How Does The Second Gilded Age End?
Sources
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Transcript
Hi it’s Tuesday, May 19th, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Last week, we discussed the French Revolution and whether the United States is entering its French Revolution era. You can watch that after this. Today we’re discussing the Gilded Age as another potential point of comparison between what is currently facing the United States today and what history can teach us might happen. Things feel uncertain. We’re looking to the past to find answers. As I said in my last video, history isn’t a crystal ball that will just magically show us what is going to happen, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, usually in unexpected ways. But it can be helpful to take the lessons learned from history and apply them to today. Because the reality is that as much as we like to think of time as a long continuing line, it’s also quite cyclical, and a circle is often more accurate than a line when describing historical events. It can be really frustrating when you want to look at history as a long line, an arc that bends towards justice or progress, when how it really acts is just like a cycle repeating itself in endlessly frustrating ways because we can’t seem to actually really learn from the past, or things change just slightly enough that we forget or we think the past doesn’t apply to us. But accepting this reality, that history moves in cycles and phases and arcs and not a clean straight line, can help us to accept what we can and cannot control. We can’t control everything but we are also not doomed to repeat the same history over and over. We can write history as it is happening, nothing is set in stone. That being said, the similarities between now and the Gilded Age are pretty striking.
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We ended our episode in France in the year 1800, today we’re picking up across the ocean in the United States starting around 1875. In that time, the United States fought a bloody civil war, attempting to keep the union together despite the rot of slavery at its core. The years immediately after the war saw the Reconstruction Era, a time when this country attempted to forcibly right the wrongs of centuries of slavery, only to eventually pull out of the South, which then entered its KKK-riddled Jim Crow era. Industrialization was in full swing. In the 75 years since the turn of the 19th century, major technological advancements drastically changed the way people lived, worked, and interacted with each other. The telegraph allowed for faster dissemination of information, a truly radical change that allowed, for the first time, for people in California to receive the same news at roughly the same time as people in New York. And railroads transported goods and people faster and more easily than ever before. The first railroad in North America launched in 1827. By 1881, the US railroad network hit 100,000 miles of tracks. 20 years later, in 1902, that number doubled to 200,000 miles of tracks. Industrialization meant a boom in manufacturing, commercialization, and mass production. Where once artisans lived in small villages and practiced a craft by hand, completing every step of the manufacturing process along with the help of a couple apprentices, now machines could do the work of 100 men and allowed for greater accumulation of wealth and the centralization of work in cities. Farmland accumulated into a few hands, leaving a class of landless workers who were forced to move to the cities to trade their labor for a wage. Taking advantage of the hordes of laborers looking for work and trying to provide for their families, industrialists created factory jobs with zero health and safety protections where workers of all ages would do backbreaking labor for 10 to 15 hours per day, earning a few cents an hour for their work. Tenements and boarding houses, also with very little regulatory oversight, created unsafe, unsanitary, crowded conditions in cities. But at the same time, advancements in medicine meant that life expectancy jumped from 40 in 1880 to 47 in 1900, especially as rates of infant mortality fell. I learned recently that those numbers are really skewed by infant mortality. Like babies died really really often in the 1800s, about 30-40% died before the age of 5. So if you made it to 10 your actual life expectancy was closer to 70 or 80. So many babies died though that it pulled the average down so when we say “life expectancy was 40” that doesn’t actually mean MOST people died around 40. It means 40% of people died at 3 and the other 60% at a much older age.
It was during the mid 1800s that germ theory was first established and basic hygiene like hand washing and pasteurization cut down on communicable diseases dramatically. So the kids are dying less frequently which is great for industrialization cuz that means more little fingies to get into the little machines and make them work. And in the biggest industries in America–steel, coal mining, railroads, meatpacking, the risk of injury or death while on the job was extraordinarily high. The fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was 2.2 workers per 1000. The railroads saw 2.7 deaths per 1000 workers. In mining it was 3 workers dead for every 1000 workers. So you had kids as young as 6 going to factories everyday working among machines with exposed blades, gears, belts, high up on walkways and ladders without railings, high voltage wires were just exposed to the air, pressure boilers would explode, toxic chemicals and gases could asphyxiate workers, it was truly a free for all that presented a major cash grab for industrialists. It was America’s first experience with technology advancing far faster than Congress was able to keep up with, so while lawmakers were slowly learning about the dangers and lack of protections, squabbling over how to handle them, and getting paid a pretty penny by industrialists not to do anything, the technology was advancing and everyday people had to live with the consequences. And as workers died in droves, pushed to the max working long hours with high production quotas, for a few pennies an hour, the “titans of industry” amassed unprecedented levels of wealth, and they weren’t afraid to show it off.
Some of the most famous examples of these Gilded Age industrialists include Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Andrew Carnegie is, I think, the gold standard of the “American Dream” as well as how to sell your greed and exorbitant wealth to the people so they don’t send you to the guillotine. Carnegie immigrated from Scotland when he was 12 in 1848. He immediately went to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, eventually finding work as a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh office of the Ohio Telegraph Company. There, he made connections and learned the brand new telegraph technology. At 18, he jumped to another emerging technology, railroads, becoming a telegraph operator at the Pennsylvania Railroad. 4 years later he was made superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania railroad. That’s the part of the story Carnegie loved to point to to prove that he was just really smart and worked really hard to get where he was. Which is true, he was smart and he did work hard. It was also around this time when he began committing crimes in order to amass his wealth. His boss at the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Scott, helped young Andrew Carnegie with his first “investments” which was just insider trading based on knowledge they had as part of the railroad business. Through this early insider trading, Carnegie was able to begin amassing his fortune. Then the Civil War happened, which of course was a boon to those who worked in or owned businesses heavily relied upon by the federal government in times of war–like railways and telegraphs, for example. By 1864, at 28 years old, Carnegie had enough wealth that he became an early investor in the Columbia Oil Company, helped found a steel mill, and developed various ironworks. His friends at the Pennsylvania Railroad proved useful during this time–all their businesses needed each other to function, and so in exchange for some kickbacks, the Pennsylvania Railroad became one of Carnegie’s best customers.
Over time, it was steel that ultimately made Carnegie the richest man in America. But it wasn’t just the actual smelting of iron into steel, a process he managed to perfect at an industrial level, but it was also the vertical integration of his business. Meaning he bought out not only his competition but also all the businesses that produce necessary products for the steelmaking process. Everything came under the Carnegie Steel Company umbrella, allowing him to set prices, produce things more efficiently and cheaply, and undercut any potential competition. He also worked closely with his friends in the railroad industry, which relied on Carnegie steel to lay its tracks and which made money from the transport of steel along the railways, in order to fix prices amongst themselves. Carnegie also spent a LOT of money lobbying Congress to keep tariffs in place that made him millions every year.
Despite Carnegie’s claimed “pro labor” stance, when it came down to it, he cared about the bottom line above all else. In June, 1892, when Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland, he gave his general manager of the Homestead Steel plant, Henry Frick, carte blanche to do whatever it took to manage relations with the steel workers union. They were in the middle of contract negotiations, with Carnegie attempting to dissolve the union altogether. When negotiations stalled, Frick decided he would no longer negotiate with the union and instead only work directly with individual workers. And despite the unions attempts to continue negotiating, Frick shut down the mill altogether and locked out 3800 workers. So the workers staged a strike, locking down the town in order to keep out any strikebreakers the company attempted to hire to take their place.
And so what do you know the company hired 300 private enforcers, the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s private for hire police force. My red dead girlies will know. The 300 Pinkertons came up the river along the steel mill. When they stepped off their boats onto shore, they were met first with rocks and then with bullets, sent flying by the mill workers and members of town standing guard to block the strikebreakers. The battle that ensued lasted 12 hours, left a dozen people dead, and ended in the Pinkerton’s surrender. As the Pinkertons surrendered and left their boats, the townspeople, workers, women, and children, accosted them, kicked them, spit on them, and tore their clothes. The Pinkertons were placed in the local jail for their protection and then sent packing on the next train out of town. But of course activist violence always begets greater, retaliatory state violence. So at Frick’s request Pennsylvania sent in the National Guard. Instead of 300 Pinkertons, the striking workers and their supporters were faced with 8500 troops armed to the teeth with gatling guns, securing the mill from the striking workers within 20 minutes and placing the town under martial law as 1700 scab workers were brought in by train. The violence continued as scab workers got attacked in the streets, and refused service at local businesses. It didn’t help that some of the scab workers were black, brought in by locked train car, some unaware of the strike at all when they arrived in Homestead. Tensions boiled over in November, 5 months after the initial strike, when white workers attacked the black families living in Homestead. But by mid-November, the union conceded defeat and dissolved. Some strike leaders were charged with murder, 160 others charged with lesser crimes, none of them were convicted due to sympathetic juries. And of course none of the Pinkertons or troops were tried for anything because violence is justified when it’s the state or a state proxy, obviously.
In 1901, at the age of 65, Carnegie sold his company to JP Morgan, who monopolized even more of the steel industry into the United States Steel Corporation, paying Carnegie over 300 million dollars for his steel business, making him the richest man in America. Afterwards, Carnegie decided to dedicate his life to philanthropy, giving away 90% of his fortune, focusing especially on the creation of public libraries. He started his push for public libraries even before retirement, something that was openly mocked by his workers who, once the unions were successfully busted, he made work for 12 hours a day, built them a free library and then lectured them about how they should be using all their leisure time to better themselves in the library he so benevolently built for them. Which just about sums up life in post-industrialized America–capitalists accumulate unconscionable amounts of wealth through insider trading, price fixing, and underpaying their workers for the value their labor produces, then lecture those same underpaid, overworked employees that if they just work harder on bettering themselves then they, too, could become rich and successful, and then donate that money they hoarded to their own pet projects in order to justify all their hoarding. The difference between today’s robber barons and the robber barons of the gilded age is that the robber barons of yesteryear understood something really fundamental that today’s robber barons do not, something that mob bosses also understand intimately–it is a lot easier to swindle, steal, undercut, and horde money, when you make sure that some of that money you steal goes to benefit the masses. One of the reasons Pablo Escobar was so successful and his legacy so complex is because a lot of poor people really liked him because he paid for things that benefitted the public. The reason you know who Andrew Carnegie is isn’t because of the massive, bloody Homestead strikes, it’s because his name is on a bunch of buildings that he paid for and that are open to the public or on college campuses. Much like you can launder money, you can also launder your own legacy through philanthropy, something today’s billionaires seem woefully unaware of. Can you imagine how much more subdued and less furious we’d all be if instead of rocket ships Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos built free public libraries or massive food banks or something? They forget that they can’t just buy political will from politicians, something the robber barons of the Gilded Age also did very well, but they also have to buy the good will of the public if they don’t want us out in the streets calling for them to be taxed or worse–I made a whole video about why billionaires absolutely should be terrified of us, you can watch that after this.
So obviously the similarities are incredibly stark, between the Gilded Age and today: new technologies have emerged like AI and social media, that Congress is woefully unprepared to address and regulate, hell Congress still can’t effectively regulate the internet, let alone these technologies that have emerged just within the last 5 years. And it is off the backs of these major new technologies that today’s robber barons have amassed their fortunes, largely BECAUSE Congress has failed to regulate. And let’s of course not give Congress too much credit–much of their failure to regulate is less due to sheer incompetence, which is certainly part of it, and more due to the fact that they can be easily bought out by these same people who have amassed those fortunes. And it is through this deregulation that wealth inequality has managed to grow back up to gilded age levels.
The political similarities are also stark. Historian Jon Grinspan, as quoted in a recent Council on Foreign Relations article said of the Gilded Age, quote “Presidential elections drew the highest turnouts ever reached, were decided by the closest margins, and witnessed the most political violence.…The nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections “won” by the loser of the popular vote, and three presidential assassinations. Control of Congress rocketed back and forth, but neither party seemed capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives. Driving it all, a tribal partisanship captivated the public, folding racial, ethnic, and religious identities into two warring hosts….Republicans tended to support an active federal government, while Democrats denounced “centralism,” but mostly, each side just opposed what the other stood for.” Yeah, sounds pretty familiar.
There are some deeply important differences, however, between today and the Gilded Age. Mainly, we do not have the same level of union membership as we did in the late 1800s today. That lack of collective bargaining power means we have very few economic levers to pull to try to even the playing field. Secondly, as I’ve said before, we are really comfortable with capitalism in this country today, we have settled into our roles as consumers for the last century in ways that make us easier to manipulate. We want instant gratification. We want to shop to feel something. We’re willing to continue giving our hard earned cash to the capitalists because we want to keep consuming. In the late 1800s, people generally were far less comfortable with capitalism because it was just taking its modern, industrialized form. In a single generation, people went from being able to subsist on the land and use communal grazing land to survive to having to trade their labor for money in order to live in squalor in the cities or in company towns with zero freedom. That was a monumental shift in a very short period of time. In order for the level of violence and upheaval to happen like the strikes and the political movements during the end of the Gilded Age, people have to be really really uncomfortable and they have to feel directly impacted by this injustice every day in ways that are very obvious. Most people do not pay attention to politics–if you’re watching my channel you’re in the minority. They just aren’t going to do anything unless they are so uncomfortable they feel they have no other choice. Up until recently, we really haven’t been there, but I think we are arriving at a place, especially with the growth of AI and the clear, direct impact that data centers are having especially on rural communities, where people who normally don’t get involved with politics are starting to pay attention because they’re really really uncomfortable. They have no other choice but to do something, because they literally can’t afford to live.
Okay so that’s all well and good but how the fuck do we get out of this? Let’s see what they did in the Gilded Age. So after the Homestead strike of 1892, major labor protests didn’t stop. Because in 1893, the country suffered a widespread economic depression, caused in part because of the failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad companies that led to nearly 20% unemployment. In 1896, William McKinley won the presidency on the back of huge financial contributions from monied interests who wanted him in the White House because they knew he’d pass pro-business policies. His campaign raised 5 times as much as his Democratic opponent. He was re-elected in 1900, this time with Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate. He was then assassinated in 1901, and Roosevelt ascended to the Presidency, which is the moment kind of universally recognized as the beginning of the Progressive era and the end of the Gilded Age. But of course reality isn’t as clean as a single event drawing a line in the sand. Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t some bleeding heart leftist, nor was he the first person to come up with or propose curbing the monopolistic money hoarding happening in the country at the time. Teddy Roosevelt embodied the hypermasculine ideal that had become popular at the time and the rugged individualism that defines American culture. He also was very much in favor of capitalists and industry and even big businesses. But he also seemed driven by at least a rudimentary sense of fairness, and wanted every man to get a quote “square deal.” So it fit within that framework for him to step in and enforce the already existing anti-trust laws, because again he didn’t just come up with this on his own, the Sherman Antitrust act had been on the books since 1890 but hadn’t been aggressively enforced. And so it was during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency that we got numerous lawsuits against monopolies or trusts as they were more popularly called then to break up unfair business practices. We also got the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act as a response to the public outrage over abuses in the food and drug industries. We also got an expansion of the administrative state into issues of consumer protection. And a lot of this is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt because it happened during his presidency but I think the most important takeaway here is that it wasn’t the election of a single person to the presidency or one single act that caused a sea change that undid decades of growing inequality all in one fell swoop. Prior to Roosevelt taking the presidency in 1901, the United States saw DECADES of labor organizing, including dozens of people who lost their lives while protesting in favor of fairer working conditions. In order for the changes to happen federally, in the executive branch and in Congress, there were DECADES of articles, think pieces, books, and pamphlets written by journalists, some of whom also lost their lives in the name of free speech, in order to bring attention to these issues so that public sentiment shifted and enough people got worked up enough that Congress and the President couldn’t ignore them. And of course we had to have people in those positions of power to act, but it didn’t happen quickly or overnight, it wasn’t the work of a single president, it was the work, over DECADES, of grassroots movements, of labor organizing, of activism, of journalists and writers that eventually brought these ideas against big business, in favor of labor protections and consumer protections, to enough of the forefront that people in power actually acted on these ideas. But it took decades of screaming into the void to get there. There wasn’t a clean line of demarcation. There wasn’t a perfect outcome. These are battles that in some ways we are continuing to fight today, because that’s kind of the nature of capitalism, it is a constant fight between those who control the capital and those who don’t, because we will always outnumber the capitalists or industrialists or AI warlords or whatever they might be popularly called at any given time. And so eventually they do have to listen to us and capitulate to us in order to keep their capitalist machine chugging, because they need us. We have just gotten really comfortable with being uncomfortable, with just kind of subsisting, being just a little bit miserable all the time, because humans weren’t meant to sit at computers for 8 hours a day and then sit in front of screens for 6 hours every night. And that’s about what most of us are doing because we have to because we’re terrified. It’s just a matter of how uncomfortable we have to get before we fight back. Not to say there haven’t been organizers agitating and pointing out these inequalities for years, decades, but there has to reach a critical mass for it to create any real, legal change. And I think we are reaching that critical mass, and I have a feeling that in the United States it will likely eventually result in similar outcomes to the so-called progressive era–not in a fiery civil war, or a French Revolution style reign of terror, but in legal reforms that make capitalism less uncomfortable to exist under for more people. It’s just a matter of enough people doing enough organizing that whenever a person manages to take power that is willing to give a shit about the will of the people, the people will be ready to come forward and vocalize what their will actually is. And I know that sounds like kinda pipe dream thinking right now–our midterm elections feel very up in the air, and whether or not our elections are free or fair in 2028 is anyone’s guess at this point–but like I said last week, I don’t think we’re at a point where we’re going to see the level of unrest that Europe saw in the mid1700s, the kind that will lead to widespread, constant conflict, wars, and bloody revolutions. I think the bones of this country will remain in place until the MAGA experiment fizzles out, which it eventually will, and someone who gives a shit about pluralistic representative democracy steps in. But of course who knows how much damage will be done before that, both to our internal institutions as well as to the United States’ position as a global superpower. But it will be, as always, up to us the people to step in and rebuild it into hopefully something better. So all of this is, I guess, a pep talk to you all to not give up on whatever it is that you’re doing to fight for what you think would make this country better, which should absolutely include labor organizing if that’s something that’s possible for you, but can be as small as checking in on your neighbors or forming a neighborhood chat group, giving mutual aid, volunteering your time to help your neighbors, running for local office, truly the possibilities are endless you just have to choose something and just keep showing up. It will make you feel a sense of agency and like you’re working towards something, which will help with the doom scrolling and the feelings of hopelessness, and on top of that it also is actually genuinely what we need to be doing to keep pushing for something better. And the solidarity you create with the people around you when you do these things also will help you stay hopeful even when it feels like no change will ever come. It’s a long, long road that is unpredictable and never a straight line. You just gotta keep at it.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about whether the US has entered its French Revolution era.
