THE NEW GILDED AGE IN AMERICA

 

“Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must,” The Gilded Age by Mark Twain

Many students of history were surprised when Donald Trump promised at his second inauguration to usher America into a new “Golden Age.” As he spoke, he was surrounded by a cadre of tech billionaires. Their combined net worth was one trillion dollars. Trump’s spectacle looked more like the beginning of a new “Gilded Age,” not a golden one.

What exactly was the original gilded age in American History, the period from the 1870s to the late 1890s? What can we learn from those years that may be useful in understanding Trump’s second term? What is different in America’s mood today, compared to the time following the Civil War through the beginning of industrialization?

According to Wikipedia, the term Gilded Age was first coined by writers who borrowed the concept from one of Mark Twain’s lesser-known novels, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).  The book satirized a federally promised “golden age” after the Civil War, identical to the promise made in Trump’s speech. The pejorative term gilded age described what became an era of serious social problems (disorder, corruption, inequality). It was masked by a “gold gilding of economic expansion that only benefited the wealthy few.”  

The original gilded age is associated with the rise of powerful industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. It marked the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. At that time, the federal government was confined and there was no system to regulate abuses.

Following the Civil War, America experienced industrial expansion in railroads, steel production, and oil industries. A small elite accumulated vast wealth. The labor class faced poor working conditions and low wages. Large numbers of immigrants arrived in the US, contributed to the workforce but also faced the challenges of nativist rejection. Powerful labor unions began to form in response to stifling working conditions and child labor.

Analyzing the political and economic history of the original gilded age gives us some examples to compare with Trump’s recent initiatives. Following the Civil War, a Republican Congress enacted the Pacific Railroad Act, which granted railroad companies 6,400 acres of federal land. Today, Trump’s “gifts” to private companies include drilling rights on federal lands and favorable regulations for businesses including cryptocurrency.

In 1872, a scandal implicated 30 sitting members of Congress, as well as the sitting Vice President, Schuyler Colfax in an elaborate double-billing and securities fraud scheme. Three years later, the Whiskey Ring Affair exposed dozens of corrupt federal revenue collectors. City mayors, like the NYC political machine Tammany Hall, made an art form of corruption during the gilded age.

In the present gilded age, Trump has terminated Inspector Generals, regulatory agencies, and reorganized the Justice Department with loyal supporters. As a result, many abuses and illegal acts in government and business will easily escape detection.

During the first gilded age, the close relationship between the executive branch, Congress, and the new industrialists resulted in a massive concentration of wealth into the hands of a small number of companies. Today, the corporate “magnificent seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) is a group of major tech companies that are in a similar position.

Elon Musk, the primary owner of Tesla, X, and other tech companies has been tasked by Trump with shrinking the government and removing regulatory impediments to billionaire growth.  Altogether, Trump has appointed an unprecedented 13 billionaires into his administration.

What can be done to slow the advance of the Trump inspired second gilded age? To study the problem, the analysis and conclusions from a book released in 2017 was worth a second look. The Age of Acquiesce by Steve Fraser tackles the issue of “American resistance to wealth and power” from the founding of our country until recently.

Fraser finds that following the Civil War, many Americans were still part of the agrarian economy and distrusted modern capitalism. The new industrial movement threatened their views on work, family, community, and religion.

Americans were angry, and they often fought hard against the abuses of the gilded age. As late as 1912, nearly a million Americans, or six percent of the electorate, cast ballots for a socialist president, Eugene Debs. Mass labor movements were common and would not accept a world where a few wealthy men controlled the country.

Fraser documents how, over time, the political will to challenge great wealth disappeared. In the grand bargain of 1950, unions in the steel and auto industries traded in their control over shop-floor rules for job security and steady employment. An ethos of individual accumulation replaced what was left of labor solidarity. Fraser concludes that in today’s world, there is waning American dissent to a society governed by the wealthy.  We have somehow lost the ability to imagine an alternative.

What is needed for the present gilded age is a new coalition of resistance and solidarity. Ironically, both Steve Bannon, a populist leader in the Republican MAGA movement and Bernie Sanders, a socialist Senator from Vermont take similar positions. They both vehemently attack the influence of the new gilded age billionaires.

Is it possible that a bottom-up coalition will emerge from these sworn political enemies and others to challenge the entrenched “one percent?” If it does, the social energy and creativity of ordinary people could again prevail.