The Gilded Age | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS
The Gilded Age, quite possibly worse than the current slop we are dealing with in Washington, was a time of extreme disparities in wealth. At one end of the scale were Carnegie, Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, and J. P. Morgan, while at the other were millions of Americans dealing with the transformation from the relative independence of the yeoman farmer to an economy in which more and more people depended on an employer for a paycheck.
The parallels with today are hard to miss. Then, as now, booming financial markets and enormous private fortunes existed alongside economic insecurity. Corporate interests poured money and influence into government, while workers fought for wages, safety, and some measure of power over the conditions of their employment. Underneath it all was a debate that sounds remarkably familiar today: how far should laissez-faire capitalism be allowed to run, and at what point does government have an obligation to protect workers and the public from the power accumulated by great wealth?
The circumstances are different, and more than a century of labor law and regulation separates us from the Gilded Age. But the argument over concentrated wealth, corporate power, the stock market, political influence, and workers' rights sounds awfully familiar. History rhymes.
ChatGPT was used in the creation of this article, but is extremely tangential to the point of this article.
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The Gilded Age | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS
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From the documentary:
who knew when they said "of the people, by the people, for the people" that they would be referring to wealthy people this far along in the democratic experiment ...
Full Disclosure: I am an investor. And I own a fair amount of both Gold and Silver stocks!
(Does that mean that I am "a bad person"?)
Good choice.
Quote Origin: Behind Every Great Fortune There Is a Crime – Quote Investigator®
Well, I don't like absolutes, but I do know that there is no such thing as a "Self made man". It all goes into the web of society pretty quickly, and while maybe not every fortune is related to crime, I think that every fortune has had a path that was eased by other people, with some being more ethical than others.
People are saying that no one has ever become sucessful while being honest!
People say a lot of things. Sometimes they are actually right.
What say you?
It will probably take longer, but to be honest, i'm too candid for my, or most persons in my near proximity's' good to no stopping zones misunderstood for ones misunderstood, and since i only LIE while sittin up in bed, i don't do sit ups, in bed, till woke, woken till slumber party starts ending, all cause someone saw wood in half the time outs left in the forth quarter of the 3rd period wear questions are worn like marks, yet more valuable than the honesty that should be so much more appreciated than it isn't nearly enuff, and thats is a large part of our demise, greed and power surpass, every now and then, those eye'd consider wise, when on thy shoulder rests a potatoe chip of chocolate chipped from minted change, that just couldn't
I want you to write the activation instructions for the nonexistent flotation devices when we start dropping shipping containers full of maga traitors into the atlantic trench ... /s
This is the era DJT is referring to when he says "Make America Great Again," I believe.
It is. Trump would fit nicely into the era of the 'robber barons.' Just look at how he 'steamrolling' Washington, D.C. And I quote: "The essence of democracy is equality.
Everybody gets one vote. The essence of capitalism is inequality." Conservatives believe in hierarchy. That is, they believe that if you are poor-look the part! (And kiss some wealthy guy's or gal's (or both) 'nether regions' by doing what they say under the guise of "loyatty" if you want to belong to their society.
You can see it playing out in full 'relief' by looking at Trump's White House newest scandal: Natalie Harp! It is reported that she does not have a security clearance and yet she isin the midst of the White House international activities. Why? Apparently she gives good service to Trump. An example of the president doing what he wants when he wants.
Just telling the truth.
are you thinking she gives him a happy ending after she's done with the depends and wet wipes? that might help explain his regular losses of consciousness in the oval office, along with the transfusion bruises on his hands ...
And then there's "The Giving Pledge":
The Giving Pledge is a charitable effort founded in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett .
It asks the world's wealthiest individuals and families to publicly commit to giving away at least half of their wealth to philanthropy during their lifetimes or in their wills. [ 1 ]
Aha! So that equality explains the high standards of living that prevail amongst the populace in Communist countries!
I'm sorry. . .I am not discussing communism or its ways. . .which I do not know much of anything and sure do not have any experience/s of. I think our way of life/society is just fine, and as always the times should dictate what works within it. . . and that we are not beholden to this or that ideology/ies alone.
All economic resources are publicly owned and controlled by the government. Individuals hold no personal property or assets.
Production is intended to meet individual and societal needs and is distributed according to individual ability and contribution.
Which do you prefer?
You go first!
[✘]
No sir! You can go first. . . . It's easy. Not scary at all.
Please proceed with your choice! 
If one watches the documentary, or reads the transcript, it is possible to compare and contrast the Gilded Age with different periods throughout history. A more meaningful comparison can be drawn, in my opinion, by looking at the long transformation of the infrastructure underlying the economy, and at how those changes reshape society, work, wealth and government.
The Gilded Age did not simply appear. It grew out of decades of railroad construction, telegraphy, mechanization, expanding national markets, industrial production, corporate finance, immigration and urbanization. By the late nineteenth century, those forces had accumulated enough weight to transform the country. Americans were rapidly moving from farms, crafts and small proprietorships into wage labor. Enormous fortunes accumulated around those who controlled the new systems of transportation, production and finance. Political power followed, along with labor unrest, populism and arguments over how much power government should allow capital to wield.
The present did not suddenly begin with artificial intelligence either. The groundwork has been building for decades through microprocessors, containerization, telecommunications, satellite communications, personal computing, the Internet, global supply chains, cloud computing, smartphones and increasingly concentrated control over semiconductors, data and computing infrastructure. AI may be the latest and potentially most disruptive stage of that much longer transformation.
The comparison, then, is not between the Gilded Age and “the age of AI.” It is between two long periods in which changes in the underlying economic infrastructure accumulated until they began reorganizing the distribution of wealth, the nature of work, social relationships and political power.
The circumstances are very different, and the outcome of the present transformation is still being written. But that is where I think the comparison becomes meaningful.
A corollary of these great shifts is that those who recognize what is happening early, along with some who simply happen to have the right idea at the right time, can accumulate wealth on a scale that would have been almost unimaginable only a generation earlier.
This was written in collaboration with AI. The ideas are derived from the partnership of Me, Myself, and I.
The present did not suddenly begin with artificial intelligence either. The groundwork has been building for decades through microprocessors, containerization, telecommunications, satellite communications, personal computing, the Internet, global supply chains, cloud computing, smartphones and increasingly concentrated control over semiconductors, data and computing infrastructure. AI may be the latest and potentially most disruptive stage of that much longer transformation.
"You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" is a well-known saying . It means you cannot achieve a big goal or bring about change without causing some mess, trouble, or sacrifice along the way . [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
The idea started in France in the 1700s ( "on ne saurait faire d'omelette sans casser des œufs").
So were all of the eggs that were broken actually necessary to make the omelet?
We have lived with rules for a good deal of time now that were intended to ameliorate the human desire to have it all, but they have been gradually reduced until this administration, when they are rapidly having their underpinnings pulled out. The result is the return of the power=money equation. Fuck the little guy because they can't do anything is not, IMO, a good operating procedure.
We have Trump pulling the underpinnings out of rules and systems (btw it's "MAGA-APPROVED"), because unless it's conservative-its nothing (for the Other). Case in point: Trump is pushing for Darline Graham for Senate-her late brother's current seat even though she is apparently UNQUALIFIED by a lack of national security 'chops' such as her brother, Linsey Graham was.
It is what conservatives want. . .so, she will likely serve a six years term in her brother's old seat ("handed down," even).
Now if this was a democrat being 'honored' this way. . . hell, just look at how conservatives in the United Kingdom dogged Professor Jason Arday reportedly to death (even after he resigned from his professorship) and yet when it is something they WANT TO DO. . . the silence is deafening.
Conservatives do what they want. . . self-righteously.
The Gilded Age was created by railroad barons and industrialists. The Gilded Age spanned the end of reconstruction in the 1870s until the Panic of 1893 marked the beginning of the end of the Gilded Age. What followed the Gilded age was the Progressive Era from ~1900 till the end of World War I. Antitrust laws were enacted in the 1890s to break up the industrial trusts. The progressives focused attention on reforming working and living standards to counteract excesses of industrialists but they failed reign in finance. So the Progressive Era marked the beginning of Wall Street dominance and the concentration of wealth in the hands of financiers where J.P. Morgan held power. The industrial Gilded Age gave way to the financialized Progressive Era where the Federal Reserve was created to institutionalize finance, the influence of banks rapidly increased, and trade of private industrial stocks was consolidated on Wall Street.
It's easy to create a narrative of excesses during the brief Gilded Age. But don't use that period of disparity to gloss over the problems created by progressive reforms. The reforms following the Gilded Age were intended to be benevolent but those reforms did not address the problems of market competition and creation of opportunities.
The meaningful comparison between the Gilded Age and the present is that both reflect long transformations in the infrastructure of the economy that are reshaping work, concentrating wealth, and shifting social and political power. What follows is a recurring struggle over who benefits from that transformation, who bears its costs, and whether government serves as a counterweight to concentrated economic power or becomes another instrument of it.
The documentary offers more than a catalog of Gilded Age abuse: it shows how periods of structural economic change reshape society. Industrialization made the country vastly richer and more powerful, but it also changed who depended upon whom, shifting Americans from farmers, craftsmen, and small producers toward wage labor. In the process, economic power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who controlled the new infrastructure and capital.
You are addressing a different question from the one I am raising. None of this depends on the Progressive Era having solved the problems of the Gilded Age. The point is that a fundamental economic transformation created new concentrations of wealth and power, changed the relationship between people and work, and forced society and government to respond. Whether those responses were successful, inadequate, or created problems of their own is a separate question.
This was written in collaboration with AI. The ideas are derived from the partnership of Me, Myself, and I.™
The "boy/s" with biggest toys WIN! I remember that one from the Eighties, thereabouts. Few use it 'today.' - in my hearing anyway.
Here's the thing, when people are allowed to run 'wild' in society without guard-rails. . . they get hyper-competitive. . . that is, eventually it begins that other people will get wronged, injured, and dead in varying numbers/masses. That is the nature of unchecked COMPETITION.
People get bamboozled, and yes, steam-rolled (flatten) by those that do not mind being harsh, coarse, and 'brutal.' Think: "Cut-throats" and "Raw capitalists."
I think about people like Elon Musk (in general) and what it must take to run any number of 'operation/s' of world domination ((and beyond) such as his. Left to his own devices, wanting for nothing, and thus, fearing even less. . .in general, people such as he can (and ultimately will) decide that his worldview (which is time and time again proving successful) should be the ultimate goal of the planet and thus he should remove anybody that gets in his way of achieving "the Goal" -whatever the goal of the moment be.
This is the problem with arrogance coupled with high brilliance and excessive power! And so it was in the past. . . until guard-rails where put in place to protect-everybody from OVERACHIEVERS!
That narrative dismisses that the Gilded Age was built upon immigrant labor needing work. Waves of immigration in the last three decades of the 19th century reshaped society. The fabulous wealth of the Gilded Age was created by exploiting cheap immigrant labor for railroads, timber, mining, steel, and factories.
The following Progressive Era was heavily influenced by the plight of immigrant labor. Exploitive working and living conditions were forcing immigrants into a permanent lower class with few opportunities. Immigration was the connecting causation between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
The established population was predominantly agrarian and the Gilded Age did not substantially change that portion of society. A large part of farm labor still involved caring for animals used for power. Replacing animal power with machines (and large scale manufacture of farm machinery) came after the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age did not change the horse-and-buggy nature of society. The main cause of societal change was immigration. The robber barons of the Gilded Age exploited that cheap immigrant labor.
Comparing the Gilded Age to today should focus attention on the expected cheap labor provided by AI. Even now there are the first inklings of progressive reforms for exploiting AI. AI may be the exclamation point for the dot.com era.
If only it were that simple.
The labor-force data are national, not statistics confined to immigrant workers. As was pointed out in the documentary, this was an ongoing transformation and did not occur purely as a result of immigration. In fact, the movement away from agricultural labor was already well underway before the largest waves of late-nineteenth-century immigration. Immigration was certainly an important part of the transformation, but the census data do not support your claim that it was the causal link between the Gilded Age and what followed.
Sorry, but you are going to have to work a lot harder than just typing the words into your device. You are going to need to actually watch the Documentary and/or read the Transcript. Then you will be asked to provide some type of evidence that is able to be checked against reality. If you do that, great. I will be glad to continue this conversation.
Your figures are disguising a few stark facts.
So the number of people employed in agrarian activities increased during the Gilded Age. The end of the southern plantations shifted toward sharecropping to sustain the agrarian economy so the number of southern farm workers didn't shrink substantially. Westward expansion and homesteading increased the amount of land being farmed during the Gilded Age. The Civil War did not stop the opening of the west to farming but now the labor would be provided by free people rather than enslaved people. Internal migration into newly opened territory resulted in eight new western states added to the Union.
The role of immigrants was to accelerate the pace of industrialization. Immigrants weren't just a source of cheap labor for railroad construction, mining, and steel production. Immigrants provided the cheap labor needed to support growing populations in industrial centers. The industrial centers exploited the cheapest labor: immigrants, women, children. The American middle class that arose during the Gilded Age was as dependent upon cheap labor as was the plantation economy of the South.
The Gilded Age was a period of exceptional exploitation of cheap labor by all strata of the economy. And immigrant labor really did provide a ready source of cheap labor. Unlike waves of immigration early in the history of the US, immigrants during the Gilded Age were being trapped in an industrial ecosystem that offered limited opportunities. The Gilded Age arose from exploitation of the cheapest labor and immigrants were a large source of that cheap labor.
I have watched the documentary a couple of times since it was released in 2018. And I questioned some of the presented material then just as I am doing now.
Nerm said:
To which I reply: So what? The absolute number of the US population increased around a factor of 8: From less than ten million in 1820 to almost eighty million in 1900. These data points do not alter the fact that the agrarian share of the workforce has been going down across the history of the USA as the non-agrarian share of the workforce has been going up.
Also, the rural/urban population was changing as more people moved to the cities for employment. That meant a growing share of Americans depended upon wages and markets rather than directly producing much of what they needed themselves.
In addition, the agrarian sectors of the economy were becoming more dependent on banks and railroads. The economy was changing from local to regional and national.
So yes, there were more agricultural workers in 1900 than in 1870. There were also vastly more Americans. The relevant question is not whether the absolute number of farmers increased. It is what was happening to their share of the workforce and to the economic relationships upon which Americans depended.
You still have not provided evidence that points to immigration being causal link between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. The country operates as a complex system. It is very rare that we get one factor that controls the direction of the country. More often it is the culmination of factors over a period of time that steers the way that the populace thinks.
The silliness in all this is the approach of divide and conquer. That is, the two 'sides' - the wealthy and the poor 'ying-yang-ing' against one another. The 'fools' for all their abilities, smarts, and even wisdom think in makes sense to FIGHT and break nearly everything the Other has perpetually INSIDE THE 'HOUSE'! Our House! It's our ONLY home-our country. . . and we are fighting like cats and dogs to RISE ABOVE. . . each other.
What should we be doing as a nation: Working together to accomplish great things. . . like lowering our national debt. . . the RIGHT way. . . what is the right way. . .well, that remains to be be found and put into place. . .and it will take people acting in UNISON and CONCERT to accomplish. Not all this 'hissing, pissing, and shi-ting on the Other that is our daily actions!
A House divided. . . is Split!
I have yet to watch the video above and will do when time permits. Hopefully, later today!
Done.