demands for regulated rates or public ownership. However, despite, and even partly because, of the advent of a continental-wide system of railroads, access to canals and shipping remained vital to the farm economy. This was as true for grain farmers in California who sent their grain across the oceans on sailing ships, as cotton farmers seeking to get their produce to southern ports. One of the Grange’s biggest battles was with the grain elevator companies that facilitated shipping on the Great Lakes. Canal digging and improvement intensified in the decades after the Civil War, and the Grange and similar organizations were in the middle of this process. Ignatius Donnelly of the Minnesota Grange, for example, campaigned for a huge canal linking the Georgian Bay with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that would “put the Atlantic at our very door,” and make “practically an air-line” to New York and Liverpool, and “free water communication with the external world.”

To use water as a starting point, Equality would have discussed in greater depth the question of water transport. In turn, this would have facilitated a geographic shift in the sense of locating the American farmer and the economy more generally on the periphery of Europe and international developments. At the same time, more attention to the arid and semi-arid West would have meant more attention to the distinctive demands for irrigation and other needs of western farmers, and most significantly it would bring Native Americans more fully into the narrative.

If you brought water to the center of your work and its analysis, do you think it would significantly change its form, argument, subject, or conclusion? If so, how?

This may be a failure of imagination on my part, but the main changes a focus on water would bring to my work would be those mentioned above. Putting this another way, in writing this book I tended to be aware of such things as water transport and transoceanic connections, although I only wrote about them in a limited way. If I were to rethink these issues, I may have written more expansively on them.