The Glamour of the Gilded Age

By Brittany Baldwin

As Barbara (The Power of Beauty) keenly observed how art took a dramatic turn towards Cubism and fragmentation in the early 1900s, I cannot help but wonder what led up to that shift. This week I have been exploring New England for the first time, and one common theme in New York, Mark Twain’s house, and Newport seems to be the wealth and glamour in the Gilded Age, rising in the 1880s, but lasting for some until the late 1930s. It was men like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan who amassed fortunes unlike anything America had seen before. Yet, is it not interesting that Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism was in vogue, and both the new millionaires and people like John Dewey and Teddy Roosevelt also adopted theories based on Social Darwinism?

On the one hand, the millionaires justified their large fortunes on the Social Darwinist theory that the fittest will rise to the top. The first generation millionaires came from moderate or poor families; they started in the factory, or clerk positions, and rose to the top based on genius, good investments, luck, and hard work. They were the nouveau rich, and many credited it to the fact that they were simply following the natural process of social evolution. On the other hand, Dewey and Teddy Roosevelt accepted the premise of Social Darwinism, but then used that as a justification to put more and more controls on businessmen who would inevitably rise to the top if government did not intervene. Granted, some laws and limits were needed at the time—children should not work in factories, businessmen should not blur into political tycoons, and the powerful should not exploit the weak. Roosevelt, however, began a trend of government intervention in business which tends to tumble into a whole mess of problems if no one checks the multiplying nature of the tumbleweed.

Yet, a common thread seems to connect the new millionaires and the new brand of politicians—both had a disillusioned view of human nature, and both go to dangerous extremes because of this. Many of the “Robber Barons,” or “Captains of Industry” (or both), justified their actions because they said that they were naturally more fit then the rest, and that they were progressing towards a stronger breed of American industrialism. As James J. Hill said, “The fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest.” Indeed, that seemed to be the case, but, they often used this logic to overlook malpractice and injustice. While many of the “Captains of Industry” had gone from “rags to riches,” and had rightly earned their fortunes, they often participated in bribing and conniving other corporations and politicians to exchange favors for them, while also paying the lowliest workers very small sums, working them for very long and grueling hours, and manipulating them to vote for certain candidates. Many were capitalist without a conscience, entrepreneurs with no limits, and big business daddies with thousands of indentured children. They viewed human nature as a thing which progresses for the fittest, reaching unimagined heights, and which puts the unfit in their just places—sketching man as merciless, scientific, and devoid of love.