Talking Politics Guide to ... The Gilded Age
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2019
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We talk to historian Sarah Churchwell about the Gilded Age in late nineteenth century America and the comparisons with today. Rampant inequality, racial conflict, fights over immigration, technological revolution: is Trump's America repeating the pattern or is it something
new?
Talking Points:
In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles W. Warner coined the term “The Gilded Age,” in their eponymous novel.
- The phrase was re-discovered in the 1920s and applied retrospectively to the period of the 1870s-roughly 1900.
- The Gilded Age satirized the way wealth and consumerism were taking over American life and showed how this move towards a “huxterist” culture was subverting America’s democratic ideals.
Yet this was also a period of real growth.
- The major transformation of the period was the railroad.
- Rampant inequality characterized the era: the robber barons on the one hand, and poor immigrant communities on the other. But in the middle of this, there was also a group of people working their way into the middle class.
Immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe, exploded during this period.
- America did not have immigration control.
- The first immigration laws were passed in the 1880s and 1890s, most notably the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Reconstruction overlaps with the Gilded Age.
- There was no redistribution to the former slaves. Johnson effectively pardoned the former Confederates.
- The Klan emerged during this period as domestic terrorists.
- This ultimately leads to the Great Migration, African Americans leaving the South to seek opportunities further North.
The bridge between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Period was the age of populism.
- William Jennings Bryan was a grassroots populist who almost became president.
- There are many echoes to the present moment: white working class men asserting their right to be middle America at the cost of excluding other communities.
Is this a new Gilded Age?
- Today, the tech giants are cornering technology the way that Carneige cornered steel.
- But maybe the gilt is the story, and the exceptional moments are the aberrations.
Further Learning:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello my name is David Ronson and this is Talking Politics. Today we're presenting the |
| 0:07.5 | first of our summer guides we're going to be doing these over the next month and we're |
| 0:11.4 | starting with Sarah Churchill, historian of America and she's going to be talking to us |
| 0:15.7 | about the gilded age, what it meant at the end of the 19th century and whether we're living |
| 0:20.1 | through another one. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review |
| 0:28.8 | of Books. As politics speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB where Brexit and Trump |
| 0:36.5 | are only part of a picture that includes, well everything else, read relevant pieces and subscribe |
| 0:43.1 | at a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking. |
| 0:53.2 | We probably should start with trying to identify a time frame for this so as I understand it the phrase |
| 0:58.3 | comes from a Mark Twain novel of 1873 but then when you google it people often say the gilded age |
| 1:04.6 | started in 1873. Yet presumably Twain was talking about something that was already in existence. |
| 1:10.8 | How do you frame it? Yeah well I think so first of all so the poor Charles Dudley Warner always |
| 1:14.8 | gets forgotten. He co-authored it with Mark Twain. I feel we should just give him due credit. |
| 1:19.8 | So they co-wrote this book The Gilded Age in 1873 which was actually a kind of minor |
| 1:24.4 | Twain work and the phrase was basically rediscovered in the 1920s and applied retrospectively |
| 1:31.4 | to the period of the 1870s to about 1900 roughly. People do quibble about when exactly it began. |
| 1:38.3 | It began with the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Did it begin with the coining of the phrase |
| 1:43.5 | in 1873? You can make economic arguments about various crashes or panics but there was a crash |
| 1:49.2 | in 1873 as well. It was a crash in 1873 exactly and actually there were a series of crashes and |
| 1:53.4 | recessions and panics through the 70s and 1890s that were caused by the practices of the |
| 2:00.2 | so-called robber barons that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were talking about. So basically |
| 2:04.7 | what they were calling out was a turn in American history after the war as part of Westward |
... |
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