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3 The great silence of
a Gilded Age By Steve Fraser
Google "second Gilded Age" and you will
get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can
learn more about what you already instinctively
know. That we are living through a gilded age has
become a journalistic commonplace. The
unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a
Yogi Berra-ism: It's a matter of deja vu all over
again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a
replica of the world Mark Twain first christened
"gilded" in his debut bestseller back in the
1870s?
Certainly, Twain would feel right
at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object
of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is
thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one
in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief
investors conspired with a wagon-load
of
government officials, including
Ulysses S Grant's vice president, to loot the
federal treasury once again lubricate the
machinery of public policy-making.
A
cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain
has made the wheels go round in these terminal
years of the George W Bush administration. Even
the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived
and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic
cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All
of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan
brought back morning to America.
Reagan's
America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the
New Rich and the New Right paraded in their
sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at
the new president's inaugural ball, it was called
a "bacchanalia of the haves". Diana Vreeland,
style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante),
was stylishly blunt: "Everything is power and
money and how to use them both ... We mustn't be
afraid of snobbism and luxury."
That's
when the division of wealth and income began
polarizing so that, by every measure, the country
has now exceeded the extremes of inequality
achieved during the first Gilded Age; nor are our
elites any more embarrassed by their
Mammon-worship than were members of the "leisure
class" excoriated a century ago by that
take-no-prisoners social critic of American
capitalism Thorstein Veblen.
Back then, it
was about masquerading as European nobility at
lavish balls in elegant hotels like New York's
Waldorf-Astoria, locked down to forestall any
unpleasantness from the street (where ordinary
folk were in a surly mood trying to survive the
savage depression of the 1890s). Today's "leisure
class" is holed up in gated communities or
houseoleums as gargantuan as the imported castles
of their Gilded Age forerunners, ready to fly off
- should the natives grow restless - to private
islands aboard their private jets.
The
free market as melodrama At the height
of the first Gilded Age, William Graham Sumner, a
Yale sociologist and the most famous exponent of
Herbert Spencer's theory of dog-eat-dog Social
Darwinism, asked a good question: what do the
social classes owe each other? Virtually nothing
was the professor's answer.
As in those
days, there is today no end to ideological
justifications for an inequality so pervasive that
no one can really ignore it entirely. In 1890,
reformer Jacob Riis published his book How the
Other Half Lives. Some were moved by his vivid
descriptions of destitution. In the late 19th
century, however, the preferred way of dismissing
that discomfiting reality was to put the blame on
a culture of dependency supposedly prevalent among
"the lower orders", particularly, of course, among
those of certain complexions and ethnic origins;
and the logical way to cure that dependency, so
the claim went, was to eliminate publicly funded
"outdoor relief".
How reminiscent of the
"welfare to work" policies cooked up by the Bill
Clinton administration, an exchange of one form of
dependency, welfare, for another, low-wage labor.
Poverty, once turned into the cultural and moral
problem of the impoverished, exculpated Gilded Age
economics in both the 19th and 21st centuries (and
proved profitable besides).
Even now,
there remains a trace of the old Social Darwinian
rationale that the ascendancy of "the fittest"
benefits the whole species and the accompanying
innuendo that those consigned to the bottom of the
heap are fated by nature to end up there. To that
must be added a reinvigorated belief in the free
market as the fairest (not to mention the most
efficient) way to allocate wealth. Then, season it
all with a bravura elevation of risk-taking to the
status of spiritual, as well as economic, tonic.
What you end up with is an intellectual elixir as
self-congratulatory as the conscience-cleansing
purgative that made Professor Sumner so sure in
his cold-bloodedness.
Then, as now,
hypocrisy and self-delusion were the final
ingredients in this ideological brew. When it came
to practical matters, neither the business elites
of the first Gilded Age, nor our own
"liquidators," "terminators," and merger and
acquisition Machiavellians ever really believed in
the free market or the enterprising individual.
Then, as now, when push came to shove (and
often way earlier), they relied on the government:
for political favors, for contracts, for tax
advantages, for franchises, for tariffs and
subsidies, for public grants of land and natural
resources, for financial bail-outs when times were
tough (see Bear Stearns), and for muscular
protection, including the use of armed force,
against all those who might interfere with the
rights of private property.
So too, while
industrial and financial tycoons liked to imagine
themselves as stand-alone heroes, daring cowboys
on the urban-industrial-financial frontier, as a
matter of fact the first Gilded Age gave birth to
the modern, bureaucratic corporation - and did so
at the expense of the lone entrepreneur. To this
day, that big business behemoth remains the
defining institution of commercial life. The
reigning melodrama may still be about the free
market and the audacious individual, but
backstage, directing the players, stands the state
and the corporation.
Crony capitalism,
inequality, extravagance, Social Darwinian
self-justification, blame-the-victim callousness,
free-market hypocrisy: thus it was, thus it is
again!
At the end of the Reagan years,
public intellectuals Kevin Phillips and Gary Wills
prophesied that this state of affairs was
insupportable and would soon end. Phillips, in
particular, anticipated a populist rising. It did
not happen. Instead, nearly 20 years later, the
second Gilded Age is alive, if not so well. Why
such longevity? The answer tells us something
about how these two epochs, for all their striking
similarities, are also profoundly unalike.
Missing
utopias and dystopias As a title,
Apocalypse Now could easily have been
applied to a movie made about late 19th century
America. Whichever side you happened to be on,
there was an overwhelming dread that the nation
was dividing in two and verging on a second civil
war, that a final confrontation between the haves
and have-nots was unavoidable.
Irate
farmers mobilized in cooperative alliances and in
the Populist Party. Farmer-labor parties in states
and cities from coast to coast challenged the
dominion of the two-party system. Rolling waves of
strikes, captained by warriors from the Knights of
Labor, enveloped whole communities as new
allegiances extended across previously
unbridgeable barriers of craft, ethnicity, even
race and gender.
Legions of small
businessmen, trade unionists, urban consumers, and
local politicians raged against monopoly and "the
trusts". Armed workers' militias paraded in the
streets of many American cities. Business and
political elites built massive urban fortresses,
public armories equipped with Gatling guns (the
machine guns of their day), preparing to crush the
insurrections they saw headed their way.
Even today the names of Haymarket (the
square in Chicago where, in 1886, a bombing at a
rally of rebellious workers led to the legal
lynching of anarchist leaders at the most infamous
trial of the nineteenth century), Homestead
(where, in 1892, the Monongahela River ran red
with the blood of Pinkerton thugs sent by Andrew
Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to crush the strike
of their steelmaking employees), and Pullman (the
company town in Illinois where, in 1894, president
Grover Cleveland ordered Federal troops to put
down the strike of the American Railway Union
against the Pullman Palace Car Company) evoke
memories of a whole society living on the edge.
The first Gilded Age was a moment of Great
Fears, but also of Great Expectations, a period
infatuated with a literature of utopias as well as
dystopias. The two most successful novels of the
nineteenth century, after Uncle Tom's
Cabin, were Edward Bellamy's utopian
Looking Backward and the horrific dystopia
Caesar's Column by Populist tribune
Ignatius Donnelly. The latter reached its
denouement when Donnelly's fictional proletarian
underground movement, the "Brotherhood of
Destruction", marked its "triumph" with the
erection of a giant pyramid composed of a
quarter-million corpses of its enemy, "the
Oligarchy" and its minions, cemented together and
laced with explosives so that no one would dare
risk removing them and destroying this permanent
memorial to the barbarism of American industrial
capitalism.
This end-of-days foreboding
and the thirst for utopian release were not,
moreover, confined to the ranks of agrarian or
industrial trouble-makers. Before "Pullman" became
a word for industrial serfdom and the Federal
government's bloody-mindedness, it was built by
its owner, George Pullman, as a model industrial
city, a kind of capitalist utopia of paternal
benevolence and confected social harmony.
Everyone was seeking a way out, something
wholly new to replace the rancor and incipient
violence of Gilded Age capitalism. The Knights of
Labor, the Populist Party, the anti-trust
movement, the cooperative movements of town and
country, the nation-wide Eight-Hour Day uprisings
of 1886 which culminated in the infamy of the
Haymarket hangings, all expressed a deep yearning
to abolish the prevailing industrial order.
Such groups weren't just angry; they
weren't merely resentful - although they were
that, too. They were disturbed enough, naive
enough, desperate enough, inventive enough,
desiring enough, deluded enough, some still
drawing cultural nourishment from the fading
homesteads and workshops of pre-industrial
America, to believe that out of all this could
come a new way of life, a cooperative
commonwealth. No one really knew what exactly that
might be. Still, the great expectation of a future
no longer subservient to the calculus of the
marketplace and the capitalist workshop lent the
first Gilded Age its special fission, its high
(tragic) drama.
Fast-forward to our second
Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No
great fears, no great expectations, no looming
social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias; just
a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history.
Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the
break-away political parties, the waves of strikes
and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals,
the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are
the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which,
no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered
questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the
blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to "yes we
can"?
What's left of mainstream populism
exists on life-support in some attic of the
Democratic Party. Even the language of our second
Gilded Age is hollowed out. In a society saturated
in Christian sanctimony, would anyone today
describe "mankind crucified on a cross of gold" as
William Jennings Bryan once did, or let loose
against "Mammon worship," condemn aristocratic
"parasites," or excommunicate "vampire
speculators" and the "devilfish" of Wall Street?
If 19th century evangelical preachers once
pronounced anathema on capitalist greed, 21st
century televangelists deify it. Tempers have
cooled, leaving God, like many Americans, with
only part-time employment.
The great
silence I exaggerate, of course.
Movements do exist today to confront the
inequities and iniquities of our own Gilded Age.
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