The Gilded Age

When I was a college student in the late 1960s, the most popular US history courses were the ones that covered the Gilded Age. They promised to illuminate the origins of urgent contemporary problems. Their canvas was broad and filled with compelling characters—a ruling class composed of swashbuckling robber barons, given to speculating in dubious securities, bribing entire legislatures, and squeezing maximum productivity from their workers; a multi-ethnic proletariat of restless, angry workers, frequently thrown out of work by lurches in the business cycle, footloose and wandering whole regions in search of jobs; a formally free but frequently dependent black population, striving for independence but often left to the mercy of their former masters; an emerging foreign-policy elite, eager to secure a place for Uncle Sam at the imperial banquet while there were still a few crumbs left. These figures were involved in nothing less than “The Making of Modern America.” Or so the course titles claimed.More »