The Gilded Age Unravels

The dot-com(eth) and also goeth away. As the “new economy” sinks beneath the horizon and those stock options vaporize, it may be time to trade in the Lexus for something, let us say, less showy-perhaps even knock a wing or two off the blueprints for that 7,500-square-foot houseleum in the hills. Wall Street trembles. The Nasdaq is in free fall. Indices of economic gloom gather like ghosts at a funeral. Portents are everywhere that America’s latest Gilded Age may be coming to an end.

Mark Twain invented the notion of a gilded age. At least the phrase has passed down to us from his first novel, “The Gilded Age” (which he wrote with his good friend Charles Dudley Warner). Published in 1873, it was an instant bestseller. A year later, a dramatic version opened on Broadway, where it became a smash hit that then toured the country. People found it uproariously funny, and it still seems that way now. Twain captured the ridiculousness, the cant and the pretentiousness of a post-Civil War America in which “the air is full of money, nothing but money, money floating through the air.”

Like all good satire, “The Gilded Age” carried a high-voltage moral charge. Twain and Warner sought to skewer a society that Walt Whitman at just that moment condemned in “Democratic Vistas” as “cankered, crude, superstitious, and rotten...,” overwhelmed by an insatiable greed for money, land and power. Money lust and the strange tragicomic behavior it elicits have excited the imaginations of historians, memoirists and novelists writing about that and subsequent gilded ages ever since. Two recent books, “Gilded City” and “The New Gilded Age,” are no exception. But the novel that originally gave this social obsession its enduring name actually had a rather different, if related, preoccupation. “The Gilded Age” was much more about the depraved condition of public life and in particular about the profound corruption of democratic government than it was about the moral depravity of private life. In an era also aptly known as “the Great Barbecue,” practically everyone from vice presidents to city aldermen, from cabinet members to state assemblymen conspired, often in broad daylight, with rapacious financiers and industrial Napoleons to convert the public treasury and the nation’s resources into their own exclusive reserve. Twain and Warner zeroed in especially on that relationship. It was a novel about Washington and the hinterland, not New York (the city gets a walk-on role). It was a story of money and democracy, not just money.

It would be unfair to say that M.H. Dunlop’s splendidly described “Gilded City” or the interesting collection of essays packaged by The New Yorker magazine as “The New Gilded Age” are merely about the mores, not so much the morals, of the monied classes. But it is fair to say that politics has largely dropped out of the gilded age equation. If the reigning view no longer considers democracy relevant, let that stand as evidence of the triumph, however ironical, of the culture of glitter and narcissism. That civic self-consciousness which Twain could take for granted scarcely disturbs the introspection of the postmodern sensibility. Indeed, reading “Gilded City” and “The New Gilded Age” together becomes an enlightening exercise in psychic disequilibrium. These books not only confirm the kinship we all implicitly assume but also suggest its opposite: That these two gilded ages, separated by a mere century, are light-years apart, not only in their sense of the commonwealth but also in their moral and cultural predispositions.

The recent March madness on Wall Street reminds us all, if anyone needed reminding, that no one is immune to the power of Gotham. The $4.6 trillion lost in a single week is greater than the entire publicly-held federal debt. Imagine scrapping the country’s auto, steel, electrical machinery and oil industries and you begin to take its measure. With 50% of American families invested in the market, middle-American truckers, mailmen and bakers are as likely to feel the pain as are dot-com billionaires living it up in high-rent districts on either coast.

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A century ago, long before it exerted this kind of brute economic omnipotence, New York’s gilded panache riveted the country’s attention. Dunlop is a gimlet-eyed observer, precise and meticulous in her descriptions, witty and remorseless in her interpretations of what she (or her publisher) has chosen to call in the book’s subtitle “scandal and sensation in turn-of-the-century New York.” The world she gives us is funny and painful to look at. It is, in part, Thorstein Veblen’s world, full of the most outrageous displays of invidious social competition and emulation: lavish costume balls, titles of nobility purchased by the yard in Europe, the fashionably exhibited body of the Society grande dame entombed in iron-like lingerie, slumming expeditions to the urban demi-monde, sexual predation behind the locked doors of exclusive men’s clubs.

Like a laser slicing through this shimmering cloud of frivolity and hysterical gaiety (‘Gilded City” is set firmly in the Gay ‘90s) is Dunlop’s piercing but never overstated sense of the cruelty of it all. Without saying so, she convinces that social cruelty is a defining feature of what it means to live in a gilded age. One thinks immediately of the social murder of Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.” Dunlop’s cases are earthier. They include elaborate floral arrangements for Fifth Avenue ftes consisting of exotic swamp flowers secured by the stoop labor of impoverished farmers in the fetid marshlands of Florida.

Then there were those nighttime tours of the city’s saloons, brothels and lower-class dives, partly exercises of a customary voyeurism, partly masked as modern social examinations, led by “experts” who functioned as both guides and guards, keeping the living specimens at a safe distance while allowing for the cheap thrill of a proximate criminality tinged with the promise of “racially transgressive” sex. Dunlop notices the small revelatory moments, the “tells” that like some nervous tics give away the real motivations beneath the gambler’s bluff. The reader, for example, feels the humiliation of a workman barred from the Metropolitan Museum of Art because he came dressed in his overalls. Best of all (or is it worst of all?) in this gallery of sadistic social pleasures was a philanthropic gambit known as “toy watching.” Here’s how it worked: During the Christmas season, poor children were rounded up and assembled in the city’s grandest department stores, where they were allowed to view toys they would never be able to own or play with but, if they were lucky, might watch in operation as they were tried out by the offspring of more fortunate shoppers. And as they watched, they would in turn be watched by their gilded benefactors. And as we might well say today, toy watching was but one of a thousand points of light.

“Gilded City” is not a study in social cruelty; it’s just as much an anthropology of the culture of consumption and a genealogy of the society of the spectacle. But the book is given its frisson by its acute sense of class tension. Though Dunlop omits the era’s political context-the Populist revolt, confrontations between striking industrial workers and the armed might of the federal government, anti-monopoly crusades and the like-she lets the reader know that “[i]n New York City at the close of the 19th century, there was more wealth in private hands, more stuff available to buy, more opportunity to get ahead, and more densely packed poverty than anywhere else on the face of the Earth.” She makes sure we know that all this gaudy display is happening amidst the trauma of the 1893 depression. She tells the story of a crazed man firing wildly into Delmonico’s, shouting “Curse the rich! Curse them now and for all time!” not only because it caused a predictable sensation but also because it cues us to the brittleness of this gilded world. It floated atop a bubble of social fear. Its obsessive self-regard was matched by a wary gaze at the down and out.

By contrast, “The New Gilded Age” fails to capture this sense of social cruelty, the gazing back and forth across the gilded divide, the air of tenuousness, evasion and fear. There are no essays about gated communities or about the nation’s exploding servant caste or about the romance of blackness among affluent white suburban teenagers or about the recent transformation of poverty into an experience of underpaid work rather than unemployment. There is a piece on the “turtles and teamsters” demonstration in Seattle, one on sweatshops and an anguished article about drug dealing and family corrosion in the ghetto. But they sit off by themselves and scarcely penetrate the hermetic, gilded universe of the rest of the book. Each essay is finely crafted and engaging. But none was written for this book. Rather, they are occasional pieces of good journalism that now find themselves packaged as an enterprise in high-concept publishing. One need know no more perhaps than that nearly every essay in the book was written sometime between the beginning of 1999 and the end of 2000 to realize that the “Age” referred to in the book’s title is really a McAge, a marketing strategy cooked up on the fly, not seriously meant to suggest the depth, duration or complexity of true historic ages, be they iron, gilded or golden.

The title then is itself gilded. And this is worth noting because, as the publication date of Twain’s novel reminds us, Dunlop’s gilded age did not begin in 1893 but 20 years earlier at least. So too, the one proclaimed by The New Yorker, regardless of the cramped datelines of its assembled articles, took off around the 1979 election of Ronald Reagan as president, the publication of George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty” and the eruption of Wall Street’s merger and acquisition mania of the 1980s.

But if The New Yorker collection is, as an ensemble, less than advertised, moving back and forth between it and Dunlop’s “Gilded City” is an eye-opening experience. Elements of the gilded life endure. There is first of all what Henry James called the “bottomless superficiality” of it all, the spectacle of wealth on parade, the awe and envy inspired by riches exhibited in monumental profusion. We take this for granted about the Gay ‘90s. But despite the recent emergence of a faux asceticism among the super rich, our “new gilded age” can certainly hold its own in ostentatious pretension and oneupmanship: Just read essays in “The New Gilded Age” like Tony Horowitz’s “The Inn Crowd,” David Brook’s hilarious “The A-List E-List” or any of Adam Gopnik’s three pieces, but especially “Display Cases,” which deftly updates Veblen’s dissection of conspicuous consumption for our own world.

I was surprised that there was nothing in The New Yorker collection about sexual wilding, but “sex and the city” is certainly part of our current gilded self-consciousness. Dunlop reminds us with her tales about “The French Ball” and “Seeley’s Dinner” that the Gay ‘90s, while reticent in its public language, was just as titillated by tales of debauchery and sexual sport. These were of course strictly patriarchal extravaganzas, organized by and for men in a clubby privacy that catered to male fantasies of feigned female innocence. However differently they might be staged today, there seems to be a current of sexual rule-breaking and exhibitionism running through the overexcited nerve endings of the gilded temperament whenever it crops up (the “Roaring ‘20s,” whose signposts were the speakeasy and the bull market, comes to mind).

In matters of style and social mores, sensibility and ideology, the two gilded ages seem to talk to each other. Compulsive shopping as therapy for what ails, so familiar today, seems to have entered its takeoff phase in Dunlop’s ‘90s. Nicholas Lemann’s description of the new managerial mandarinate and its meritocratic self-justification (‘The Kids in the Conference Room’) echoes the Social Darwinism of the first gilded age, which also naturalized and rationalized otherwise unconscionable inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power. An arch smugness also seems endemic. The same charitable types who put together the “toy watching” tease convinced themselves that their own gargantuan spending sprees would trickle down to help the poor and that any more direct forms of assistance would sap the elan vital of those unfortunates. Great patches of our current gilded plutocracy, especially those of the Republican persuasion, say they believe more or less exactly the same thing.

Wealth, it appears, is its own justification. And that too is a golden thread connecting our age to earlier ones. What begins as a quest by the newly wealthy to explain and excuse themselves before the bar of tradition ends by abolishing all traditions save money. Daphne Merkin’s “Our Money, Ourselves” and Gopnik’s “A Hazard of No Fortune” tell new versions of an old story, recounted an age ago in “The House of Mirth” and “The Custom of the Country.” Beneath all the glitter and affectation, the sentimentality and artifice, is the pure money. Which brings us to Wall Street.

Twain proved long ago that the Gilded Age was not strictly a New York affair. Still, Wall Street was and remains a vital artery of its economic and social circulation. By the 1890s, much of the money used to pay for all the fun had been born or reborn on Wall Street. J.P. Morgan was emerging in all his imperial, guru-like grandiosity. He, and the white-shoe world of investment banks he presided over, proposed and disposed-and the rest of the industrial and commercial world followed after. Alongside this stately orchestration, racier types pursued super-heated dreams of instant wealth, speculating with libidinal abandon. For every somber-suited banker there was a Billy Burgundy or a “Bet-a-Million” Gates, high-fliers always about to crash and burn; but while they soared they lent the age a certain reckless flair.

Who doubts today that Wall Street exercises an even greater power whose reach girdles the world? Stock market speculation has become a national pastime allowing Veblen’s culture of emulation to seep further down the food chain than ever before possible. Larissa MacFarquhar’s piercing portrait, in “The New Gilded Age,” of a Silicon Alley promoter-she calls him “The Connector’-reveals that behind all the slick networking hype, the hip, avant-garde dot-com business flash, stand those gray, implacable edifices of Wall Street high finance to which the same old deferential pleading is still advisable. And as David Denby’s confessional “The Quarter of Living Dangerously” poignantly demonstrates, the numbers of addicted Wall Street “irrationals” multiply at the speed of the Internet, seduced by dreams of easy money, ready to risk home and happiness. Denby’s story, a kind of “Perils of Pauline’-meets-Gamblers’ Anonymous of the stock market, was a staple of the gilded age memoir not only in the Gay ‘90s but as far back as the equally flashy 1850s, during what might be called America’s prehistoric gilded age.

Finally, there’s “The Donald.” Mark Singer’s “Trump Solo” shows him off in all his gaudy, bravura crudeness. It’s as if he were the second coming of “Jubilee” Jim Fisk, that opera bouffe stock market scoundrel who, until he was assassinated in 1871 by the lover of his ex-mistress, amused and fascinated the multitudes with his sheer audacity, his sybaritic exuberance, his unapologetic skulduggery in matters of high finance and his sentimentalism and flamboyant generosity. The only difference between “Jubilee Jim” and “The Donald” is that Trump takes himself seriously; Jim never made that mistake. Together they twine the ages.

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History happens, however, and it is the ways in which the two gilded ages are not alike that are most compelling. Perhaps the most basic and profound is that Dunlop’s era of high living took place right in the middle of an extraordinarily prolonged economic slump, indeed was punctuated by one industrial, financial and agricultural trauma after another. The panic of 1873 left the country prostrate for most of the rest of the decade. Periodic crashes in the ‘80s spoiled febrile attempts at recovery, and 1893 marked the beginning of a drastic depression that lifted only near the turn of the century. What a difference a century can make, as we just now may be coming to the end of the longest sustained boom in the nation’s history. The New Yorker’s “The New Gilded Age” probably takes for granted what it shouldn’t, namely that gildedness and prosperity go hand in hand. This may account for the unintentional yet nonetheless distinct social unconsciousness of the book.

Globalization is part of the reason for today’s sustained good times. To the degree that we in the imperial center thrive thanks to the export and universalization of sweated labor abroad, to that same degree our native consciousness enjoys an inoculation against the social uneasiness that disturbed the glassy surface of the Gay ‘90s. Clinton-era prosperity has after all not only enriched the rich but has even shed its grace downward, albeit with viscous slowness. Yet here at home there are want and inequity aplenty. Some fundamental revamping of the nation’s cultural apparatus, in its religious and political life particularly, has blunted the sting and eased the anxiety once aroused by such Gilded Age classics as Jacob Riis’ “How the Other Half Lives.”

Take religion. Oddly, our gilded age coincides with the efflorescence of fundamentalist and other forms of religious rebirth. Precious little of it, however, turns its attention to problems of wealth and poverty. The case was otherwise a hundred years ago. On the one hand, back then official Protestantism amounted to so much unctuous, desiccated cant. Yet it nonetheless supplied the encompassing cultural framework within which the making and disposal of money was evaluated.

Of course, there was no shortage of ministers ready to justify the piling up of huge fortunes (Dunlop quotes from some). But the “genteel tradition” which encoded middle-class values as a set of Protestant strictures about work and self-discipline still viewed fast money, lavish displays of money, money cut loose from its ethical moorings, to be distasteful if not immoral. This disdain could, on occasion, even go so far as to ignite movements for social reform. Whether it did so or not, it stood there as a kind of bad conscience, echoing in the editorials of patrician mugwumps like E.L. Godkin of The Nation or the novels of William Dean Howells or the refractory sermons of the Social Gospel movement. An embedded religious consciousness formed a kind of moral horizon that the gilded sensibility might violate but never entirely efface.

All of that is gone with the wind, so to speak. To be sure, there are religious groups in the forefront of protests against sweatshops and other iniquities. But if there is such a thing as basic middle-class morality, it no longer feels existentially or religiously uncomfortable in the presence of money-seeking for its own sake. On the contrary, as Larissa MacFarquhar’s “The Gilder Effect” observes, the tradition of biblical prophecy can be wedded to the contemporary fine art of stock-picking as in the visionary outpourings of secular theologians like George Gilder. Gilder’s meta-optimism that marries the deity to Internet entrepreneurship revivifies the deity as a high-tech venture capitalist. And Gilder’s is only the most coherent articulation of a more inchoate and yet pervasive religion of good times.

One side effect perhaps of our recent gilded prosperity has been this vacancy in the religious mind, so that however censorious the religious right waxes, it rarely finds a connection between the moral looseness it excoriates and the culture of affluence. This too might be accounted for on grounds of the great techno-economic discrepancy between our times and theirs. Dunlop’s gilded age rested on the wealth thrown up by aging technologies, suffering all the signs of advanced economic arteriosclerosis. It suffused the atmosphere with a certain languidness and fatalism, even cynicism. Our new gilded age floats (or was afloat until recently) on the billowing high hopes of a new technological utopianism. The religion of the free market is its celestial accompaniment.

If God seems missing in action, so too a once vigorous and diverse culture of political opposition barely survives as an etiolated remnant. However brazen, celebrants in Dunlop’s “Gilded City” could never be entirely oblivious to the ringing denunciations reverberating from the prairies of the rural Populist insurgency, from the mordant militias of urban anarchists and socialists, from the outraged petty bourgeoisie in towns and small industrial cities all across the country, scandalized as much by the moral turpitude as by the predatory economic behavior of gilded age monopolists and their political confederates. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the 1890s, the country was bitterly divided down the middle over its political response to the massing of private economic power. Utopian fantasies like Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” and Ignatius Donnelly’s dystopian horror, “Caesar’s Column,” or weighty exposes like William Demarest Lloyd’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth” and Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty” were not only bestsellers but national events, precisely because they punctured the illusions of the gilded caste. Howells was joined by dozens of lesser novelists in excoriating the moral consequences of gilded avarice. What is there today to compare in scope to this sort of culture of political resistance? To ask the question is to answer it. And its absence breeds a certain reckless disregard.

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The bumptious self-assurance and triumphalism encouraged by global and technical preeminence has also extinguished the last remains of self-conscious cultural inferiority, once so markedly a part of the makeup of the monied arriviste. Every previous gilded age-even the one localized in New York in the 1850s, when the city first fancied itself a player on the world stage-engaged in grandiose projection. Talk of New York and of the United States as the future metropoles of world capitalism began making the rounds even before the Civil War.

But from Dunlop and all the many historians and memoirists and costume dramatists that preceded her, we know that culturally the gilded elite of the Gay ‘90s was in thrall to Europe, to its heraldic aristocracy and its artifacts of high culture, all of which it sought to purchase (between 1880 and 1910, more than 800 American women married British or European titles and became known as “dollar princesses,” Dunlop reports). Lombard Street still came ahead of Wall Street. America the Greatest remained a fantasy, however tantalizingly close to reality. Now it’s reality. The prerogatives of imperial ascendancy include the power to dictate taste and the paraphernalia of social prestige. The culture of emulation in our gilded age no longer mimics that of the Old World. Buying a peerage today seems a wacky anachronism more than a rite of social passage.

As Brooks notes in his “Conscientious Consumption,” there is now a slice of our gilded elect who’ve adopted an intensely self-conscious democratic demeanor and style of expenditure. It amounts to a code of financial correctness that seemingly eschews the ostentation of its gilded age forebears. No more the studied artifice, the elaborate masquerades and choking effusions that crammed the parlors and ballrooms of the Gay ‘90s. Instead, the new theology and aesthetic of ascetic consumption honors a faux naturalness and simplicity even goes so far as to genuflect before the rougher artifacts of oppressed cultures, all of which provide a spiritual license, justifying the vast amounts of cash it takes to achieve this contrived lifestyle. To suggest that this class of extremely rich people disdains any hint of aristocratic privilege is to risk a gross underestimation of how far it has traveled in its moral psychology from the hierarchical hedonism of the Gay ‘90s.

What’s going on here? We may lack much in the way of organized, angry opposition; few Populists or anarcho-socialists or distempered Jeremiahs populate the streets of our imagination. What we do have is a gilded elite that has constituted itself its own opposition. Its politically correct, self-abnegating style of high-end consumption helps erect a virtual reality in which real social contradictions receive a psychological and moral easement, a fantasized resolution. Tidal waves of consumer culture wash across those ancient borders that once demarcated class from class.

How different is this from the deliberate, guilt-free showiness of their gilded ancestors! Back then, aping the ancien regime obeyed its own social logic. When the patricianate of the turn of the century paraded its wealth and auctioned off nobility, however silly much of that appears in hindsight, it did so as part of its portfolio, its credentialed entitlement to rule. It was, after all, the ruling class heir apparent, following the demise of the Southern slavocracy and the Brahmin merchant princes of New England. Hardly a model of disinterested civic mindedness, walled off from its social inferiors by protective codes of sumptuary ritual, often hopelessly self-absorbed, it nevertheless assumed authority and responsibility for running the main institutions of the nation’s economy and political system while superintending its cultural coming of age.

The creed of “conscientious consumption” among a segment of today’s gilded billionaires-still dressed in jeans and living in the same trailers where fortune first struck-relinquishes all such claims, is in effect an abdication, a breakdown in the process of social reproduction. The 1960s certainly deserve some of the blame or credit. But Dunlop’s Edwardian world was already living in twilight at the time of World War I. During the Great Depression, its lights went out for good. However much our two gilded ages bear a family resemblance, in the end they peer uncomprehendingly at each other from across an unbridgeable gulf of historical extinction.