Steve Fraser on Gilded Ages

The BBC reported startling economic equality figures in a recent documentary: the top 200 wealthiest people in the world control more wealth than the bottom 4 billion. But what is more striking to many is a close look at the economic inequality in the homeland of the "American Dream."

The United States is the most economically stratified society in the western world. As The Wall Street Journal reported, a recent study found that the top .01% or 14,000 American families hold 22.2% of wealth — the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, just 4% of the nation's wealth.

Additional studies narrow the focus: This from the Pew Foundation and The New York Times: "The chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades. "

This from The Economist’s special report, "Inequality in America:" "The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)."

This trend, among others, has some historians and cultural commentators comparing our era to that of the late 19th century Gilded Age. Bill Moyers guest Steve Fraser notes its hallmarks: crony capitalism, extreme inequalities in wealth and income, ostentatious spending and wage depression.

Mark Twain is responsible for naming the period between Reconstruction and Roosevelt, 'The Gilded Age’. As The Oxford Companion To United States History notes, it is the only period to be commonly known by a pejorative name.

Fraser notes that the first Gilded Age was met with labor unrest and political agitation. American Conservative magazine suggested the second might be as well.

In the course of the 20th century, there were several eras of growing economic inequality. On a few occasions, they came to an end in a relatively gentle way, with democratic elections and more egalitarian legislation.

More often, however, they were ended by a catastrophe, such as the Great Depression, a violent social revolution, or a world war. When the rich went out, it seems, they normally did so with a bang, and not with a whimper. The way things are now going, it is likely to be so in the future.

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Steve Fraser is an author, an editor, and a historian, whose many publications include the award-winning books Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman And The Rise of American Labor and Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. Most recently he is the author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Place. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nation, and American Prospect.

Bill Moyers Journal
Published on June 13, 2008.