Commentary on Gilded Ages, Now and Then

Abstract

The skyrocketing separation of the richest Americans from the rest amidst a political and cultural discourse that celebrates the individual and the unquestioned wisdom of the free market has many commentators comparing our time to the Gilded Age of 100 years ago. It is an apt comparison. W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1935) assessment of this era, found in the chapter from his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America 1860– 1880 titled “The Counter-Revolution of Property” could also describe our era, with lives lived amidst the products of mass production, the domination of politics by corporations, economic booms and busts, labor markets divided by race and gender, and misery in this world of plenty. Painter (1987, p. xx) reports that in pre-federal income tax 1890 the top 1 % of families owned 51 % of the real and personal property, a figure that resonates with today’s 99 % Movement. Given the contradictions and crises we face in the early twenty-first century it is not surprising that historical archaeologists are interested in this earlier period. This earlier “Gilded Age,” like ours, was comprised of complex array of forces shaping life. Symptomatic of this complexity is that different scholars of the first Gilded Age, including authors in this collection, provide different date ranges to encompass these processes, depending upon which they foreground: a short politically defined Gilded Age (1876–1914), a longer Gilded Age from slavery America to imperial America (1865–1914), or an even longer phase of the social and ideological consolidation of capitalism (1789–1914) (Wallerstein 2011). Among the forces a century and more ago were: