America's New ‘Gilded Age’
What we can learn from a time of dizzying technological innovation, global tension, rampant anti-immigration rhetoric and barons consolidating power.
Corruption and innovation. Excessive economic divides. Populist rhetoric and anti-immigration legislation, with oligarchs running amok in politics.
We’ve been here before.
It describes America’s Gilded Age, so dubbed by Mark Twain (and now portrayed on HBO), when world altering technology like the lightbulb, typewriter, and telecommunications came to the fore, economic divides soared, and politicians demagogued immigration.
It also sounds a lot like our current political moment. Then, as now, we see rapid technological innovation and disruption (like AI), global tension (from conflict in the Middle East to Ukraine) and harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. And like the Gilded Age, barons are popping their heads up and seizing influence.
Like Elon Musk.
Last Friday, I was asked by BBC to speak about Musk’s influence in the 2024 Presidential election. He could have enormous sway, particularly in Pennsylvania, a state that has been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing, and where he is flirting with investment. I recalled a 2010 visit where President Obama and Musk walked side by side admiring early SpaceX rockets.
How fast things change.
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In 2010, at Cape Canaveral, Florida we were planning a visit for President Obama to NASA and a tour of private space innovations.
President Obama was set to announce the end of a Bush-era Constellation program that he said was over budget and behind schedule. Part of President Obama’s solution was announcing a greater need to collaborate with private companies on space exploration.
Elon Musk led one such company, SpaceX, and it had a rocket we could tour for press photographs. It was a photo opportunity that could tell a story: Private space innovation was efficient and effective. Musk walked with President Obama, geeking out about the technology. There was no sign Musk wanted to dive into the political fray, never mind the manic, speculative and highly partisan rants of recent weeks.
I do look back and wonder about our responsibility to giving fuel to a modern day baron.
It’s also interesting to me that back then — and with Tesla — Musk’s popularity was with a more liberal crowd, determined to tackle climate change and intrigued by the inventions of Space explorations, satellites and telecommunications.
Musk’s evolution and more public positions on politics were slow, but more pronounced during the pandemic. Musk, frustrated with restrictions in California, moved his base of operations to Texas, took on a more stark tone, and after government regulators took him on and Democrats took concern with his anti-Union positions, he started moving farther right.
It was the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump that won Musk’s endorsement. An endorsement that now has him a hero of the MAGA movement (or ‘dark MAGA’ as he proclaimed) and has him suggesting he himself will knock doors for Trump in Pennsylvania.
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While we’ve seen the rise of tech barons like Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the Gilded Age — which spanned from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900s — saw the rise of J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, among others.
Modern day tech barons are behind incredible inventions improving our communication and infrastructure — sun-produced power that can be stored in batteries, driverless cars, satellite internet, goods delivered to your home with a click of a button, an interconnected world.
Some of the names of the Gilded Age would forever change our communications and infrastructure: it was the time of the invention of the telephone, phonograph, typewriter, lightbulbs. Steel infrastructure led to skyscrapers, the invention of the automobile changed transportation and railroads expanded supply chains and American opportunities.
Those opportunities — and economic gains — were not shared by all. It was because of heightened economic disparities that an assortment of organizations, including the American Federation of Labor, came about. Politicians adopted populist rhetoric. An anti-baron sentiment would grow, but more often the blame was on the outsiders.
There was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1882 and the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 that between them barred certain immigrants from specific countries or with a criminal history, taxed immigrants and denied immigration based on their ideology.
Fake news was also a thing: Yellow journalism drew eyeballs and helped heighten global conflict, it spread false stories, inflamed public sentiment, and created a fear that would lead to the American-Spanish war.
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Today it’s hard sometimes to know what to believe.
Elon Musk is a hero to some in America; someone they want to invest in manufacturing in their hometown or home state. To others, he’s a lunatic, someone who takes extreme positions, has troubled relationships even with his own children, and weighs into conversations with artificial intelligence memes or disinformation. So is he a hero of invention or a lunatic who spreads misinformation? Both could be true.
The Barons who built the Gilded Age, troubled as some of them were, would have legacies that would last far beyond their era. It also led to rightful speculation of how to change the consolidation of wealth and power in America.
While there’s worry that the political divides of today mimic the divisions around the Civil War, it’s fascinating to look at the similarities between the era just following the Civil War, because the Gilded Age is when America is still divided, Barons gained power, while fact-based news was hard to get.
The Gilded Age doesn’t have just one day or one Presidency, or one event that ended it. It slowly faded; out of it grew the Progressive Era where labor reforms and regulation would begin to balance the imbalance of the time.
In many ways it shows just what has always happened in America when we see change: The pendulum swings.
With just three weeks left, voters are casting ballots now. Some trust in one baron or another. Some think one leader or another can solve it all. But this period of invention and division — we’ve been here before — and it was a lot of things, not just one day or one election, that led to change.
That’s perhaps an important reminder to think about as we near Election Day.
Beautifully worded Johanna (i am a history buff so i really enjoyed your gilded age theme). We’ve had terrible disagreements in Congress before where it got to the point where a Senator was severely beaten with a cane by a Congressman right on the Senate floor. We came so close to literally becoming a divided nation in the 1860’s. But even if that had come to pass, it would have resulted in two democracies.
No other time in our history have we been under the threat of our democracy being overthrown, resulting in an autocracy.
I pray that there are enough men and women of good conscience that will deliver us from this danger.