The Gilded Age returns – in more ways than one

One of our first excursions of local exploration, after moving to the Hudson Valley, was to visit Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown. The Gothic revival home was built in 1838 by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, but its best-known owner was Jay Gould.

Gould, a financial manipulator and railroad tycoon, came to personify the anything-goes ethos of the Gilded Age. He became a national villain in 1869 when he and a business partner tried to grab control of the country’s entire gold supply, setting off a financial crisis that rippled through the nation’s economy. Gould escaped prosecution, using his political connections with New York’s Tammany Hall machine, and went on to assemble a vast empire of railroads in the Midwest and West. When a fraudulent English lord tried to swindle him and fled to Canada to avoid legal accountability, Gould arranged to have him kidnapped, nearly triggering a war between the U.S. and its northern neighbor.

As our guide at Lyndhurst explained to us, Gould reveled in his ruthless Robber Baron image, believing that it gave him an edge in business competition. And, she noted, Gould had another side to his personality: devoted family man. He came home from the city nearly every weeknight on his yacht (he refused to take the train because of his rivalry with railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt) to have dinner with his wife and children. Unusual for his time, he wrote his will to ensure that his daughters, as well as his sons, inherited equal shares of his estate. The last owner of Lyndhurst, who deeded it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was his daughter Anna.

Gould isn’t a main character in the HBO series The Gilded Age, which debuted its third season on Sunday, but his spirit and that of his fellow Robber Barons pervades the drama. The central male character, George Russell, seems to be a mashup of Vanderbilt, Gould, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and several other tycoons. Russell builds his business empire by blithely buying off politicians, crushing competitors, and threatening to squash labor unions. Yet, like the real-life Gould, Russell is quite devoted to his family: his uber-ambitious wife Bertha and their two children.

Part of the series’ appeal, no doubt, is the reality that we are living through another Gilded Age. The Robber Baron in chief sits in the White House, shamelessly profiteering off his position, and he is surrounded by equally rapacious dynasts. Today, in place of steel and railroads, it is tech and its adjuncts that feed the fortunes and vanity of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and their fellow oligarchs. Once again, economic inequality is skyrocketing. Once again, government regulation of business is neutered. Once again, the very notion of honest public service is derided and mocked.

The term Gilded Age was coined by Mark Twain and co-author Charles Dudley Warner in an 1873 novel of that name. Their book was centered on corruption in Washington, but the term soon came to epitomize a larger set of ills. Amid the vast economic expansion of the post-Civil-War era, many Americans came to feel that their country was being stolen from them. The America of earlier years, the country of small towns and small farmers and unlimited possibilities enabled by the ever-present frontier, was being circumscribed. The Robber Barons were devaluing everything in their path, turning the ordinary citizen into a vassal, degrading the value of democracy by using their vast wealth to buy up and buy off politicians from New York City to the prairies and plains.

There was always an element of myth in this conception of an older, Edenic America – it certainly was no democratic paradise for enslaved Africans, uprooted Native Americans or disenfranchised women – but it exerted a powerful hold on the public imagination. And Americans reacted to the perceived loss of national innocence with growing anger. By the late 1800s, western farmers were voting into office populists committed to rein in the railroads and bankers who were fleecing them. And by the turn of the century, a national movement called Progressivism was working to enact a broad range of economic and social reforms at all levels of government.

The TV series tends to gloss over these roiling contradictions. While an interesting subplot explores the life of a young African American woman trying to make her way as a writer, for the most part the show is devoted to the competition between old money and nouveau riche. A couple of episodes depict labor unrest in one of George Russell’s steel mills, but the denouement is sugar-coated, with Russell refusing to order soldiers to fire on the strikers. In real life, when workers at Carnegie’s Homestead mill struck for higher wages in 1892, National Guard troops helped break the strike. Two years later, federal soldiers violently crushed a railroad workers’ strike in Chicago, killing 30 workers.

That doesn’t mean the series isn’t entertaining, that it isn’t fun to watch. And it doesn’t mean the show lacks lessons about our own Gilded Age. Just below the glossy surface of life among the privileged in the 1880s, New York was a city of immigrants. The new Americans from Ireland, Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe helped generate the great wealth that buoyed the upper crust, and provided the labor that made lives of leisure possible. All four of my grandparents were part of this diaspora, escaping the miseries and menace of life in Russia for Jews of their generation. Another great wave of migration, of African Americans from the South, would begin in the 1920s.

For the most part, the newcomers of The Gilded Age buy into the national ethos of a land of unlimited potential: “This is America. Anything’s possible,” says Jack Trotter, a footman who dreams of becoming a successful inventor. But lurking in the background is an ugly strain of nativist prejudice that will, within a few decades, ring down an iron curtain on the age of unlimited immigration to America. My grandparents were very fortunate to come when they did; if they’d waited a bit longer, they would have been trapped in a Europe heading toward bloody calamity. Many of the relatives they left behind perished in the Holocaust.

Today’s immigrants, most of them from Latin America and Asia, also play a vital role in American life – a fact that is becoming ever clearer as the Trump administration’s relentless and heartless crackdown continues. We will also, I believe, soon discover the hollowness of Trump’s faux populism, as he pursues policies that enrich himself and his cronies and reinforce rather than ameliorate the great inequalities of 21^st century America.

But every illness has its cure, every toxin its antidote, as the Robber Barons and their cohorts learned during the Progressive Era. What does that look like today? It’s hard to say with precision, but I can tell you that New York – the same New York where the original Robber Barons flourished – is showing a new kind of energy that suggests a backlash to the oligarchs and their growing piles of wealth. Young people have rallied around democratic socialists like the energetic and joyful mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the equally charismatic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And, notably, they are reaching millions by channeling their energy and messages into social media campaigns that have rallied young people across the city to their cause – turning the tables by wielding the very social-media tools owned by today’s elite. They may own the platforms, but they might rapidly be losing the message.

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Age%3A_A_Tale_of_Today

Lyndhurst (mansion,) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndhurst_(mansion)

Homestead Strike, https://www.britannica.com/event/Homestead-Strike

Pullman Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike