Gilded Age 2.0?

0:01NPR

0:11Darian, has anyone ever asked you this hypothetical? Michael, if you could go back to any decade in the past, what would you pick? Probably like 80 ,010 BC. I want to know about the Neanderthals. What was up with them? Were they smarter than us? Were we marrying them? I don't know. Personally, I don't think I want to go back to any period before now. Like, I'm good with the present. I don't want to stay there, to be clear. I would have to come back, but maybe for three days. Well, if President Donald Trump were playing this game, I think I know what he would pick. We were actually probably wealthiest of any time, relatively speaking, at any point in the history of our country.

0:54In the 1890s, we were so wealthy, we had commissions. So 1890, that is in the late 1800s, a period that historians know as the Gilded Age. But Trump is not the only one nowadays thinking about the Gilded Age. In recent months, some have even argued that we're living through a second Gilded Age. And they say that's not a good thing. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Darian Woods. What was the U.S. economy like during the Gilded Age? We ask a couple of Gilded Age historians, and we ask, could history be repeating itself?

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2:55I notice there's even an HBO TV show called The Gilded Age. Have you seen this? Yes, yep. I have some catching up to do, I have to say. I was a little bit underwhelmed by the series, the first season. I think everybody was. Ouch. I mean, in fairness, Edward T. O'Donnell is not the typical audience member for this show. Edward is a historian at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and he's been studying the Gilded Age for years. What makes the Gilded Age so fascinating for me, and I think for lots of people, is it's really the birth of modern America. It starts around the 1870s. The Civil War is in the rearview mirror and suddenly just America explodes.

3:35Between 1870 and 1900, the population basically doubles, thanks in part to a mass influx of immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of people are moving from rural areas into cities. And in these decades, big business booms like never before. We had factories and manufacturing before the Civil War, but after the Civil War, we start to have gigantic, you know, factories that have thousands of workers and industries like the railroad that has spread all the way across the country. People start talking about a place called Wall Street because it now is part of the engine of the new booming industrial economy.

4:11And fueling this boom were gigantic leaps in technology, from buildings made of wood to skyscrapers made of steel, from horses to trains, from the telegraph to the telephone, from oil lamps to electric lights. The world is literally becoming bigger, faster, and brighter. And this change is so rapid that the very concept of time changes too. With new technology, we now can create really accurate watches and clock towers, and then we can begin to impose that time on people. So you don't just show up for work anymore in the morning. It's, you know, 8 a.m. And by the final stroke of eight, if you're not at your place at the factory, you are late.

4:55And by 1900, Edwards says the U.S. economy has gone from seven or eight in the world to number one. But all this growth also came at a cost. For the average American, the Gilded Age does produce a fair amount of wealth, a fair amount of upward mobility. What we now call the middle class does expand. But there are millions of Americans who are feeling left behind and, you know, data shows that they're left behind. There's definitely a growth in the Gilded Age of what we might call the 1%, you know, the very, very super rich and ostentatious ways of spending money and displaying that wealth. Rebecca Edwards is our other Gilded Age expert.

5:36She's a historian at Vassar College in New York. Another thing that happens is that people begin to measure wealth inequality. People begin to talk about wealth inequality. There's a growing feeling that the economy is rigged. Farmers are losing money to new kinds of financial middlemen. Factory workers are exploited and subjected to dangerous working conditions. Conflicts between employers and unions were incredibly common and often turned violent. And then there was also the widespread problem of government corruption, which took a lot of forms, from politicians doling out plum government jobs to their supporters to corporations giving out freebies and kickbacks to government officials in exchange for friendly treatment.

6:18One thing that strikes me is that a lot of corruption in the era was not exactly illegal, but in a rapidly developing economy that was becoming much more complex and financialized, there were a lot of opportunities for self-dealing that weren't outright illegal. but you could look at them and you could sort of say, no, that should be against the rules. We just haven't made a rule yet. Wealthy business tycoons were not shy about using their money to shape power in Washington. In 1896, the oil tycoon J.D. Rockefeller and the financier J.P. Morgan reportedly each spent a quarter million dollars to help elect William McKinley president.

7:00This was a lot of money in those days. I mean, it's a lot of money today. Yeah, well, it's$250 ,000 between oligarchs. And to review the late 1800s economy, it's defined by disruptive technological change. It's defined by discontent among the working classes, wealth inequality, and the unseemly tangle of money and politics. Wait a second. Are we still talking about the Gilded Age? Sounds familiar, right? You can see why many would say in many ways we are living in a new Gilded Age. I mean, just look at the news. You have Elon Musk, the world's richest man who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect Trump and then joined his administration.

7:42And also consider how Trump himself has not exactly been shy about enriching himself and his family through selling meme coins and doing real estate deals. And like the Gilded Age, there doesn't seem to be any legal guardrails preventing them from doing that. So what do our historians Edward and Rebecca think? Do these comparisons mean we're in a new Gilded Age? There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain, it doesn't really matter, actually, if he said it, which is that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. You know, many chapters of history seem to resemble previous chapters, but they're not the same.

8:14What we look for, though, are themes and questions. The world that people inhabit now is very different than it was in the 1880s and 1890s, but there's that same sense that the average American worker can't get a fair shake. Yeah. By one estimate, in the 1890s, the wealthiest 1 % of Americans held about half the country's wealth. Today, it's estimated they hold about 30%. So maybe we're not in a second Gilded Age, but maybe Gilded Age light? I think I would say it the other way around, that actually this Gilded Age is, in some ways, more severe than the first one in terms of people's difficulty getting ahead.

8:58Because the American economy was expanding like crazy in the late 19th century, and there were whole new fields opening up like traveling salesmen or pink collar work for women who were starting to work office jobs. And it's hard to see today new fields opening up like that that provide people with better wages and better working conditions. Not to mention today there are fears that AI threatens to make a lot of jobs obsolete. Now, even with all these echoes of the Gilded Age, it is worth noting that at some point it did come to an end. For the first couple decades of the 1900s, this is an era that historians call the Progressive Era.

9:39This is a coalescing of movements in response to what a lot of people felt were the excesses of the Gilded Age. It's a time when the government passed laws to protect workers and the environment, to curb political corruption and corporate monopoly power. And it was in this progressive era that the country first officially institutes an income tax, which was actually targeted at the wealthiest Americans. So if we're living in a second Gilded Age, could we see a second progressive era in at some point? Maybe. But any good historian will tell you there's no guarantee that that will happen. Darian, why are historians so focused on the past?

10:17Can't they make a prediction about the future? I think you're looking for a soothsayer.

10:27This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Jimmy Keighley. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon is our editor and the indicators of production of NPR.

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