How “Tariff Man” is Bringing Back the Gilded Age

Count on one thing: if Mark Twain, the famed American author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a nineteenth-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.

“They want me to go in with them on the sly,” says Colonel Sellers, the anti-hero of that novel. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the colonel explains to his wide-eyed dinner guest how they would “buy a hundred and thirteen wild cat banks in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri… and then all of sudden… Whiz! the stock of every one of those wildcats would spin… profit on the speculation not a dollar less than forty millions!”

With Twain’s uncanny insight into the American character, his novel presaged the quarter-century to follow so accurately that, in the end, it lent its name to “the Gilded Age,” that era of rapid industrialization and rising robber-baron fortunes. Ripped from two centuries of Puritan moral moorings by an “inflamed desire for sudden wealth,” the novel’s archetypal American families are caught in a “fever of speculation” that sends them scrambling across the continent in a frenzied search for jackpot profits.

With money then breeding its own morality, the era’s capitalist excess naturally begat Trumpian-style corruption. When unpaid wages stopped the construction of his railroad out West, Twain’s character Colonel Sellers sent the project’s chief engineer to the head office in New York City to find out what had happened to the missing money.

“The matter is simple enough,” the company’s president explained matter-of-factly to the astonished engineer. “A Congressional appropriation costs money. A majority of the House Committee, say $10,000 apiece — $40,000; a majority of the Senate Committee, the same each — say $40,000; a little extra to one or two chairmen of two such committees, say $10,000 each — $20,000; and there’s $100,000 of the money gone.”

Beneath the spectacle of soaring stock prices, spreading railroad networks, smoking steel mills, powerful trust monopolies, and conspicuous consumption by the country’s ever-increasing number of millionaires, Twain discerned a deep underlying insecurity to be the very essence of what became known as the Gilded Age. “It is a time,” he wrote, “when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.”

Looking at contemporary America through Twain’s somber vision can teach us something significant about our own time that has so far eluded the mainstream media — particularly the profound political implications of President Trump’s wild global tariff regime. Those duties on foreign imports will not just raise prices and stoke inflation, as the media has indeed been telling us, but all too crucially undercut the fiscal foundations of a middle-class American society that we’ve known for more than a century, creating a new Gilded Age of rising private fortunes — in our time, billionaires — and deepening social inequality.

And with Donald Trump in mind, let’s take a little trip through a history that’s anything but Tom Sawyeresque.

Cycles of Change

Give Twain full credit: when writing that novel, he also intuited that the economic juggernaut driving his Gilded Age would come crashing down in what proved to be the devastating panic of 1893. The country had indeed suffered 11 previous panics, most of them regional or relatively short-lived. This one would be different. As New York banks held fire sales of assets to meet a cash crunch, some 340 banks nationwide simply suspended operations, while industrial output shrank by 15%, and unemployment hit an unprecedented 19%. Adding to the difficulties of workers, the McKinley Tariff of 1890, named after then-representative (and not yet president) William McKinley, had imposed record-high duties of 50% on imports and so raised the price of many basic consumer goods, which should sound all too familiar in the age of Trump. The panic then became a full-blown, four-year depression that sent thousands of the unemployed, then called Coxey’s Army, marching on Washington to demand redress from Congress.

Not only was that panic an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, but it was also the first in a boom-and-bust cycle that has marked America’s unbridled capitalism up to the present moment — with each boom producing spectacular private wealth and each bust fostering abject public misery and mass reform movements. Like Icarus of Greek legend, whose wings of wax carried him too close to the sun, the U.S. economy sometimes flies so high that its wax wings melt. The ensuing crash is so searing, immiserating so many for so long, that it can inspire sustained movements for change.

The severity of the protracted 1893 depression that ended the Gilded Age sparked myriad calls for social change and lead to the Progressive Era during which labor unions organized workers, the NAACP started its struggle for civil rights, and women marched for suffrage. Investigative reporters called “muckrakers” also began publishing exposés of financial power and political corruption in mass-circulation magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s Weekly, thereby setting an agenda for political reform. In major cities, middle-class reformers opened settlement houses for poor immigrants, enacted housing codes to ban cold-water tenements, and set up free public schools. At the state level, progressives like Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette battled the railroad monopolies that gouged farmers desperate to get their crops to market.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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