“The Gilded Age” is the term used to describe the tumultuous years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. It was named after Mark Twain’s satirical novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, set in the late 1800s. During this era America became more prosperous and saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology. But the Gilded Age had a more sinister side: it was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers, and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class. In fact, it was wealthy tycoons – not politicians – who inconspicuously held the most political power.

During the Gilded Age the United States became the leading industrial nation in the world, built a powerful navy, defeated a world power, and acquired a large overseas empire. It was also transformed by the values of a new industrial and urban society. The most important development was the rise of industrial capitalism and the growing corporations that controlled nationwide industries, supplanting the small, locally owned factories and businesses around which the economy had previously been built.

American life was also fundamentally altered by other far-reaching changes: the passing of the physical frontier with the settlement of the last American West, the eclipsing of countryside and farm by city and factory, tremendous urban growth with all its accompanying problems, revolutionary innovations in communication and transportation (the telephone and transcontinental railroads), new agricultural technologies, a huge influx of immigrants, the rise of large-scale labor unions, and the emergence of the United States as a world power. As Howard Mumford Jones put it, it was the Age of Energy. These developments gave the Gilded Age its dramatic character and its importance in American history, and they established the foundations of modern America.

The phrase “America’s Gilded Age” typically brings to mind the dazzling wealth of the “robber barons”: Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, and others. Their fortunes left us lasting monuments – mansions in Newport, great camps in the Adirondacks, treasure-filled libraries and museums in Manhattan. But in his book Age of Betrayal, Atlantic senior editor Jack Beatty paints a much different picture.

“This book,” Beatty begins, “tells the saddest story: How, having redeemed democracy in the Civil War, America betrayed it in the Gilded Age.”

The era began with Reconstruction and with the promise that blacks would not only rise up in status but be included in the nation’s civic life. It opened new avenues for the working man to improve his station by starting his own business or by moving out west to work his own farm. It set forth the ideal that, for the first time in the nation’s history, each man would be accorded a single vote – rather than allowing disenfranchised slaves to count toward a given state’s representation in the federal government, thereby politically empowering Southern slave-owners.

Yet by century’s end, sharecropping had replaced slavery as a way to keep blacks working in penury, and the voting rights so recently granted were taken away. The industrialization of the country, which brought so much wealth to so few, left most of the rest struggling to get by as wage laborers, working for someone else in the factory or on the farm. Wealth influenced and co-opted the government at all levels, through unregulated campaign contributions, vote buying, and similar machinations.

Beatty leaves it to others to describe the glamour of the Gilded Age. Instead, he makes viscerally clear the grinding poverty, the bloody racial hatred, the violent labor strikes, and the corrupt politics that also characterize that era. And he draws parallels with our own time, where once again a yawning gap has opened between rich and poor, and political influence is available to anyone willing and able to pay.

*Why the title Age of Betrayal? Who – or what – exactly was betrayed?* I deal with three betrayals: of democracy, of the freed people of the South, and of what Lincoln called “the right to rise.”

Government for the people, a despairing Rutherford B. Hayes noted in his diary, was supplanted in the Gilded Age by “government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.”

It was an era when government held the keys to corporate and private fortunes – land and subsidies for railroads, tariff protection for manufacturers, mountains for mining companies, timber lands for lumber kings, court orders to prevent strikes, and state militia, federal lawmen, and U.S. Army regulars to break strikes and shoot strikers. “Government by campaign contributions,” in Henry Demarest Lloyd’s words, gave America the most violent strikes in the industrializing world.

Fifteen years after emancipation, the party of Lincoln betrayed the nearly four million former slaves in the South. Following the tied Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, the Republicans kept the presidency in return for ending Reconstruction. And the Lincoln-appointed justices of the Supreme Court effectively gelded the protections for the freed people that Congress had written into the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of using the amendment as Congress intended – to strike down state laws abridging the rights of southern blacks – the court granted those protections to corporations, using the due-process clause of the amendment to strike down regulatory and labor laws.

From the archives: “Reconstruction” (December 1866). “No republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.” – Frederick Douglass

Sources: YouTube video | History.com article | Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums | The Atlantic – The Dark Side of the Gilded Age