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gilded age
Let's Make Trump the Last Gasp of America's Second Gilded Age
The challenge is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: To fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few.
Jan 03, 2025
Ultra-wealthy elites. Political corruption. Corporate monopolies. Anti-immigrant nativism. Vast inequality.
These problems aren’t new. In the late 1800s, they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age. We overcame these abuses then, and we can do so again.
Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.
The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — that changed American life forever.
But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.
It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.
They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.
Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. When lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful moneyed interests turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.
The gap between rich and poor in America reached record levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.
Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. It was also a time of voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote.
The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.
It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.
But America reached a tipping point. The nation was fed up. The public demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest. Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.
A new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.
Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.
After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company, which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.
Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.
The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.
The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from giving money directly to politicians or political candidates.
Then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (you may have heard of him) continued the work through his New Deal programs, creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a 40-hour workweek and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.
But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, and after America had built the largest middle class the world had ever seen, we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.
The reforms that followed the first Gilded Age withered.
Starting with Reagan, taxes on the wealthy were lowered. Campaign finance laws were weakened. Social safety nets became frayed. Corporations stopped bargaining in good faith with labor unions.
Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.
Monopolies are once again taking over vast swaths of the economy. So we must strengthen antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.
Now another generation of robber barons, exemplified by Elon Musk, is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So, once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.
Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we must protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.
As it was during the first Gilded Age, voter suppression is too often making it harder for people of color to participate in our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.
Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are being busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age.
So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.
Seeking these goals may seem quixotic right now, just weeks before Trump and his regime take power with a bilious bunch of billionaires.
But if history is any guide, they will mark the last gasp of America’s second Gilded Age. We will reach the tipping point where Americans demand restraints on robber-baron greed.
The challenge is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: To fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few.
I realize how frightening and depressing the future may look right now. But we have succeeded before, when we fought against the abuses of the first Gilded Age. We can — and must — do so again now, in America’s second Gilded Age.
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Sanders Says There Is No Choice: 'We Must Defeat the Oligarchs'
The U.S. Senator from Vermont is asking big questions about how to achieve—even in the face of Trump's return—an "economy and government that works for all, not just the few."
Nov 30, 2024
With the progressive movement in the United States still grappling with how best to respond to president-elect Donald Trump's victory earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a statement Saturday clarifying his belief that confronting the ruling oligarchy over the "coming months and years" will be the key battle for anyone who wants to build an economy and political system that puts the interests of everyday working people ahead of those of super-wealthy elites.
The Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont suggested Trump's victory was the direct result of a political economy largely controlled by the nation's richest individuals and powerful corporations and a situation in which massive wealth inequality has also created an incredible power imbalance.
"This is what Oligarchy looks like," Sanders said. "Today, while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, three multi-billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society."
With a "greater concentration of ownership than we have seen since the Gilded Age," Sanders continued, from healthcare and financial services to the food, transportation, and housing sectors—"fewer and fewer giant corporations control what is produced and the prices we pay."
Sanders slammed a corporate media system in which corporate consolidation has led to an information and entertainment ecosystem in which an estimated "90% of U.S. media is controlled by just six huge global conglomerates," and a political system "increasingly controlled by the billionaire class" that is allowed to inject nearly limitless amounts of money into elections, most of it secretly and without accountability.
"In the recent elections," Sanders bemoaned, "just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected." Such a reality, he said, must be challenged.
"Our job in the coming months and years is clear. We must defeat the oligarchs and create an economy and government that works for all, not just the few."
How can such a defeat of these powerful forces be achieved? Sanders' latest statement did not reveal a prescription, but in a series of recent missives, social media posts, and interviews over the last week, the two-time presidential candidate has said that focusing on building working-class power is the key.
In a letter to supporters last week, Sanders said the question of "where do we go from here?" is a "very serious" one that demands deep scrutiny in the coming weeks and months. And he asked a series of more specific questions that he said must be addressed, including:
- How do we expand our efforts to build a multi-racial, multi-generational working-class movement?
- How do we create a 50 state movement, not politics based on the electoral college and “battleground” states?
- How do we deal with Citizens United and the ability of billionaires to buy elections?
- How do we recruit more working-class candidates for office at all levels of government?
- Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?
- How do we better support union organizing?
- How do we put together listening sessions around the country that intentionally seek input from people who did not vote for Democrats in the last election?
- How do we best use social media to build our movement and combat the lies and disinformation coming from the billionaire class and right-wing media?
In a subsequent interview with The Nation, Sanders it is "absolutely" necessary to find ways to challenge both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, both of which are dominated by corporate interests and wealthy donors.
"We just cannot sit back and accept candidates who are not prepared to stand up to Big Money interests and fight for the working class," Sanders said. "We cannot continue to do that. So, in one way or another, we have got to bring forth candidates who [will stand up to Big Money]."
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Out-Gilding the Gilded Age
By the start of the 2020s, a light tax touch on America’s most financially favored had left America’s richest 0.01% with 10% of the nation’s wealth—over 10% above the top 0.01%’s share of the nation’s treasure in 1913.
Mar 12, 2024
How many people in India are going hungry? Researchers working on the Global Hunger Index are currently tracking 125 nations across the world. Exactly 110 of those nations, those researchers reported last fall, are suffering less hunger than India.
But India, by contrast, is doing quite well on the gluttony front. Few nations today can lay claim to a wealthy elite as gluttonous as India’s. Earlier this month, that insatiability made headlines worldwide. The occasion that sparked this global attention? A pre-wedding party for the youngest son of India’s—and Asia’s—richest billionaire, the 66-year-old Mukesh Ambani, the chair of India’s biggest corporation.
This three-day “ode to excess,” noted one British commentator, featured feasting that “even Nero might have thought a little over the top.”
Back in that Gilded Age, just like today, grand private parties had come to symbolize the excessive wealth of an outrageously unequal era.
The over 1,000 guests at Ambani’s gala, the Times of India would report, had 21 chefs at their beck and call, preparing 75 different dishes for breakfast, over 225 choices for lunch, 275 for dinner, and another 85 items for “the midnight meal.” Why so many different dishes? Heaven forbid, quipped columnist Arwa Mahdawi, that any guest “would have to suffer the indignity of eating the same food twice.”
The proud papa behind all this excess, news reports guesstimated, may have spent as much as $120 million on the party, a pittance—about 0.1%—of the $117 billion or so in his personal fortune, a net worth that Forbessays makes Ambani the ninth-richest person in the world.
The food, of course, only gobbled up a portion of that $120 million outlay. The most dramatic piece of that expense? Ambani shelled out, India Todaybelieves, somewhere between $8 and $9 million for an appearance by the superstar Rihanna, enough to convince the 36-year-old singer to give “her first full live show in almost eight years.”
On hand to enjoy Rihanna’s surprise set: a host of Ambani’s fellow super rich from all around the world, including the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Ivanka Trump from the United States. Also on hand: Bob Iger, the chief exec of the Disney entertainment empire. Disney and Ambani’s own Reliance Industries corporate giant have just cut a deal to merge their Indian media operations.
For Ambani, Iger, and the rest of their deep-pocket set, excess just seems to come naturally. Ambani’s mega-billionaire party guest Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has been busy lately building a secret compound on Hawaii’s Kauai island that may end up costing as much as $270 million. That outlay, notesWired, will be enough to put in place both an underground bunker and, above ground, a 30-bedroom mansion complex “with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field.”
Back in the middle of the 20th century, hardly anyone in America could have imagined that the future would bring this sort of over-the-top excess. By the end of the 1950s, the super rich appeared to be getting squeezed out of existence by a combination of top-bracket federal income tax rates as high as 91% and a vibrant labor movement that had significantly narrowed the pay gap between top corporate execs and their average workers.
Those taxes and that vibrant labor movement reflected, in turn, America’s widespread disgust at the decades of swelling grand fortunes in the half-century after the Civil War, an era of excess that Mark Twain had early on tagged the “Gilded Age.”
Back in that Gilded Age, just like today, grand private parties had come to symbolize the excessive wealth of an outrageously unequal era.
The hostess for the most famous of those Gilded Age soirées would be Caroline Astor, the spouse of the grandson of John Jacob Astor, pre-Civil War America’s most famous awesomely affluent tycoon. Every January, this famed “Mrs. Astor”—“Gilded Age Gotham’s society doyenne”—would welcome into her mid-Manhattan mansion the 400 worthiest of New York’s rich. She typically hosted the evening wearing a huge necklace that had originally belonged to Marie Antoinette.
How big a deal did Mrs. Astor’s annual ball become? The New York Times would eventually start publishing the annual list of her 400 guests. But why just 400?
“There are only about four hundred people in the fashionable New York Society,” Astor’s sidekick Ward McAllister noted in 1888. “If you go outside that number, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or make other people not at ease.”
Five years earlier, those nouveau rich left off the Astor guest list had started putting on their own galas, with the Vanderbilts hosting a huge masquerade ball—for some 1,200 well-heeled guests—to celebrate the opening of their brand-new Fifth Avenue mansion. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt came into this spectacular affair “swathed” in satin and carrying “a battery-powered light that she could raise over her head like the Statue of Liberty.” Dinner, catered by the renowned Delmonico’s, would begin at 2 am.
Other Manhattan deep pockets would underwrite ever more imaginative affairs. The financier Henry Clews hosted a “servants ball” that had New York’s wealthiest dressed up in rags and uniforms all made specially for the occasion from the “finest fabrics.” A “circus ball” had the city’s finest carrying peanuts “as a 12,000-pound elephant clomped about.” In 1897, still another ball turned the Waldorf Hotel into a replica of the palace at Versailles.
In today’s dollars, the hosts of that last affair shelled out nearly $10 million to stage their festivities, a sum ample enough to outfit all the guests with party favors that included “jewelry for the ladies and cigars wrapped in $100 bills for the men.”
The upper crust of this original Gilded Age, author Renée Rosen noted a few years ago, would eventually choke “on their own conspicuous consumption.” By 1913, the ferocious inequality that this consumption so highlighted had helped bring into effect the first modern federal tax on high incomes.
By the mid-1940s, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income had jumped to over 90%, and that rate would hover around that level until lawmakers dropped it down to 77% n 1964 and 70% in 1965. Two decades later, the Reagan years would sink the nation’s tax rate on top-bracket income all the way down to 28%, and the years since then have only inched that top rate—on paper—back to 37%.
By the start of the 2020s, this light tax touch on America’s most financially favored had left America’s richest 0.01% with 10% of the nation’s wealth, five times the top 0.01%’s wealth share in the late 1970s—and over 10% above the top 0.01%’s share of the nation’s treasure in 1913.
This past fall, analysts at Forbesannounced that America’s richest 400 now hold a combined wealth of $4.5 trillion. In 2023 overall, researchers at the global property broker Knight Frank reported late last month, the world’s 500 richest—led by the rich of the United States—added an incredible $1.5 trillion to their personal fortunes.
Our age has clearly become the gildest of all time.
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