The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [9]
It is remarkable, then, to read what Bernard A. Weisberger would later write about the America of 1890 for the Life History of the United States:
The average citizen believed that his social order was the world’s best and his political system the world’s wisest. . . . The future would be ever richer, more spacious for each new generation.
To the extent that Weisberger’s description of the national mood at the time is accurate (more about that shortly), it may reflect in part a popular infatuation with the mystique of industrialization that was sweeping the Western world. The miracles of technology and their promise of a brave new world ahead were celebrated at world’s fairs in London (1851), Philadelphia (1876), Paris (1889), Chicago (1893), and, again in Paris (1900), with the Eiffel Tower the most spectacular and enduring product of the period. Hand in hand with late-nineteenth-century technophilia was the return to prominence of that ancient object of mania: money.
Not that wealth had come into the hands of the many. In fact, the final decade of the nineteenth century was an era of huge income inequality between the very richest and the rest of the population—much like the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 1890, the wealthiest one percent of the population received the same total income as the bottom half and owned more property than the other 99 percent. (As for the present-day wealth gap, according to a 2006 report from the Federal Reserve, the top 10 percent of income earners in the United States possessed 70 percent of the wealth, and the richest 5 percent owned more than the bottom 95 percent.)
Even though riches eluded the great majority of Americans in the 1890s—as now—the fortunes created by the spectacular industrial expansion inflamed the popular imagination. Those who had cashed in were flaunting their new wealth in gaudy displays—which the contemporary observer Thorstein Veblen described as “conspicuous consumption”—and the man in the street found it mesmerizing. Money and the making of it had become a national obsession; at least it seemed that way to Mark Twain, who dubbed the era the Gilded Age in his novel of the same name (coauthored with his Hartford, Connecticut, neighbor Charles Dudley Warner). Patrician statesmen like Henry Adams were being replaced as the most admired Americans by hard-driving industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and by financiers like J.P. Morgan, who had amassed their riches thanks in part to the lack of an income tax (which didn’t come into effect until 1913) and the absence of antitrust laws (the first of which was enacted in 1890).
Not everyone agreed with the cutthroat rapaciousness of the money moguls, but many couldn’t help wanting their own share of the loot. What’s more, like the day traders riding the tech-stock bubble of the 1990s, the unschooled speculators of the Gilded Era marveled at their own apparent canniness: “I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars,” gushes one of Twain and Warner’s characters.
Of course, for all the glittering fantasies of striking it rich, most Americans merely toiled away as cogs in the great economic machine that was generating the fortunes of the well-off. The era of American rugged individualism when most people made a living on their own as farmers or craftsmen or tradesmen was giving way: America was becoming a nation of industrial laborers and office workers on someone else’s payroll.
Meanwhile, with government assistance to the poor virtually nonexistent, those who fell through the cracks of the industrial revolution landed hard. Guests at the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City dined off golden plates, but fifty blocks south, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the poor lived in Dickensian squalor. Families