The Gilded Age

I just finished the epic Oxford history of the Gilded Age, written by Richard White.  It covers the period from the end of the Civil War until the election of McKinley.  It was, frankly, a depressing read, yet oddly hopeful. 

The Gilded Age and Reconstruction are fascinating period in our history, during which time the roots of modern America and 20th century American greatness can be found.  America's population doubled in size, our GDP close to tripled, America became an urban, industrial powerhouse, and the roots of reform movements that would redefine American life were sunk.

However...

Reconstruction failed.  It probably would have failed regardless of Andrew Johnson's perfidy.  White supremacy - as recent events suggest - is deeply entrenched in American culture.  It was even more deeply entrenched and common in the late 19th century.  In fact, it is difficult to find a single white person whose written comments on race did not reveal an astonishing embrace of white supremacy.  Even leftist heroes like Eugene V. Debs railed against immigrants and the Chinese.  Reform was tied to ideas of Anglo-Saxon purity, and the Progressive Era that sprung from the Gilded Age also was rife with racism. 

Industrialization made a lie of American ideals.  White ably shows that Americans in 1865 embraced the Republican party's ideal of free labor, the idea that every man should be able to work with a certain independence.  Every man should be his own master (and master over his wife and children).  By 1896, no reasonable observer could describe America this way.  Mass industrialization and laissez faire libertarianism in the Courts create a set of circumstances that led to an almost continual class-based violence.  Strikes were common and bloody. Industrial accidents were common.  Urban, working class neighborhoods were disease ridden slums.  Americans physically shrunk in size from 1800 to 1900 and their life expectancy dropped.

America was wedded to bad ideas.  Old notions of laissez faire libertarianism (classical liberalism) were inadequate to dealing with the complex social structures of an urbanizing and industrializing world.  The theory that underpinned it had been mugged by the facts, but comfortable middle class Americans rarely looked beyond the theory.  When they did, they were horrified and became the backbone of the later Progressive Era.  The theory of the gold standard created successive waves of major economic depressions, 1877, 1883, 1893.  The depression of 1893 was the worst in this country's history until 1929 (which was also shaped by the gold standard).  But the gold standard kept the rich rich.  It deflated the currency, which meant if you HAD money, you were in good shape, whereas if you had debt, you were screwed.

America built a society that was categorically racist.   After the Civil War Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens died out, the North turned its back on African Americans, only to turn their guns on Native Americans.  Even the architects of the ethnic cleansing of the West admitted as much.  Phil Sheridan, who seemed to take grim delight in killing Indians, noted that you could hardly blame them from rising up against white Americans, given how we treated them.  We committed and endorsed widespread violence and oppression against the Chinese.  We hated immigrants, saying they could not assimilate into American culture.

One of the tags on this blog is "New Gilded Age."  That was intended mostly as a comment about wealth inequality, which was appalling in those decades.  While wealth inequality remains a major concern, today's poor have a safety net - however badly frayed - that earlier poor did not.  The poor starved, they died deprived of basic sanitation and healthy living conditions. 

Like I said, it was a depressing read.  However, whenever I would read another of White's descriptions of some Gilded Age horror, it couldn't help occur to me that we no longer tolerate much of what the Gilded Age embraced.  Are there still white supremacists?  Of course.  But rather than glorify them, we condemn them.  Do we still embrace bad ideas?  Yes, but we push back against them, like the Trump tax cut. 

The horrors of the Trump/GOP maladministration are a product of bad ideas and racism.  But they are widely seen as such.  While the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump, they still have to apologize and walk back from his racist brain droppings.  There is a widespread agreement, even among a plurality of GOP lawmakers, that Trump's racism is not OK.  Yes, they are powerless to do anything about it, because they fear the racist 27% of the population that makes up their primary voters.  It's bad.

But it's not AS bad, and there is considerable evidence that there will be a reckoning.  Yes, Americans are still racist, but they can't admit as much publicly.  In the Gilded Age, they loudly proclaimed it.  Treating your workers poorly has not stopped, but we have legal and societal measures in place that prevent the sort of predatory behavior that typified the Gilded Age.

If things are worse than they were two years ago, they are immeasurably better than they were 132 years ago. What's more is they are better than they were 32 years ago. 

Arthur Schlesinger argued that America goes through cycles of reform.  That efforts to improve America ultimately lead to a backlash and a retreat into conservatism or reactionary politics.  Trump feels very much like the last gasp of Nixon's Silent Majority, comfortable enough middle class, rural and exurban whites who don't like the world beyond their horizon, who are still haunted by the turmoil of the Sixties.  Certainly, Trump qualifies.

I believe that what Trump has done is expose the central lie at the heart of Republican rhetoric about small government.  It isn't principled libertarianism and love of the free market. It's the same cocoon of wealthy privilege wrapped in racism that defined the Gilded Age.  But we are less enthralled with the bad ideas that fueled that former age, and we are better prepared to reclaim our common ideals.

This all presumes that Democrats win control of at least one house of Congress in November, and there is no evidence of foreign interference in our elections.  THAT is not something we had to worry about in the former Gilded Age.