- Imagining Equality in a Gilded Age:Edward Bellamy's Radical Utopian Critique of Progressivism
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner gave their historical moment its name when they published their collaborative novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today in 1873, but the popular conception of the Gilded Age as a period of stark contradictions in terms of access to wealth and political power probably owes itself primarily to the writings of economist Henry George. In Progress and Poverty (1879), one of the best-selling books of the 1880s (Mott 167–68), George identified an important paradox in the economic conditions of the US and other industrial nations: that the material progress and increased wealth that accompanies economic development does not reduce poverty, but actually exacerbates it. "Discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention," George lamented, "have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor. … where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness" (5–6). On the contrary, George argued, the most intense forms of poverty are structurally intertwined with the most advanced forms of material progress: "The social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached … do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way or another, engendered by progress itself material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty—it actually produces it” (8–9). George attributed the growth of economic inequality during the [End Page 639] nineteenth century to the monopolization of land, particularly for the purpose of speculation, which George contended drove down the wages paid to laborers. As George put it, "The reason why, in spite of the increase of productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living, is that, with increase in productive power, rent tends to even greater increase, thus producing a constant tendency to the forcing down of wages," or, more simply, "The unequal ownership of land necessitates the unequal distribution of wealth" (282, 329).1
George's observation that "the unequal distribution of wealth"—and its likely acceleration—was simultaneously the central problem and the defining logic of his era's economy reverberates in the writings of recent commentators for whom the Gilded Age serves as a useful analogy for economic trends since the end of the Cold War. As early as 1990, political analyst Kevin Phillips proclaimed that the Reagan Era had initiated "a second Gilded Age": "The 1980s boom in the Boston-Washington megalopolis, coupled with hard times on the farm and in the Oil Patch, produced a familiar economic geography—a comparative shift of wealth toward the two coasts. And toward income groups already well off (xviii). Since then, the tendency to draw comparisons between the current historical moment and the late nineteenth century has become so common that, in their introduction to a 2012 collection of essays pointedly titled The New Gilded Age, David Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz remark,
The idea that inequality is a major social problem in the United States was once a small-niche belief limited to hard-core leftists, socialists, and Marxists. … Why, it was asked, is the U.S. public so tolerant, even unaware, of the spectacular takeoff in income inequality, a takeoff that's generated levels of inequality approaching those of the First Gilded Age? … We now live in a new world in which the public increasingly knows about the takeoff and is questioning whether extreme inequality can be justified.
(1–2)
The mainstream success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), itself organized largely around the historical parallels between the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, spectacularly proves Grusky and Kricheli-Katz's point.
An even more important way in which George's study of Gilded Age economics casts a long shadow over his intellectual heirs is his quintessentially liberal solution to the problem he identified. That solution followed logically from its perceived source. According to George, "To extirpate poverty, to make wages what [End Page...