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 paper at least, like one of the best periods in American economic history. But if that’s true, why is everyone so angry?
I’m not going to try to answer that question right now, but I am interested in the parallels between our Gilded Age and the last one. We, too, live in an era of deep, formless anger. Conservatives and progressives don’t agree on much other than the fact that America is on the brink of destruction. People on social media compete to see who can have the most apocalyptic takes. Nobody trusts the elites and experts who are supposed to be leading the country. Almost everybody thinks things are getting worse.
This roiling, unfocused discontent found a point of convergence recently with Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This act of violence has captivated the country partially because the murder was so shocking and cinematic. But it also seems to have captured our angry zeitgeist, the ethos of a country that is so fed up with its elites and institutions that, in some circles at least, people are celebrating the murder of a father of two.
Magione’s crime doesn’t feel like an isolated event. We’ve seen an uptick in violence and threats of violence against politicians and business leaders. The first Gilded Age saw waves of violence against elites, too, and many of those killings became public sensations just like Thompson’s murder has.
So what can we, in this second Gilded Age, learn from the violence of the first?
Carter Harrison Sr. was the dominant political figure in the country’s most dynamic city. As mayor of Chicago on and off between 1879 and 1893, he guided the city as its population surged and it became the rail hub of the country. He led a coalition of Catholic and immigrant union members; the Protestant elites of the city never really liked him.
Harrison’s first stint as mayor came to an end after the Haymarket affair in 1886, when a strike turned bloody after a protestor threw dynamite at the police and the police opened fire on the crowd in retaliation. But, after a peripatetic “retirement,” he re-entered politics just in time to be the face of the 1893 World’s Fair, Chicago’s biggest moment on the world stage.