Incorruptible Mass

Brahmin Capitalism

• Anna Callahan • Season 6 • Episode 8

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We kick off a series on our economy with a fascinating conversation with Dr. Noam Maggor, a professor of American history at the Queen Mary University of London. We talk about his book, Brahmin Capitalism, covering topics like the history of the economy and of capitalism in Massachusetts, how the past can help us understand our current economic realities, and what lessons we can learn to shape the future of Massachusetts for the better.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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ANNA

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that our state could represent the needs of the vast majority of the people who live here.


And so today we have an incredible guest, Noam Maggor, who is going to be talking about his book, Brahmin Capitalism. And we are going to be talking about the economy generally, we're going to talk about the history of how Boston and Massachusetts have sort of created in many ways the economy that we have today. We'll talk specifically about how it affected Boston and Massachusetts statewide politics. We will talk about the way that this story of this economic, you know, the sort of Brahmin capitalism theory, explains a little bit about what's happening even in Trump's economy because Trump idealizes this Gilded Age that a lot of the book is about.


We will touch upon questions like, will this be the end of the American empire? Or is this really a jumping-off point for progressives to be able to do wonderful things? So if you're interested in that, stay tuned. Before we do that, I will have my co-host and myself introduce ourselves and Jonathan. Go ahead and start Jonathan.


JONATHAN

No worries. Jonathan Cohn, he/him/his, have been active in progressive issues and electoral campaigns here in Boston and Massachusetts for over a decade now. And I live in Boston in the South End, right by Back Bay Station. I'll just bring out my copy as well of Noam's book to show on camera.


ANNA

Fantastic. I am Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford. I'm a city councilor. I'm so excited to be on this show all with these amazing folks almost every week. And I've done a lot of work at the local level helping progressives win slates of majorities on city councils across the country. And now the moment you've all been waiting for, which is we are going to have Noam Maggor introduce himself a little bit, if you can talk about your background a little bit. And then also, by the way, he is a professor of history at the Queen's University of London. And if you could talk both about yourself and how you got into this work as well as the book.


JONATHAN

Great.


NOAM

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I'm essentially a Bostonian in exile now, speaking from the European side. But I arrived in Brookline basically when I was 15. I graduated from high school. I then spent many of my college years, my graduate training in the Boston area. So I stayed up earlier this week to watch the Celtics. Hopefully they'll do better later on. So that's that's kind of my personal origin. And when I started my graduate training, I trained in what I consider to be, I would call this maybe less economic history, which tends to be rather narrow. We call ourselves historians of capitalism, which is a way of saying we care about the economy, we care about business, but we also care about politics, we care about policy, we care about ordinary people, labor movements, grassroots movements as well, trying to look at all of these things together.


And I began to think about how to fit Boston and New England into the larger national story of American capitalism. So if you look at the typical textbook about these types of topics, Boston, New England is featured earlier on. You might read about the Boston merchants. Maybe then you read about Waltham and Lowell and the Industrial Revolution earlier on in the 19th century. But then Boston drifts away from the the core of the national story that moves to places like New York, Chicago, the Great West. So I wanted to rethink that and see if I can revisit Boston and how it was situated in relation to the national economy later on in the 19th century and into the 20th century.


ANNA

Amazing.


JONATHAN

This is actually a tangential for the main point, the main point of discussion, but what you were just talking about mentioning Lowell and Waltham reminded me of one thing that was interesting. I remember in your book, is just kind of even just like that light, that kind of scene-setting kind of backstory to the main part about the growth of all of these industrial cities in Massachusetts, often sometimes named after like a specific industrialist.


Help build them because one thing for me as somebody who isn't from Massachusetts originally, the way that Massachusetts has so many different, not-that-large places incorporated as cities, has always been changed coming from like my Philadelphian and the area around Philadelphia, it's there. You don't have that many things that would call themselves cities. It's all your villages and towns, et cetera, going out for probably an hour in every direction. Whereas the way in which you have all of these kind of now like maybe 50,000 at most, really around getting it to 100,000 today, cities in Massachusetts is very much so a legacy of that industrial area.


NOAM

Absolutely, that's definitely a legacy of the 19th century where this was precisely the model of industrialization that New England introduced. Most of those towns, the cities that you're talking about, specialized in one type of manufacturing. In the early part of the 19th century, the part that I focus on the most in the book, even though that's not necessarily representative of everything that happened during that time, basically the Lowell model where you create the industrial infrastructure, basically using water power as your source of energy to drive industrial manufacturing around cotton textiles and kind of building a satellite around Boston, around that kind of industry, and then shipping things into Boston Harbor.


That was kind of the model for the early part of the 19th century. The Boston Associates, the group of investors that begin this industry in New England, they introduce it in Lowell and it's hugely successful. So then those kinds of cotton textile towns, this model begins to proliferate. Then they basically, over time, there's a sense that they could just proliferate forever. So basically they accumulate some money from Lowell and then they pour this money into a new city and then another city.


Those cities proliferate for a few decades, but then at some point, as tends to be the case with capitalism, this one business model hits a wall. And the last two ventures that they launch go bankrupt. And then that signals to them, okay, actually the Lowell model has exhausted itself, and we need to look for something new to do with our accumulated savings. And this is where Boston becomes really very involved in building railroads and basically the Bostonian money, New England money, moves from the New England area, moves very drastically to other parts of the country. And Bostonian money begins to finance railroads, mining, stockyards, real estate ventures first in the Midwest, then in the Great West as well. So this is part of the story, the arc of the book.


ANNA

Yeah, and I just want to let people know the, so the book is Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age. And I would love if you can sort of fast-forward to the Gilded Age part and populism and how populism reacted to this whole expansion that you're talking about and just your thoughts about how those two interacted with each other.


NOAM

So first, part of the discovery for me in writing the book is that the Gilded Age is really very much strongly associated with, you know, what's called the robber barons, which is a kind of small cast of kind of larger-than-life industrialists, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, some of the other ones who are more kind of in finance, eventually also JP Morgan. Some of these names are still kind of familiar to us today. And the Bostonians are not traditionally kind of listed alongside these larger-than-life figures.


But it turns out what I realized when I was doing research for the book is that Bostonian money is actually really aggressive and very much involved in a lot of the cutting-edge ventures at the time. So that's one of the contributions of talking about Brahmin capitalism is to say, actually, those people maybe were not too proud of some of the ventures that they were involved in. Stockyards, mining, those are not necessarily— some of those ventures obviously involved some labor conflicts. They are not the kind of gentlemanly ventures that the kind of Harvard graduates wanted to necessarily associate themselves, but they were nevertheless very much involved in that. So that's part of the story about capitalism in this period.


And maybe some of this is the kind of thing that today you mentioned Trump, maybe other people might be wistful for, is the kind of larger-than-life role that investors and businessmen had in the national life at the time. Maybe this is the kind of thing that they, maybe some of the tech entrepreneurs who are very involved in the Trump administration, maybe that's the kind of image that they would like to recreate and this is what they're wistful for. And the period as a whole is very much associated with those figures.


I mean, Richard Hofstadter, as the kind of leading American historian of the 20th century, said, when you move into the 19th century, nobody remembers the names of the presidents from the period. What they remember are the names of the capitalists. This is an age associated with money, associated with fortunes, associated with the larger-than-life capitalists, not with the Lincolns, the Andrew Jacksons, the Jeffersons. Right. And that's what we've got now.


ANNA

President Musk.


NOAM

President Musk, exactly. So, and later on in the 20th century, if you can think about FDR and other significant presidents. So the late 19th century is very much associated with that. And this is the kind of thing that Trump might be wistful for. But you also mentioned the populace, which is maybe something that exists today, maybe not in the same kind of pronounced way, but the late 19th century, that's another feature of the book, was also a kind of heyday for grassroots movements and for democratic politics, something that I explore in the book both in municipal politics. So I look at Boston and how this played out on the local level, but then also out west.


So the American political system is— actually one of its remarkable kind of unique qualities in this period is how democratic it actually is, that the US, ordinary people without property, I don't want to— I mean, obviously not people of color, not women yet in this period, but nevertheless, there is a mass electorate. People without property have a voice in politics. And this really, I think, shapes the contours of American capitalism in very interesting ways, which is very, by very huge contrast, dramatic contrast to the situation, say, in the European context or in other contexts where the people who own the property have a voice in politics, they almost dominate politics entirely.


So a lot of what we see in the Gilded Age is actually the product of this type of collision between, on one hand, people who are immensely powerful because they have financial resources, they own the assets, they own the land, they own the railroads, and they're immensely powerful. And yet, when it comes to politics, they have to contend with a lot of power that comes from ordinary people. And a lot of what emerges out of it and a lot of the legacy of the period comes out of their strategies for dealing with precisely that.


How do you reconcile capitalism and democracy essentially? How do you allow the capitalists to continue to accumulate in a situation where they don't control city government and they don't control state government necessarily? So how do they contend with the pushback that comes from democratic politics, from people who care about the rights of workers, care about the environment, care about regulating the power of corporations, people who care about monopolies, et cetera?


ANNA

That's one thing that I often think about is people talk about democracy and capitalism as if they have no problem coexisting naturally. As specifically for a specific question that you're trying to come up with an answer to, you can choose to use a market system to come up with an answer, or you can choose to use democracy to come up with an answer. And you might not want to use democracy to come up with the price of a toothbrush. And I agree. I don't want to use democracy. I don't want to be voting on the price of a toothbrush. But I do want to be voting on a lot of these other things that you could choose to make a market system and you cannot. There's literally no way to. You gotta pick one system for those decisions. You cannot have both. And the fact that you have a democracy and we also have capitalism doesn't mean that those two are naturally easily coexisting, right? It is the nature of capitalism to make the decisions based upon market systems and who has the money. And it is the nature of democracy to make those decisions based upon one person, one vote. And those are the two things, really, they just do not go together.


NOAM

Absolutely. And I would say part of the forgetfulness about the tension between these two things emerges out of perhaps, I would say, the Cold War, the post-war period, when there was a kind of working compromise between these two systems. And so the legacy, the earlier origins of the conflict between the two has kind of been airbrushed out of American history or airbrushed out of our collective memory. But I would say definitely in the late 19th century, and you can find it in the book, there's no question that for all involved, the people who are pro-democracy, the people who are pro-capitalism or pro-market, there's no question in their minds that these two things are clashing and that they're on some fundamental level very incompatible.


So, and just to give a couple of examples, I mentioned Brookline before, the notion that the invention in the late 19th century of the suburb is a product of that. Because basically the people on the property say, as long as we're part, we live in Boston and we're subjected to Bostonian taxation, we're basically allowing the democracy to decide how to allocate resources. Property taxes are low by today's standards, but at the time they were considered confiscatory, much higher than elites had to deal with in other contexts.


And so the solution to this is to, there is a conflict in the late 19th century. This is a period when this municipality of Boston is actually incorporating the towns around Boston. So this is how Roxbury and Dorchester and West Roxbury and those areas that used to be Brighton, they used to be autonomous, used to be their own town governments are absorbed into the city of Boston. And suddenly they are subjected to Boston-level taxation, which is also the reason that a lot of the land there that used to be much more kind of landed rural estates gets subdivided into smaller parcels.


That's part of the story of the late 19th century in Boston. Brookline residents who already at the time tend to be more affluent, they mobilize against that. They realize what the implications of that might be for their taxes, for their property. So they managed to carve out Brookline as a safe haven for their properties. And that is a legacy of precisely a 20th-century legacy of that conflict between capitalism and democracy in the late 19th century.


Some of the cultural institutions in Boston are also, in a way, an outgrowth of that. People don't quite remember that, for example, Harvard started out essentially as a state school in Massachusetts, was part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and governed by the general court. So it had those origins of being part very much associated, affiliated with the state of Massachusetts and being kind of part of a kind of public institution to begin with. People in the 19th century still remember this, even as Harvard became more and more privatized and became more and more reliant on private funds. But still in the 1850s, there are still reform proposals that try to put more basically representatives from the city, from the state to sit on the governing boards of Harvard.


At the time, the big controversy around Harvard had to do with slavery. A lot of the people who controlled Harvard were, I would say, maybe I wouldn't say pro-slavery, but definitely were very— cotton textile manufacturers who were interested in peace with the South. They were not interested in abolitionism and in sectional disunion. So that was part of the controversy at the time. And the democratic forces at the time tried to say, okay, how do we exert influence within this powerful institution? The elite at the time managed to push back against those efforts. So this is how we get an institution like Harvard that is immensely powerful, immensely influential, but not necessarily beholden to democratic politics within the state, and it remains autonomous, remains a kind of ultimately a fairly elitist institution.


ANNA

Interesting.


JONATHAN

There's two things that what you were commenting reminded me of. One, the, I know that your book particularly talks about this, is about the way in which that pre-Civil War Boston economy was heavily invested in slavery in the South because of cotton and the connection to the textile industry and the westward expansion being like a source of where do you park all of your capital and like, suddenly, the situation has changed.


After that, it reminds me of the way in which, for a lot, I feel like, and it's something that still exists today, in which Boston relies on extractive industry that exists elsewhere, that we kind of pride ourselves in some ways of not having here, but are dependent on. And because thinking of that when in the way in which Boston views itself as a particularly green state, although we are heavily reliant on gas for our energy system. We have very little in the way of renewable energy making up compared to what one might otherwise think, especially because of all of the rich people who hate offshore wind or anything that have stymied that. But you see that same dynamic where we view, because it is not being extracted in Massachusetts, we have that kind of benefit from that presentation of the more humanized and enlightened economy that is reliant on things happening and happening in other places that our state is largely still invested in.


And the other thing I was going to tag in that you were talking about, one of the other, one of the tensions I really appreciated highlighting in the book is that point of municipal consolidation in Boston and how the city's growth, when the city grows, whether just directly by size or by population needs, you have a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to sustain the city. And if you need to build infrastructure to sustain a city, like all of the basic levels of that, whether that's some transportation or city services, that needs to be funded and that money needs to come from somewhere.


And that you have all of these financiers who are the ones who are funding all of this development of infrastructure out west when they were the ones like, when it was largely privately owned funded infrastructure, were the same people who were the most vehemently opposed to any growth in the city of Boston because growth of the country, like growth and expansion out west meant profit and growth in Boston meant taxes to them and that fundamental tension that existed.


ANNA

Oh, my God.


NOAM

Absolutely. I couldn't put it better myself.


ANNA

So before we go on, I'm going to just bust right in here and say that we really, really appreciate our monthly donors who allow us to keep this podcast, not just the recordings, which we of course do for free. Nobody here is paid, but allow our three young assistants to do our graphic design; to cut the videos, including cutting a bunch of different pieces for TikTok and for other places; they do all the social media posting and they basically make sure that everything that we talk about here in this progressive media is able to get to you and your friends and your allies and everywhere that you might be, everywhere that progressives might be.


And, you know, we really have a dearth of progressive media here in Massachusetts. We are one of those few places you can go to always hear the news about what's going on both nationally and here in the state. And so if you can, if you're not one of those monthly donors, you're welcome to just click the link below, you know, pay for your cup of coffee a week or something, pop that into the show, make sure that you, you're gonna get a really special feeling when you're listening to the show and you're like, you know what? I'm one of those donors. You're gonna feel great.


That being said, we've got two more points that I want to make sure that we cover. So we're gonna cover the future, and Noam's thoughts about the future, given his understanding of history. I love talking to historians about the future because they have this whole context of, well, let's see. This is what happened already. So we can take some lessons from there.


Then I'm just going to open it by saying that one of the podcasts that I listened to is, you know, really talking about the possibility because of Donald Trump's— the effect on the economy that the tariffs, the on-tariffs, the off-tariffs, on-tariffs, off-tariffs, as well as his belligerent attitude toward many different countries, like we're going to annex Greenland and Canada and other places that he has talked about annexing, aside from Gaza, now is going to become a part of the United States. And all of these things where he is offending many different countries, and then popping tariffs on everyone that, you know, why shouldn't everybody, maybe all other countries are just gonna start working with each other and stop working with us.


And that would change completely the economic foundation of the world economy because the dollar is currently the sort of most stable thing that people rely on all around the world. So this question of, wow, are we looking at the end of the American empire? Really? Economic empire is the question. And that's the sort of dire question. And as soon as we talk about that, we're going to talk about something more optimistic. So make sure you're correct. But I would love to hear your thoughts about that first.


NOAM

I mean, first I would say we already touched on the kind of romanticized version of the Gilded Age that Trump is perhaps wistful for, and how that is a kind of misreading of the period because it erases a lot of the democratic aspects of the period. So the late 19th century is indeed a period of massive industrialization and development in the United States. But I would say, Jonathan already mentioned the tendency to move into extractive industries.


So the big money likes these extractive industries where you can get safe and quick returns. If we're thinking about American development more broadly, where do you get the engineers? Where do you get the know-how? Where do you get the more the manufacturing industries that rely on people's knowledge and training, you have to kind of bring in the other side of the equation. You have to bring in the democratic grassroots pressure for an education system, for urban infrastructure, for corporate regulation, for anti-monopoly, for progressive taxation. A lot of those things also come out of the Gilded Age.


So I think progressives have a lot in terms of a legacy from that period to also claim— and I would definitely argue that there's a legacy there that reinforces them way more than the tech entrepreneurs who are currently kind of claiming that the high ground. I think let's look at the legacy of the period much more broadly. And I'm not here to— I don't think the point for progressives is to defend American empire. The point is to defend American democracy and American prosperity at home.


And I think this is, there's a lot in this period that can provide us with guidance. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox for policymakers, a lot of things that are deeply entrenched in that are not foreign, that are in the American political system, in deeply entrenched in American legal culture, the policymaker’s toolbox is very rich coming out of that period, things that were used to harness the power and to regulate the monopolies of the late 19th century, they can again be used and wielded in very productive and developmental ways to also harness the power of today's monopolies, whether it's through breaking them apart in some cases, in other cases regulating them to make sure that they serve the public purpose, and maybe in some other cases basically moving— I talk in the book a lot about financial investment, making sure that financial investment goes into productive sectors that benefit the population rather than into crypto speculation, other things of that nature.


JONATHAN

No, and one thing what you're saying in terms of the pushback that existed in the Gilded Age, and you talk about that in the book, is like the one thing that is, that is some can give some degree of hope amidst like the not-great political climate or situation exists now is throughout history, when people realize that they're being screwed by a bunch of rich people who have no connection to anything on the ground, they typically end up at some point, whether sooner or later, organizing to try to wrest power away from them and to try to like that kind of tension before between democracy and capitalism.


NOAM

They started running about that.


JONATHAN

They attempted pushback.


ANNA

Oh wait, they didn't have podcasts back then.


NOAM

And yes, in the book there are many, many figures like this who basically had no illusions about market-driven systems somehow miraculously generating prosperity for everyone. They realized, no, we need to mobilize politically and with the right kinds of institutions, the right kind of regulation, the right kind of infrastructure and policies in place, we can harness the power of private forces to serve the public good. This is not something that just kind of automatically happens through the invisible hand or whatever other myth people like to propagate.


I should also mention, if we're talking about progressive goals, I'm co-organizing a big conference in Cambridge, UK in a few weeks. called Beyond Neoliberalism, really trying to think constructively, think optimistically, hopefully, about the future, kind of bringing in the best minds from history, political science, economists, lawyers, policymakers, journalists, to basically try to forge together an alternative, a progressive alternative to what we're seeing today and some of the lessons do emerge from the 19th century.


And I think it is ultimately a very optimistic message that if the political power will be there, if the political will is there, there are definitely, there's a lot that we can do. The notion that we live in a, and I think this is maybe another kind of lesson of history that a lot of the things— the fundamental lesson, a lot of the things that we just take for granted, that we just take as givens, that are just part of the landscape — for example, the notion that there is a suburb that is not beholden to the metropolis more broadly that has a kind of separate tax base — that this is actually the product of political struggles that took place in the past.


In the same way that should empower us in the future or in the present and in the future to think about, okay, we can take up these struggles, we can change some of the things that seem deeply entrenched. And there's a lot in American history, including in the so-called Gilded Age, has a very bad reputation, but including in that period, there are a lot of things that can inspire us today to go after monopolies, go after concentrated wealth, go after these people who really seem almost invisible.


ANNA

Absolutely. I myself have said I'm an inevitable or unquenchable optimist, and so, that is just part of my personality.


JONATHAN

And I do, and I do really like that as that key lesson in history is that when you think about anything that exists now, any institution or structure or kind of general aspect of kind of society, economy, or governance, it exists not because it exists. It exists because somebody wanted it to, and somebody might have also not wanted it to. And that creates a certain degree of malleability that gives that ability to kind of to shape what comes in the future from it.


ANNA

Wonderful. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you, Noam Maggor, for coming on. It's been fantastic talking to you.


JONATHAN

Thank you for the conversation. People want to read Nomagura's book.


ANNA

Oh, please read Nomagura's book. There it is on screen, Brahmin Capitalism. And any closing words for anybody? Wonderful. Thank you all so much. Wonderful to have this chat. And we thank all of our listeners as well. Feel free to forward this on to your friends, and we will see you all next week.