Gilded Age or Golden Age

We look at the so called Gilded Age and examine its true history.  

Transcript

Gilded Age or Golden Age? 

August 2025

“Every period is characterized by change.  This is true because of the nature of human existence and also because that is the way historians define changes of the past.  But some eras exhibit greater change than others, and it was certainly true of the late 19th century in the United States.  During that time, the central fact of American Life was the evolution of the nation from a largely agricultural, rural, isolated, localized, and traditional society to one that was becoming industrialized, urban, integrated, national, and modern. “ 

Historian Charles C Calhoun

One of the great myths of American history is summed up in its terminology – the Gilded Age.  Officially, gilding is the decorative process of applying a thin layer of gold, or other metal, to a surface. It’s used to create a luxurious appearance and can be applied to various materials like wood, metal, stone, and even textiles.  The obvious connotation here is that the late 1800s were not a time of incredible growth and increasing prosperity, but merely a period of superficial embellishment.  Just a few Americans enjoyed that wealth while the rest toiled away in hellish factories.  The realities are a bit different.  There were awful working conditions, poverty, and struggle, just as there had been from the time of the Sumerians 5,000 years ago up until the 1800s.  

Then there was the accompanying term Robber Baron.  The term originated in 1859, first used by The New York Times to describe industrialists of the time.  The figure attributed was Cornelius Vanderbilt. The phrase, originally referring to medieval German lords who charged illegal tolls, was used to critique Vanderbilt’s business practices, particularly his shipping monopolies and exploitation of government subsidies.

Bill Moyers, who served as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Press Secretary, a key figure in the Founding of Public radio and TV, and later contributed to PBS, captures the progress ethos of the Gilded Age by comparing it to the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control, a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.” But this is simply wrong.  

Charles C Calhoun, cited above in our quotes section, knew far more about this period than most historians, much less a journalist. He noted, “The term Gilded Age derives from the title of a novel published in 1873 by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner…as Twain put it, satirizing ‘speculativeness’ in business and ‘shameful corruption’ in politics.  Alas for historical truth, scholars for decades tended to view Twain’s and Warner’s gross caricature as an accurate, if somewhat overdrawn, portrait of late nineteenth-century life.”  In the past 30 years, there has been a great deal of reevaluation of this period, but alas, the name has stuck.  

In addition to simple name recognition, there is another reason this is called the Gilded Age.  Historians could later paint the progressive era as a corrective.  The term Gilded Age tells us more about historiography than it does about the actual time.  

There are two great myths attached to this: that this was Laissez-faire (check) faire run amok.  But the leaders of the late 19th century used government to achieve their ends.  One example is the Erie War between Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.  When Vanderbilt attempted to gain control of the Erie Railroad, Gould and his partners, Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk, issued fraudulent stock to dilute Vanderbilt’s holdings. Vanderbilt secured a court injunction against them and an arrest warrant for Gould, who then fled to New Jersey. Gould then went to Albany and reportedly used a suitcase full of money (equivalent to about $7 million today) to bribe state legislators, including the powerful Tammany Hall boss, William “Boss” Tweed, to pass laws that legalized their fraudulent stock issues and prevented the merger of the Erie and New York Central Railroads. None of this was about business, but instead bending the government to their ends.  It happens today, of course, but not in such an illegal fashion.  For example, a Titan of today, Microsoft, in 2023, employed 110 lobbyists in Washington D.C. Of these, 83 had previously held government jobs. No doubt the misnamed Robber Barons like Gould, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt would not be toting suitcases full of cash but rather hiring vast lobbying operations.  

The other was inequality.  During the Revolutionary War days in the 1770s, the top 20 percent of the population owned about two-thirds of the wealth, while the bottom 20 percent owned only 1 percent.  Now this is primarily due to simple age.  Children did not have the wealth of their parents, and Colonial America was extremely young.  That does not change the inequality, however.  Between 1860 and 1900, the wealthiest 10% of American households owned about 75% of the nation’s wealth[1], resulting in severe social inequality.

Compare this to the 1920s, AFTER the Income Tax and a host of progressive policies.  The top 0.1% held a significant portion of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 42% possessed very little. In fact, inequality is a terrible measure.  Communist governments often do not have this issue – everyone is poor, so there is no inequality.  A closer examination is needed to understand how the middle classes and the poorest live, both in comparison to other nations and, more importantly, to those generations that preceded them.  To do that, we will look at both national statistics and one figure.  In the late 19th century, the United States experienced rapid economic growth, fueled by industrialization, and became one of the wealthiest nations in the world, surpassing some European powers in terms of overall wealth and per capita income.  And even assuming that a Vanderbilt might skew the wealth per capita, it was not like America was unique in that.  Victorian England was characterized by stark social inequality, with a rigid class system and significant disparities in wealth, living conditions, and opportunities between the wealthy elite and the working and underclasses. 

One of the key differences in inequality between the US and Europe was not the existence of that inequality but rather that in Britain, a poor person could not become wealthy.  Vanderbilt, Gould, John D. Rockefeller Sr., and Andrew Carnegie all started as either lower-class or impoverished.  Take Gould. He grew up in poverty on a farm in upstate New York. His early life was marked by hardship and tragedy, including the death of his mother when he was four. He worked on the family farm and later in his father’s store. Despite his humble beginnings, Gould showed an aptitude for mathematics and surveying, which he taught himself. 

We will discuss national items further, but let’s take just one figure.  

Trixie Friganza (born Delia O’Callaghan; was born in 1870. She eventually became an American actress. She began her career as a singer, working her way from the chorus to starring in musical comedies to having her feature act on the vaudeville circuit.  She transitioned to film in the early 1920s, mostly playing minor characters that were quirky and comedic. She retired from the stage in 1940 due to health concerns. She spent her last years teaching drama to young women in a convent school, and when she died, she left everything to the convent. 

Now I could have an entire podcast on Trixie and the evolution of acting in America, but I have another purpose in mind.  Though born in a tiny Kansas town, she was raised in Cincinnati, then the eighth-largest city in the United States.  She began working at a young age (12 or 13) to help support her family, securing a cash girl position at Pogue’s store and earning $3 per week. At age 16, she was promoted to the handkerchief counter at Pogue’s, and her salary increased to around $4.50–$5.00 per week. Eventually, she took a shot at performing. Despite her mother’s disapproval (stage work was considered disreputable), she managed to get hired and was employed, off and on, for the next 50 years.   And in this, she was special.  A person born in the US in 1870 could expect to live, on average, around 39 years. High infant and child mortality rates heavily influenced this figure.  The number is skewed because between 15-20% of infants did not survive long beyond birth.  But because Friganza survived her first year, she and her fellow 1870s could expect to live nearly ten years longer. For example, a 10-year-old in 1880 could expect to live to about age 48. 

Friganza’s unique employment also contributed to her longevity, which is why she lived to 85.  Over half of the nation in 1870 was employed in agriculture.   The other jobs were in manufacturing, trade, and domestic service.  The number of mishaps and fatalities associated with agriculture and manufacturing in 1870 was high. 

When Friganza travelled, there were two choices.  She could ride a horse or take a train.  Getting around Ohio was easy, but getting out West was a little more difficult, as it was only a year before her birth that the intercontinental railway was built.  As Friganza aged, train travel, once a hazardous undertaking, became safer with the introduction of George Westinghouse’s airbrake, which also occurred the year before her birth.  

As a child, if Friganza wished to talk to family or friends, she could send a letter through the post or visit in person.  By the time she was 30, there were 1.3 million telephone units installed so that she could phone them.  

Now let’s consider the changes wrought, all emanating from the so-called Gilded Age, that dictated life in 1940, the year Friganza left the stage.  

Less than 21% of the nation was farmers.  If Figanza wished to travel in 1940, she could still take a train, but horses were now relegated to farms and ranches.  She could drive a car herself or take a taxi.  She could ride on a bus, or something not available to anyone in the 19th century, or fly on a plane.  The first US commercial passenger flight took place on January 1, 1914, between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida. She could even go to Europe.  The first US commercial flight to Europe with paying passengers took off on June 28, 1939, operated by Pan American Airways. This historic flight, aboard the Boeing 314 flying boat named the Dixie Clipper, flew from New York to Marseilles, France, with a stop in the Azores.  This reduced the typical 2-3 week voyage across the Atlantic to a single day. 

Her life, her very existence, changed, almost entirely in a positive way, during the 19th century.

And I return to the national stats.  The United States became the world’s largest economy in terms of GDP around 1890. This occurred as the US experienced rapid industrialization and surpassed its closest competitor, Britain, in overall economic output.  The US became number 1 in agriculture, oil, steel, coal, railroads, and even began to overtake London in finance. Railroad tracks were 53,000 miles in 1870, but over 200,000 in 1900.  Wheat production doubled in the same period. Steel production grew from 77,000 tons to 11.2 million tons.   Life expectancy jumped from 40 years (including infant mortality) to 49 years, nearly a 20% jump, due to the output enabled by industrialization.  

And innovation, even in running a corporation.  As John Steele Gordon writes in his An Empire of Wealth, “The great corporate enterprises of the Gilded Age were only possible because of these new accounting tools. And this evolution of accountancy continues unabated today. Cash flow, for instance, is now regarded as one of the most important indicators of corporate prospects. But the very phrase cash flow was coined only in 1954.”

And it is not just the massive quality of life engendered by the late 1800s that made it a Golden Age.  The figure who is associated with the name Gilded Age, Mark Twain, was active in this period.  Tom Sawyer (1876), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1886) were all completed in this period.  Add to that the works of Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, and Stephen Crane. In art, America produced John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt. In music, the era saw the rise of popular music in the parlor, the flourishing of spirituals and blues, the influence of European touring musicians, and the addition of John Phillip Sousa marches. 

The United States is the only Great Power to front on both the Atlantic and the Pacific and the only one whose national territory sprawls across arctic, temperate, and tropical climate zones. It is at once both effectively an island, with all of an island’s military security, and a continent, with all of a continent’s resources.”

Everything that came later.  Winning both World Wars and the Cold War against communism was forged not in the 20th century but fundamentally in the 19th.  One of the keys to understanding history is to understand those who write it.  I would love to say that historians are automatons taking all the facts and then distilling these pieces of information into a narrative that is 100% accurate.  The reality is that every historian brings biases and their own experiences to the work. And in this case, there is a desire for comparison.  The citations of inequality are rife, and thus comparisons of Musk and Bezos to Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. However, the goal remains to include fact-based primary and secondary sources that tell the story as accurately as possible, regardless of our personal views.  And the facts are that the economic greatness of America, the American that reached its financial and ideological heights in the 20th century, was forged in the 19th century.  It was as close to a Golden Age as any other in our history.