Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ vs. the ‘Gilded Age’: An examination
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump, with his usual bombast, has declared that his second term will be a new “golden age” for the country.
Some critics have argued the US actually seems to be in something like the Gilded Age, the period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after Reconstruction and before the Progressive era, when robber barons and industrialists built great fortunes but inequality grew.
For a better sense of the Gilded Age — which takes its name from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley’s novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” — I talked to Richard White, a Stanford history professor emeritus and author of “The Republic for Which It Stands,” which examines US history from Reconstruction through the Gilded Age. The book is part of the multivolume series Oxford History of the US.
Our phone conversation, edited for length, is below:
Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ vs. the ‘Gilded Age’
WOLF: President Donald Trump say that this is the beginning of a new golden age, but critics are referring to it as more of a “Gilded Age.” You wrote THE book about the Gilded Age. What comparisons do you see?
WHITE: I think there are a lot of comparisons, but I’d be careful about cherry picking them. There are a lot of differences between the late 19th century and today, but certainly the emphasis that Trump makes on industrialization in the United States, the tariff, his courting of the wealthy — all of these things bring up a certain kind of resonance with the Gilded Age.
Trump has a new favorite president
WOLF: During his first term, he was a big fan of Andrew Jackson, but now he’s a big fan of William McKinley, maybe the final president of the Gilded Age, depending on when you’re cutting it off. What do you see in William McKinley and his presidency that would excite Trump?
WHITE: That’s a tough question to answer because Trump doesn’t know much about William McKinley. But I think the reason he selected William McKinley is that William McKinley was the architect of the McKinley Tariff, which turned out to be a political disaster; and that William McKinley was an imperialist, and Trump, in his second term, seems to have imperial ambitions, at least on paper.
(Note: The McKinley Tariff, enacted when McKinley was in Congress, raised tariff rates to nearly 50% on manufactured goods.)
The McKinley Tariff vs. the Trump Tariff
WOLF: I’ve talked to tariff historians who told me that as president, McKinley sort of turned against tariffs, and Trump is going in the opposite direction. Is that your sense of things?
WHITE: McKinley always was pro-tariff, but he modified his stance on tariffs. McKinley learned from the disaster of the McKinley Tariff. The McKinley Tariff swept the Republicans out of power in the following election. And so McKinley, when he came back, certainly still Republicans were pro-tariff, but he had a much more modest set of tariffs than he had the first time around. So I would never say that McKinley turned against tariffs, but certainly he modified his views.
Trump’s deep state vs. Teddy Roosevelt’s bureaucracy
WOLF: McKinley was later assassinated, and maybe there’s a tie-in there to civil service reform, which was a major political issue of the day as we moved toward a more professional civil service. Now Trump is going in the opposite direction, trying to reclaim more power over the bureaucracy. What can you say about the civil service reform of the late 19th century and are we kind of going in the opposite direction now?
WHITE: I think Trump would like to. The civil service reform in the late 19th century, initially, was not very effective. There were still a huge number of political appointees.
The assassination of McKinley, I think, was not that closely tied to civil service reform. But what was going to happen after McKinley — and that’s going to be because of Theodore Roosevelt. Really, the reason we remember William McKinley is that he’s the president whose assassination made Theodore Roosevelt president. Theodore Roosevelt really was the president who begins to initiate a full-scale bureaucratic state in the United States. He’s a reformer, and McKinley himself would have gone that direction, but not with the same enthusiasm that Roosevelt had.
Tech titans vs. robber barons and industrialists
WOLF: The other thing that I think could be a tie-in to the Gilded Age could be that during Trump’s inauguration, the tech titans amassed behind him. There are obvious comparisons to robber barons or industrialists. To your mind, is there an antecedent for somebody like Elon Musk and his influence today?
WHITE: Yes. I think great wealth in the United States is always dependent on government aid. Elon Musk gets a huge amount of his wealth from government contracts, government subsidies. In late 19th century, it’s going to be the tariff — that’s one of the important things about the tariff — it’s going to be the tariff and subsidies which create the first great American fortunes, with the railroads, with the steel industry.
The way in which big corporations and the very, very wealthy are tied to government policies, that’s very Gilded Age. That’s one of the greatest parallels between the two periods right now. The way that Trump is linking himself to the very wealthy and likes to pretend — he’s a wealthy man, but he likes to pretend his fortune is equal to theirs — is pretty much diagnostic of where we’re going.
WOLF: But if you think of somebody like JD Rockefeller — he was involved in politics, but it’s not like he had an office in the in the Executive Office Building.
WHITE: He didn’t, but plenty of others before him — Carnegie was involved in politics. Tom Scott, who has one of the first great railroad fortunes, is very, very involved in politics. The Gilded Age barons owned newspapers like Jeff Bezos, they are people who are intimately involved with the lobby. They invent the modern lobby through corporations. So there might not be an exact parallel to Elon Musk, but remember, Elon Musk is a politician who’s a few months old. We don’t know how this is going to turn out, but the involvement of the very wealthy in American politics is an old, old story.
Gilded Age inequality vs. today’s inequality
WOLF: I saw something you wrote from before the Trump era drawing parallels between inequality in the late 19th century and inequality today and I’ve seen you argue that there were eras in US history where the profit motive was much different than it is today. Do you still hold that view or has your thinking shifted in recent years?
WHITE: No, I think it’s one of the lasting battles in American politics. There’s an old ideal in the Gilded Age, the 19th century, for competency. The goal of most Americans during this period was not to be fabulously wealthy; it was to have enough money to support a family, to put aside money in their old age, to have security and to be independent. I don’t think that’s really ever disappeared. There are certain times where what’s stressed is a desire for great wealth, but my feeling is most modern Americans, that is not what they’re working for. They really are still, though they don’t use the word anymore, more interested in competency. Very often, what’s publicized — what goes in media, popular media, the internet — that’s all going to be around the very, very wealthy. That’s the part that shows up. But I have great doubts that represents the ambitions of most Americans today.
Bitcoin vs. the Gold Standard
WOLF: Trump wants to be the crypto president and there’s this idea that Bitcoin could become a sort of reserve currency. There’s this meme stock thing that Trump has that momentarily made him insanely wealthy. Going back to the Gilded Age, that was a time of evolving currency. Now we seem to be at a place where Trump is looking at it maybe changing the way the dollar is used. What are your thoughts from a historical perspective on how the dollar became powerful and Trump’s efforts to potentially change it?
WHITE: One of the great issues of the Gilded Age was the gold standard. Political campaigns were fought over whether the standard should be based on gold, whether it should be a fiat currency, such as we have today, whether it should be a mixture of gold and silver. So currency issues are quite old.
When you start talking about Bitcoin and you start talking about meme stocks, you’re much closer to something else that happened, which is a huge amount of speculation, not so much in the stock market, but in the shadow stock market, in which people literally were not buying stocks, but they were betting on whether stocks were going to go up and down. There’s a way in which stock market manipulation can become a kind of gambling. And in this case, it became literally gambling. And it seems to me the meme stocks and the Bitcoins, that’s really gambling. There’s nothing behind it. There’s no there there, and as soon as somebody takes the foundation out of it, somebody just simply ceases believing in it, the whole thing will collapse. I think we’re going into very, very dangerous speculative territory. But it’s not unprecedented. This kind of thing happened in the early 20th century also.
One thing I would add to all of this is that when people talk about the tariff, there’s a structural difference between the late 19th century and today. In the late 19th century, with the tariff, the government was running a surplus. The problem the government had was deflation, and there was too much money in the Treasury, and the tariff was one of our major sources of revenue.
One of the things McKinley was trying to do, and the Republicans were trying to do, was to raise the tariff in order to reduce the federal deficit by making the tariffs so high, it would take down tax revenue because they really were worried about the deflation that was coming with the Gold Standard.
Now we’re in a very different situation, because now we have great deficits and the idea that the tariff is going to bring in revenue is really not something that’s going to happen.
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