Talking Politics

We talk to historian Sarah Churchwell about the Gilded Age in late nineteenth century America and the comparisons with today. Rampant inequality, racial conflict, fights over immigration, technological revolution: is Trump's America repeating the pattern or is it something new?Talking Points:In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles W. Warner coined the term “The Gilded Age,” in their eponymous novel. The phrase was re-discovered in the 1920s and applied retrospectively to the period of the 1870s-roughly 1900.The Gilded Age satirized the way wealth and consumerism were taking over American life and showed how this move towards a “huxterist” culture was subverting America’s democratic ideals.Yet this was also a period of real growth. The major transformation of the period was the railroad. Rampant inequality characterized the era: the robber barons on the one hand, and poor immigrant communities on the other. But in the middle of this, there was also a group of people working their way