The Gilded Age Never Ended

When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.

What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act.

How to make sense of their age and ours, one Gilded Age long gone and one now getting stripped of its shine? Henry James—famous for his timidity, his fastidiousness, his suspicion of anything meretricious or gaudy—might seem an unusual figure to lead this investigation, but he does just that in Peter Brooks’s new book, “Henry James Comes Home” (New York Review). Brooks tells the story of James’s return to America in 1904 and his observations of the country, after his happy childhood in pre-Civil War New York and his sojourns in Paris and London. The study is a companion piece to a volume that Brooks, an emeritus professor at Yale, wrote almost two decades ago, the wonderful “Henry James Goes to Paris.” That book sought to understand why James, an abiding Francophile and a prescient admirer of French modernism, could not make a home for himself in Paris in the eighteen-seventies. Brooks offered, on James’s behalf, some finely wrought speculations about the deceptively open nature of Parisian intellectual life which remain true to this day.

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This book is not as good as that one, in part because it is more narrowly moralistic, with too much tut-tutting about New York as it was, and in part because, where the Parisian story had to be extracted from letters and novels, this story is one that James himself laid out in a published account of his return, “The American Scene.” Inevitably, the job is given over more to paraphrase and gloss than to original narrative. We miss James’s mature prose, the tension between endless fuss and decisive lucidity, the beautiful Whistlerian fog that somehow lifts just long enough to show us things exactly as they are. Because the fog sometimes turns out to be the actual transmitter of illumination—the clarity rising from within the confusions—any simple summary or attempt to distill objective lessons betrays his mind. James was a racist of a sort, while also an advocate for the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois. He could be anti-immigrant and vestigially antisemitic; his visit to Ellis Island and the Lower East Side is one of the more disagreeable things in all his writing. (The “denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.”) But he was too intelligent not to recognize that the energy and purpose of the new New Yorkers would eventually overwhelm that of his class and kind.

It is easy to become impatient with James, since the beautiful confusions sometimes recede to reveal simple hypocrisies. James (and Brooks after him) rasps indignant at the “cottages” built in Newport by members of the nouveau regime—he was thinking of Vanderbilt and Whitney. But James rhapsodized about the stately homes of England, which differed mainly in having been built centuries instead of minutes before. “Of all the great things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character,” he wrote, “the most perfect . . . is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house.” England, not just America, was full of newly ascendant plutocrats, something that James himself acknowledged at the beginning of “The Portrait of a Lady,” when a lovingly detailed country house turns out to be the recent acquisition of a man with a freshly minted fortune. James had a weakness for new money that bought old houses, rather than new money that built its own.

And then James had loved the New York of his childhood, which he beautifully detailed in his memoir “Notes of a Son and Brother.” The new New York he saw rising around him was, to his mind, uglier and coarser. But this holds true for everyone in every period, even when the New York we cherished in our youth was roundly condemned in its day as uglier and coarser than any that had ever been before. For those of us who first got to know New York in the “Taxi Driver” hellscape of the nineteen-seventies, the city was also irresistibly full of artistic explosions in neighborhoods like SoHo, while the last sweet renaissance of American swing was blooming beautifully in the still-cheap supper clubs. Now with all these things vanished, along with the bookstores and repertory cinemas, the city seems impoverished and disfigured. James remembered Fourteenth Street and Barnum’s museum in its heyday and could see no point in the new Fifth Avenue. This is a cycle that never ends.

Though James never uses the term “plutocrat,” plutocratic America is what he was examining. To what extent were his plutocrats like ours? The Gilded Age plutocrats made their money in steel (Carnegie), oil (Rockefeller), mining (Frick), and railroads (Vanderbilt), but in the main their business models were not so different from those of their counterparts today. Musk makes most of his money in hard industrial goods, mainly cars and satellites, while losing money on the digital-media front—just as that other carmaker, Henry Ford, futilely poured money into his antisemitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Bezos, meanwhile, made much of his money by finding new ways for consumers to shop for more goods more efficiently while forcing smaller retailers out of business, exactly like Wanamaker and Woolworth in their day.

Yet real differences persist. The typical plutocrat who built the America, and particularly the New York, that James visited was a businessman with almost absolute freedom to act, and his political power was enormous. (It is worth recalling that Hitler’s constant insult to the democratic governments of Britain and America was that they were simply screens for predatory plutocrats.) Yet these men’s behavior was tightly circumscribed, at least in appearance. The plutocrats of the first Gilded Age were mostly content to influence from a distance, through intermediaries. For one thing, they were busy and living far away from Washington, at a time when that still mattered. For another, discretion had political advantages. When J. P. Morgan met with President Grover Cleveland in 1895, to discuss a deal to supply the government with gold while enriching Morgan’s syndicate with government-issued bonds, it was a scandal that contributed to Cleveland’s ouster the following year. Bezos and Musk have made a bet that increasing their economic power requires increasing their political power, in a fairly direct way.

There is another difference between their plutocrats then and ours today. Our plutocrats despise the arts as an emblem of the cautious, encumbering ancien régime they reject. But James’s plutocrats respected art, even if their motive was just to buy their way into the upper classes, and they did this by collecting the Old Masters or by opening libraries or building concert halls. The history of Gilded Age philanthropy is genuinely remarkable, and although it is easy to dismiss Rockefeller’s motivation for starting the University of Chicago or Frick’s reason for collecting Bellini as the empty acts of aging villains—arthritis producing altruism—they did ennoble the public realm. It is no accident that our great concert hall is called Carnegie, nor that, stuck in traffic round one of our greatest public spaces, Grand Central Terminal, we halt in front of a statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Indeed, to a first approximation, the most notable examples of New York architecture are plutocratic projects from the first Gilded Age or its aftermath, whether the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the first great skyscrapers, most of which are associated with individuals like Woolworth. They are triumphs of the capitalist imagination as much as the Gothic cathedral is of the Catholic imagination, and no less for it. One need only visit the Met’s newly reinstalled American Wing to delight in the restored Gilded Age interiors—the La Farge and Tiffany glass pieces are ineffable objects of delicate beauty, as poetic in their way as the marriage chests that we are asked to admire in Medici Florence. Plutocrats they may have been; philistines they were not.

Some are too easily forgotten. The grand master and manager of Penn Station, Alexander Cassatt, was among the most interesting men of the time. Brother to the great painter Mary (she was the rare American who, unlike James, did enter inner Parisian circles in the eighteen-seventies), and one of the first collectors of French Impressionist painting in America, he was both an engineer and an aesthete, combining an appreciation for the less visible work of public good with the unmissable acts of plutocratic ostentation. While building the old Penn Station in the image of the Baths of Caracalla, in Rome, he was also responsible for the construction of the railroad tunnels under the Hudson on which we still depend—as wholly admirable a modern Medici as one can hope to find.

Today’s plutocrat, on the other hand, sees the cultural élite as part of the burdensome past. One prophetic peculiarity of Donald Trump’s rise in New York was his scanting of any philanthropic role—those who did fill that role, as he felt acutely, had rejected him. Almost uniquely among New York real-estate tycoons, he never served on the board of any important cultural institution—at least until he staged a coup at the Kennedy Center. There will be no Trump museums, except those devoted to his glory.

This turn away from patronage has been gradual, evolutionary, and partial. David Geffen could still play the classic plutocratic part a decade ago, using a fortune that he’d made in entertainment to sustain the permanence of art, while Bezos clearly was on his way to the older role—the purchase of the Washington Post was a classic plutocratic gesture, the billionaire saving an American institution—when the new reality caught up with him. Where the plutocrats of the first Gilded Age built the New York we love, our own plutocratic class has scarcely built a monument or public building of beauty.

Everyone likes anarchists. When Charlie Chaplin called the Marx Brothers “anarchists,” it was taken as high praise. Insert an anarchist philosopher into a play and he will walk away with the action. Indeed, in Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia,” the anarchist Bakunin, played by Ethan Hawke on Broadway, always upstaged the actual hero of the play, the liberal Herzen. Bakunin’s character was not merely more leonine; he was more lovable. The anarchist Emma Goldman’s autobiography remains read nearly a century after its first appearance and is one of the golden books of its time—in its novelistic detailing and historical sweep, it’s a superior “Reds.” Meanwhile, the memoirs of the humbler Fabian politicians of the day are left to the dry dust of secondhand bookstores. Anarchists were fierce but somehow funny. In the silent-movie era, they were still so much a part of the fabric of American life, or at least of its mythology, that a Billy West comedy centered on the pitching back and forth of anarchist bombs, those bowling balls with lit fuses, and Buster Keaton innocently turned the same kind of bomb into a cigarette lighter in his film “Cops.”

This despite the reality that what the Gilded Age anarchists mostly did was kill people, or try to, and mostly pointlessly. The Haymarket anarchists in Chicago in the eighteen-nineties may not all have been directly responsible for the bombs that killed seven policemen on a fateful day, but at least one of them had certainly built the bombs. Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley, in Buffalo, was inspired in part by Emma Goldman, who later wrote in his defense. And Goldman herself—under the crucial influence of the anarchist philosopher Johann Most, who impressed on her the anarchist ideal of “propaganda of the deed”—worked hard on a plan to kill Frick, sending her lover, Alexander Berkman, off to Pittsburgh with a revolver that he didn’t know how to use. Neither Goldman nor Berkman knew anyone in the labor unions that were striking against Frick, nor ever asked them if his assassination would be helpful to their cause. (It wasn’t; it only helped turn popular opinion against the unions.) But few remember the organizers who in the same period helped build the American union movement, while Emma Goldman’s name still rings.

Why is this so? Henry James, once again, explored the allure of anarchy in what may be his finest Gilded Age novel, “The Princess Casamassima”—this one a major book by a great author with a hard-to-remember title. Published in 1886, it tells the story of a young man, improbably named Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes entangled in an almost love affair with a radical-chic aristocrat, the princess of the title. It’s notable that the names of the characters in this book about violence and poverty are pure, high James: Hyacinth Robinson, Paul Muniment, Christina Light (the princess), Lady Aurora Langrish—these are meant to key us into the fact that this is thoroughly stylized fiction, less a realist novel than an allegory of anarchism and its temptations.

“O.K., I’ll eat decaying organic matter with you, but it’s not a date.”

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Hyacinth has a dark background (his mother has murdered his father and is now in prison), and he has become involved with an anarchist philosopher named Hoffendahl, who has entrusted him with a nebulous plan to assassinate someone important, though Hyacinth isn’t sure who. The princess is a philanthropist who has taken a subversive turn, and whose purpose is to elevate Hyacinth, whom she flirts with without ever consummating the affair. James is quite tough-minded about the limits of radical chic. To the princess, “it’s an amusement, like any other,” Hyacinth’s anarchist minder, Paul Muniment, says dismissively, and we are meant to think he’s right.

Though the novel is European rather than American in setting, what is remarkable and universal is the connection drawn between the aestheticism of Hyacinth’s nature and the magnetism that anarchism holds for him. Much of the novel is taken up by Hyacinth waiting to learn what his mission is while discussing with the princess the necessity of some mission. Hyacinth is drawn to the propaganda of the deed not for any specific purpose but because it is the fulfillment of the romantic ideal. With Marxism tainted by its aggressive materialism, and mere democratic socialism so mere, anarchism could be imagined as a series of defiant spiritual acts. This is both the contradiction and the appeal of Goldman’s memoirs. Famous for her love of dancing and celebration and her rejection of the puritanical side of the Marxist inheritance, she saw no contradiction between that sensuality and random acts of violence directed against the plutocrats. They were both steps in the same dance.

Hyacinth has a harder time reconciling his political convictions with his increasing love of beautiful objects, a struggle that culminates in a trip to Venice in which he writes to the princess and bemoans, in a voice improbably like James’s own, the contradiction between the beauty he loves and the social creed to which he is committed: “There are things I shall be too sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I tell you le fond de ma pensée, as you used to say?—I feel myself capable of fighting for them.” He means “the monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilization as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which all the same the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable.”

At one level, the novel is a simple saga of a hero’s choice: pursuing beauty with the princess in a Venice of the mind or advancing democracy with the anarchist Muniment through the murder of a stranger. As Muniment instructs him, the assassination will be a purely theatrical action: it will be helpful to the democrats that “the classes that keep them down shall be admonished from time to time that they have a very definite and very determined intention of doing so.” The anarchist act is meant as an ornamental admonishment, not as an actual accomplishment.

Yet as the novel moves along, and the target chosen for Hyacinth by his anarchist superiors—an unnamed duke—hovers into view, the tangle of motives becomes subtler. We see that the appeal of the anarchists is essentially churchlike, akin to the appeal of Catholicism in parallel nineteenth-century novels and lives, rooted in the seductiveness of mystery and of obedience. “I was hanging about outside on the steps of the temple, among the loafers and the gossips, but now I have been in the innermost sanctuary,” Hyacinth says of his assignment, and the language is ironic only because it italicizes the original religious spirit so well: “I have seen the holy of holies.” Just as the Catholic Church would hold a perverse appeal to the decadents of the period, eventually drawing in figures as seemingly resistant as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, anarchism held out a similar enchantment at the other end of the political spectrum. Catholicism offers ritual without the tedium of rationality; anarchism offers revolutionary action against inequality without the taint of materialism, the prospect of personal gain. Anarchist violence is an unworldly action, a protest against fallen existence itself on behalf of the possibility of a beautiful life, rather than an act of practical and therefore mundane consequence. Indeed, the future that Hyacinth thinks will be secured by the anarchist assassinations is comically innocent: a “vision of societies where, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked of art, literature and history.”

This double nature, both appealing in its sweetness of soul and alarming in its lack of realism about what a program of public murder can achieve, is central to the first Gilded Age’s anarchist philosophy. Prince Kropotkin’s famous condensation of anarchist beliefs, “The Conquest of Bread,” is notable today for its techno-optimism. The world has been conquered, agriculture is amazing, we can do anything now: “The wild plants, which yielded nought but acrid berries, or uneatable roots, have been transformed into succulent vegetables or trees covered with delicious fruits. Thousands of highways and railroads furrow the earth and pierce the mountains.” (In the same spirit, the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, in the first decade of the twentieth century, “Combustion engines and rubber tires are divine!”) Yet this complacent optimism sat side by side with an apocalyptic appetite for random assassination, the propaganda of the deed. Anarchists offered a perpetually moving Möbius strip, encouraging violent acts and dreaming of abundant dinners, shooting emperors in the back while dancing in their hallways.

It is perhaps unsurprising to find that the ideology of anarchism is anarchic. What is surprising is to find it so hardy and contagious. For, as our plutocrats become ever more like oligarchs, the philosophy that they embrace is ever more anarchic—with the same mixture of technological utopianism and technological apocalypticism. Today’s fascination with destruction and disruption is continuous with the passion of the anarchists. Musk and Mangione bear a striking stylistic resemblance, that combination of rakishness and slightly deranged intensity, the weird self-satisfaction of the crooked smile—the troll, in the Internet sense, who looks like a terrorist and a boy-band member at the same time.

How is it that we have plutocrats who play the role of anarchists? Billionaires want to burn down the system that gave them their billions—even though recently arrived immigrants of the kind who fathered certain startups would have a much harder time creating businesses in systems with no rule of law, where you have to grow up knowing who the bosses are and must pay them bribes from the beginning. The biggest plutocrats of the first Gilded Age, for all their brutalities, played an essentially stabilizing role from behind the scenes—the Cardinal Richelieu role, the wise banker in the background. A role that J. P. Morgan helped perfect, it’s a billionaire fantasy of benevolence which runs right through a mythological figure like Bruce Wayne.

But Musk, like Trump, is a Joker, with the comedy and tragedy masks flipping deliriously around. G. K. Chesterton’s great Gilded Age anarchist novel of 1908, “The Man Who Was Thursday,” defined this doubleness. All the anarchists in a hyper-powerful ring that is the secret engine of Europe are secretly policemen—or is it that the secret policemen are actually indoctrinated anarchists? Both are true. Chesterton was officially against anarchism, of course, but he was against it in a way that fully accepted its allure; the anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois materialism is so obviously attractive, so close to the holy, that, though evil, it is irresistible. The appetite for romantic destruction is the flip side of the desire for authoritarian order, and, like the Joker’s merry grin and sadistic grimace, one comes right after the other so quickly that they can’t be told apart. (It is also significant that steampunk, the projection of today’s concerns into an imaginary world of late-nineteenth-century technology, is the signature surrealism of our time.)

Then, as now, the real work of reform was done in large part from the ground up, via the creation of unglamorous organizations like local Rotary Clubs, which, as the political scientist Robert Putnam has pointed out, amassed enormous social capital for progressive causes by . . . holding lunches. Meanwhile, the glamorous forces of resistance had largely absorbed the tastes of their supposed opposites in the plutocratic caste. They expected the people to admire wild and ostentatious assassinations in the same way that people admired the jewel-studded shirt front of Diamond Jim Brady. Mangione, after all, has been charged with shooting an unarmed stranger in the back, just as James’s Hyacinth is expected to do, and his public aura is clearly tied to our longing for clear, clean acts of assertion on the part of vaguely defined purposes—what an earlier generation would have celebrated as existential actions, however self-defeating or cruel.

This Gilded Age rule—that those who act violently against individuals inherit the mantle of religious martyrdom, while those who act practically to improve a system are dismissed as impotent proceduralists—is visible in the continued appeal of the anarchist imagination. Whatever it is they’re accomplishing, they’re not just holding lunches. Spending our lives captivated by glittering façades and hypnotic spectacles, we dream of the one decisive act that will break us from our chains, even if, in fact, it forges only another link within them. It is a permanent move in our modernity.

The first Gilded Age, though its injustices were remedied in part by the Progressive movement, was suspended decisively only with the arrival of the Great War, and what is so ominous about that conclusion is that the victims believed, even before it began, that the war would be the ultimate act of creative destruction, a weapon against decadent materialism. People in Britain, France, and Germany were convinced that their countries, along with Europe itself, would be better off if they burned everything down, cleared out the rot, and started over. What they got was suffering and destruction on a scale that still staggers the imagination.

At the time, the cleansing-fire credo was slower spreading to America, where the war came later and cost much less, and, indeed, ushered in something like yet another Gilded Age, the Jazz Age of the twenties, built on cheap credit and with its own cast of tycoon characters. (Throughout that decade, the Secretary of the Treasury was Andrew Mellon, who had assembled a banking empire and who, like his father, was a business partner of Frick’s.) We have lived within the insulation of the abundance that began then and, despite the Depression that soon followed, became a nearly permanent part of the American condition.

If the outcome of this new Gilded Age seems likely to be dark, it is perhaps because we have fallen into the trap that Europe fell into in 1914, the belief that by burning down flawed institutions we can somehow relight a charismatic glow. They didn’t, and we won’t. The real riddle of the Gilded Age, then and now, is that, by objective historical standards, both times were as close to golden as any age can get. The onset of the first Gilded Age corresponds to the greatest uptick in common prosperity in the known history of humankind, while our own age, despite its persistent inequities, is at least as astonishing in the global expansion of prosperity. The common people of 1900 were far wealthier than the common people of 1860. But they were not wrong to sense that they were not participating adequately in the prosperity. As Tocqueville demonstrated long ago, we grade our well-being on a curve. Rising expectations, not mass immiseration, produce revolutionary sentiments. If we feel ourselves victims of injustice and inequality, the practical effect is that we are.

To say that America is, across the quintiles, an incredibly wealthy nation and that, on the whole, it has been a well-run nation is almost taboo. We point to obvious deficiencies, from one political side or the other: we don’t build enough housing in big cities, we don’t pay workers enough, everyone should have health care. Or: the family is collapsing, what’s become of our subways, why can’t we stop the shoplifters? All of these are problems open to, so to speak, lunchtime solutions, but we dream instead of all-night fires. We want to burn the system down, it seems, in part because it works too well for people we don’t like.

Every modern age is known by the medievalism it spawns. The first Gilded Age swooned over the melancholy maidens and poesy-minded, grail-seeking Galahads of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” and so it is perhaps striking that our own medievalist saga, the “Game of Thrones” cycle on television, with its spinoff and its knockoffs, is notably more brutal and less aesthetic than any that has come before. When the most beautiful church in King’s Landing blows up, all we see is Queen Cersei, celebrating sneeringly with a glass of wine. The same brutal philistinism of the new Gilded Age as we have come to know it—that of Trumpism, as of the Putinism it admires—is essential to its ideology: there is only power and domination, dragons and destruction, and anything more is a fool’s deception. Hierarchies of power are intrinsic to human societies, no doubt, and sometimes the best we can hope for is that those on top become devoted to a higher ideal of education or common welfare or simple beauty. Without that impulse, we live in a truly barren time. Golden is better than gilded, but even gilt is better than iron. ♦