For America, a new ‘golden age’, or a gilded one?

A contemporary image of Twain’s 1873 “Tale of Today”

There he stood, giving a speech to supporters. The counting continued, but the trend made victory obvious. On the night of November 5, Donald Trump declared:

And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future, every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body, I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America, that's what we have to have (emphasis added).

Just before election day, Ruchir Sharma, who chairs Rockefeller International, an arm of the Rockefeller family investment office, wrote a column for the Financial Times with a headline that declared “The US economic boom is a mirage”. He continued:

Times look good but this growth is lopsided, brittle and heavily dependent on spending and borrowing by the government, which is typically the lender of last resort. ...

Discretionary spending is becoming a luxury for the wealthy, and so is optimism. Confidence collapsed during the pandemic and has since recovered much more strongly for the richest third of consumers than for the middle or bottom thirds. ... 

Increasingly, America is a gilded economy, with a shiny but thin veneer (emphasis added).

Which is it to be? Golden? Or merely gilded?

There was a time in American history that economic historians and writers often call “The Gilded Age”. The label originated with a story Mark Twain published with that title in 1873. Its subtitle: “A Tale of Today.”

By the 1920s, after World War One had ended and some of the excesses of industrialisation were evident, it was clear that America’s economy – powered by the railroads, the automobile, steelmaking, oil – was making some people very rich. J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon. In old age, all four became philanthropists, and their fortunes continue to fund good works around the world. Skyscrapers shot up in Chicago first, New York, and then the rest of the country. Trump Tower in New York is a pastiche of them, inaugurated in 1983.

The Gilded Age was a time of big tariffs and small government, a policy choice designed to foster industrial growth and prevent America from getting entangled in the troubles between other states. Those troubles were largely ones in Europe, where communism challenged the old land-based aristocratic and emerging industrial sources of economic power. In America, business was free to do what it wished, and monopolies reigned supreme.

But it was also a time when mechanisation made the work of ordinary people more precarious and often dangerous. Trade unions started to mobilise, strikes and strikebreaking became a sign of the lack of relationship between the sources of capital and labour. And World War One had ended only with America’s reluctant intervention and made a start at bigger government with a bit of expertise.

The Gilded Age was reflected in the novels of the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby seems to encapsulate the gilded side. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street captured the rusting side.

In the “Writer’s Almanac” for October 23, 2013 (republished in Substack on October 23, 2024, just ahead of the election day when Trump would celebrate his second coming), the humourist Garrison Keillor wrote about how the social critique in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street fell afoul of the propriety of the elites in America’s first Gilded Age. He said:

In 1921, the Pulitzer committee unanimously recommended Main Street, but the trustees of Columbia University vetoed it and instead chose Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, which they praised for its “wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Lewis was annoyed, but he admired Wharton and sent her a sincere congratulatory letter.” 

But it seems Wharton wasn’t all that pleased to have received the prize, at least under those circumstances,

… since the trustees thought her novel was praising a way of life she meant to be criticizing; she responded to Lewis: "When I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair. Subsequently, when I found the prize should really have been yours, but was withdrawn because your book (I quote from memory) had 'offended a number of prominent persons in the Middle West,' disgust was added to despair."

Writing just after the 2024 election results, the University of Texas political scientist Don Kettl argued in a Substack post that the American political landscape – left and right – has turning against experts. It’s true in other parts for the world too. He explained:

The road to this crusade begins in the late 19th century, with the Gilded Age government beset by challenges on all sides. Monopolists kept competitors out and prices high. People were getting sick from contaminants in the food chain. The Gilded Age wasn’t gilded for factory workers, paid so poorly that they piled up in tenements. One part of New York City, in fact, had 330,000 people crowded into one square mile. Farmers were convinced that big bankers were choking off the ability to borrow money to finance their crops. People wanted the government to solve these problems. The government had neither the power nor expertise to do so (emphasis added).

We know what happened next: The Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a second World War. Expertise is what you need to regulate, to keep the train on the track, to head off disasters and recover from them when they hit. In short, to govern.

And World War Two ended only with America’s reluctant intervention and a bigger government with much greater expertise.

The “golden age” Trump promises sounds a lot like the “Gilded Age”, in which a thin layer of gold makes the base metals beneath seem to shine. Trump’s various hotels are known for their gilded interiors.

Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Garrison Keillor, Ruchir Sharma, and Don Kettl all seem to warn us: We may be heading for a new gilded age, not a golden one, a return to an older, glittering time, yes, but as Shakespeare reminded us “All that glisters is not gold.” (The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene VII).  It too is a warning about …