Echoes of Rage
Our new age of violence looks a lot like the Gilded Age
If you looked at it from a certain angle, it appeared to be a golden age.
The American economy was growing at a rapid clip, averaging 2.5% growth per person per year. New technology seemed to emerge every day, revolutionizing transportation, communications, and manufacturing; people’s everyday lives would have been unrecognizable to those who lived just a few decades before. The new technology created jobs, too, as startup firms transformed into behemoths that employed tens of thousands. Cities exploded in population and the country welcomed immigrants from the far corners of the world.
But, despite all of this progress, the era didn’t feel very good to many people living through it. It was an era of political discontent and economic turbulence. Americans were especially furious with business and political elites, who were, it was thought, taking too much of the period’s wealth for themselves.
Mark Twain called the era the “Gilded Age” — beneath the glittering surface of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a darkness.
Things feel that way now, too. Though, by many measures, the economy has been great — low unemployment, a booming stock market, and robust economic growth make this look, on…
