Occupy Wall Street, a movement that began as a small encampment of young people in lower Manhattan, became a riveting public spectacle in the fall of 2011. A mere month after the first sleeping bags were unrolled in Zuccotti Park, a stone’s throw away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, millions of “occupiers” in a thousand cities around the world all on the same day echoed the plaint of those New York rebels that the whole planet had been hijacked and then ruined by a financial elite and its political enablers. “The 99%” who were its victims had had enough. Nothing of this scope and speed had ever happened before, ever. It was testimony not only to the magical powers of the internet, but more important to the profound revulsion inspired by institutions that just a few short years earlier had commanded great authority and respect. Now they seemed illegitimate and disgraced.
Peering back into the past at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street” and the domination of empowered economic elites of all sorts, a historian feels compelled to ask a simple question: Why didn’t Occupy Wall Street (OWS) happen much sooner than it did? During those three years after the global financial meltdown and Great Recession, an eerie silence blanketed the country. Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached levels not seen for a generation. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged, but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” goliaths—not the legions left destitute in the wake of their financial wilding. The political class prescribed what people already had enough of: yet another dose of austerity, plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that for the 99% of Americans would never be much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future waned and bitterness set in.
Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. Or rather it was invisible where it had always been most conspicuous: on the left. Right-wing populism, the Tea Party especially, flourished, excoriating “limousine liberals” and know-it-all government bureaucrats. Establishments in both parties ran from or tried to curry favor with this upwelling of hot political emotions. But the animus of the Tea Party was mainly aimed at big government and social liberalism. To be sure, it wasn’t fond of financial titans collecting handouts from the Federal Reserve. Still, Tea Party partisans were waging war on behalf of capitalism, not against it. That mission had always belonged to the left.
What left? In the light of American history, its vanishing, or at least its frailty and passivity, was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again landed gentry, slave owners, industrial robber barons, monopolists, Wall Street, the Establishment, and assorted other oligarchs had found themselves in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry. After all, from the outset Americans had displayed an easily irritated edginess toward any sign of political, social, or economic pretension. Aristocrats had never been welcome here. No plutocrats or oligarchs need apply either. Hierarchies of bloodlines, entitled wealth, or political preferment were alien and obnoxious—in theory at least, not part of the DNA of the New World. Elitism, wherever and whenever it showed itself, had always been greeted with a truculent contempt, what guardians of the ancien régime in the Old World would have condemned as insufferable insolence.
Is this a misreading of the American past, a kind of consoling fairy tale of the way we never were? If today’s bankers, corporate chiefs, and their political enablers managed to perpetrate wrack and ruin yet emerged pretty much unscathed, at least until OWS erupted—and even then all the sound and fury spent itself quickly—what else is new? Arguably, America is and always has been a business civilization through and through, ready to tolerate high degrees of inequality, exploitation, and lopsided distributions of social and political influence. The famously taciturn president Calvin Coolidge (“Silent Cal” was so mute that when social critic Dorothy Parker got word he had passed away, she waspishly asked, “How could they tell?”) once pointedly and bluntly pronounced that “the business of America is business.” Isn’t that the hard truth? So long as people have believed the country still offered them a credible shot at “the main chance”—an equal right to become unequal—the rest would take care of itself.
One version of the American story has it that the abrasions of class inequities get regularly soothed away in the bathwater of abundance. Rancorous conflicts, which anybody would acknowledge there have been plenty of, are, in this telling, more often about cultural and social animosities than about “class struggle.”
Class warfare, however—something that became virtually unspeakable during the last generation—was a commonplace of everyday life during what might be called the long nineteenth century. It was part of our lingua franca from the days when Jefferson and his democratic followers denounced counterrevolutionary “moneycrats” through the grim decade of the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt excoriated “economic royalists,” “Tories of industry,” and pillagers of “other people’s money.”
Presidents once felt entirely comfortable using this vocabulary. Andrew Jackson waged war against “the Monster Bank” (the second Bank of the United States, which he and his Democratic Party supporters drove to extinction, claiming in a fit of demagoguery that it was an aristocratic monopoly of the country’s credit resources run by the politically privileged). Abraham Lincoln, when informed that Wall Street traders in government bonds were bearing the market, hoping for Union Army defeats, suggested these speculators be shot. Theodore Roosevelt interdicted “malefactors of great wealth” in one of his frequent moods of moral high dudgeon, not shy about voicing his disdain for those plutocrats who thought they deserved the deference of their fellow citizens because of the size of their bank accounts. When Woodrow Wilson ran for president in 1912, he campaigned against “the Money Trust,” arguing that small circle of white-shoe investment banking houses headed up by J. P. Morgan not only controlled the capital wherewithal of the nation’s economy, its chief industries, its lines of credit, and its access to technological innovation—in sum, the pathways to economic opportunity—but used that enormous economic throw weight to subvert the democratic institutions of the republic.
Were these men—not to mention FDR, whose enemies insinuated he was a Communist fellow traveler—closet Marxists? To think so would do a disservice to both Karl Marx and these presidents. It is rather their use of the class-inflected, emotionally charged language of a bygone America that is noteworthy. It is hard to imagine any president of the last half century or so having resort to such rhetoric.
Marx once described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. Several decades have come and gone during which we’ve learned not to mention Marx in polite company. Our vocabulary went through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor” or even something as apparently innocuous as “working class.” In times past, however, such language and the ideas they conjured up struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as accurate depictions of reality. They used them regularly along with words and phrases like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced. Never before, however, has the Vatican of capitalism captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that recently ran the country for a long generation and ended up running it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville (no Marxist he), confessed as much during the Clinton years, when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”1
Occupy Wall Street, even bereft of strategy, program, and specific demands as many lamented when it was a newborn, nonetheless opened up space again for our political imagination by confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament. It rediscovered something that, beneath thickets of political verbiage about tax this and cut that, about end-of-the-world deficits and missionary-minded “job creators,” had been hiding in plain sight: namely, what our ancestors once called “the street of torments.” It achieved a giant leap backward, so to speak, summoning up a history of opposition that had mysteriously withered away.
True turning points in American political history are rare. This might seem counterintuitive once we recognize that for so long society was in a constant uproar. Arguably the country was formed and re-formed in serial acts of violent expropriation. Like the market it has been (and remains) infinitely fungible, living in the perpetually changing present, panting after the future, the next big thing. The demographics of American society are and have always been in permanent upheaval, its racial and ethnic complexion mutating from one generation to the next. Its economic hierarchies exist in a fluid state of dissolution and recrystallization. Social classes go in and out of existence.
Nonetheless, in the face of this all-sided liquefaction, American politics have tended to flow within very narrow banks from one generation to the next. The capacious, sometimes stultifying embrace of the two-party system has absorbed most of the heat generated by this or that hot-button issue, leaving the fundamentals intact.
Only under the most trying circumstances has the political system ruptured or come close. Then the prevailing balance of power and wealth between classes and regions has been called into question; then the political geography and demography of the nation have been reconfigured, sometimes for decades to come; only then have axiomatic beliefs about wealth and work, democracy and elitism, equality and individualism, government and the free market been reformulated or at least opened to serious debate, however briefly.
A double mystery then is the subject of this book. Speaking generally, one might ask why people submit for so long to various forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination. And then, equally mysterious, why they ever stop giving in. Why acquiesce? Why resist? Looking backward, the indignities and injustices, the hypocrisies and lies, the corruption and cruelty may seem insupportable. Yet they are tolerated. Looking backward, the dangers to life, limb, and livelihood entailed in rebelling may seem too dire to contemplate. Yet in the teeth of all that, rebellion happens. The world is full of recent and long-ago examples of both.
America’s history is mysterious in just this way. This book is an attempt to explore the enigma of resistance and acquiescence as those experiences unfolded in the late nineteenth and again in the late twentieth century.
We have grown accustomed for some years now to referring to America’s two gilded ages. The first one was baptized by Mark Twain in his novel of that same name and has forever after been used to capture the era’s exhibitionist material excess and political corruption. The second, our own, which began sometime during the Reagan era and lasted though the financial meltdown of 2008, like the original, earned a reputation for extravagant self-indulgence by the rich and famous and for a similar political system of, by, and for the moneyed. So it has been natural to assume that these two gilded ages, however much they have differed in their particulars, were essentially the same. Clearly there is truth in that claim. However, they were fundamentally dissimilar.
Mark Twain’s Gilded Age has always fascinated and continues to fascinate. The American vernacular is full of references to that era: the “Gay Nineties,” “robber barons,” “how the other half lives,” “cross of gold,” “acres of diamonds,” “conspicuous consumption,” “the leisure class,” “the sweatshop,” “other people’s money,” “social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest,” “the nouveau riche,” “the trust.” What a remarkable cluster of metaphors, so redolent with the era’s social tensions they have become permanent deposits in the national memory bank.
We think of the last third of the nineteenth century as a time of great accomplishment, especially of stunning economic growth and technological transformation and the amassing of stupendous wealth. This is the age of the steam engine and transcontinental railroads, of the mechanical reaper and the telephone, of cities of more than a million and steel mills larger than any on earth, of America’s full immersion in the Industrial Revolution. A once underdeveloped, infant nation became a power to be reckoned with.
For people living back then, however much they were aware of and took pride in these marvels, the Gilded Age was also a time of profound social unease and chronic confrontations. Citizens were worried about how the nation seemed to be verging on cataclysmic divisions of wealth and power. The trauma of the Civil War, so recently concluded, was fresh in everyone’s mind. The abiding fear, spoken aloud again and again, was that a second civil war loomed. Bloody encounters on railroads, in coal mines and steel mills, in city streets and out on the Great Plains made this premonition palpable. This time the war to the death would be between the haves and have-nots, a war of class against class. American society was becoming dangerously, ominously unequal, fracturing into what many at the time called “two nations.”
Until OWS came along, all of this would have seemed utterly strange to those living through America’s second Gilded Age. But why? After all, years before the financial meltdown plenty of observers had noted how unequal American society had become. They compared the skewed distribution of income and wealth at the turn of the twenty-first century with the original Gilded Age and found it as stark or even starker than at any time in American history. Stories about penthouse helipads, McMansions roomy enough to house a regiment, and private island getaways kept whole magazines and TV shows buzzing. “Crony capitalism,” which Twain had great fun skewering in his novel, was very much still alive and well in the age of Jack Abramoff. Substitute those Fifth Avenue castles, Newport beachfront behemoths, and Boss Tweed’s infamous courthouse of a century before and nothing much had changed.
Or so it might seem. But in fact times had changed profoundly. Gone missing were the insurrections and all those utopian longings for a world put together differently so as to escape the ravages of industrial capitalism. It was this social chemistry of apocalyptic doom mixed with visionary expectation that had lent the first Gilded Age its distinctive frisson. The absence of all that during the second Gilded Age, despite the obvious similarities it shares with the original, is a reminder that the past is indeed, at least in some respects, a foreign country. Why, until the sudden eruption of OWS—a flare-up that died down rather quickly—was the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?
If the first Gilded Age was full of sound and fury, the second seemed to take place in a padded cell. Might that striking contrast originate in the fact that the capitalist society of the Gay Nineties was nothing like the capitalism of our own time? Or to put it another way: Did the utter strangeness of capitalism when it was first taking shape in America—beginning decades before the Gay Nineties—so deeply disturb traditional ways of life that for several generations it seemed intolerable to many of those violently uprooted by its onrush? Did that shattering experience elicit responses, radical yet proportionate to the life-or-death threat to earlier, cherished ways of life and customary beliefs?
And on the contrary, did a society like our own long ago grow accustomed to all the fundamentals of capitalism, not merely as a way of conducting economic affairs, but as a way of being in the world? Did we come to treat those fundamentals as part of the natural order of things, beyond real challenge, like the weather? What were the mechanisms at work in our own distinctive political economy, in the quotidian experiences of work and family life, in the interior of our imaginations, that produced a sensibility of irony and even cynical disengagement rather than a morally charged universe of utopian yearnings and dystopian forebodings?
Gilded ages are, by definition, hiding something; what sparkles like gold is not. But what they’re hiding may differ, fundamentally. Industrial capitalism constituted the understructure of the first Gilded Age. The second rested on finance capitalism. Late-nineteenth-century American capitalism gave birth to the “trust” and other forms of corporate consolidation at the expense of smaller businesses. Late-twentieth-century capitalism, notwithstanding its mania for mergers and acquisitions, is known for its “flexibility,” meaning its penchant for off-loading corporate functions to a world of freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and numberless petty enterprises. The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion.
During the first Gilded Age millions of farmers, handicraftsmen, shopkeepers, fishermen, and other small property-owners—not to mention millions of ex-slaves and dispossessed peasants from the steppes and parched fields of eastern and southern Europe—became the country’s original working class. They were swept up, often enough against their will or with little other choice, into the process of capital accumulation happening at the forges and foundries and engine houses and packing plants and mills and mines and bridges and tunnels and wharves and the factories in the fields that were transforming the face of America. This reprocessing of human raw material into wage labor extended well beyond the Gay Nineties and was still going on when the whole economy fell to its knees in 1929. By the late twentieth century, however, the descendants of these industrial pioneers were being expelled from that same industrial heartland as it underwent a reverse process of disaccumulation and deindustrialization.
Profitability during the first Gilded Age rested first of all on transforming the resources of preindustrial societies—their lands, minerals, animals, foodstuffs, fisheries, rivers, workshops, stores, tools, muscle, and brainpower—into marketable commodities produced by wage laborers who had lost or were losing their access to alternative means of staying alive. Profitability during the second Gilded Age relied instead on cannibalizing the industrial edifice erected during the first, and on exporting the results of that capital liquidation to the four corners of the earth—everywhere from Nicaragua to Bangladesh—where deep reservoirs of untapped labor, like newly discovered oil reserves, gave industrial capital accumulation a fresh start. Prosperity, once driven by cost-cutting mechanization and technological breakthroughs, came instead to rest uneasily on oceans of consumer and corporate debt. Poverty during the first Gilded Age originated in and indicted exploitation at work. Poverty in the second Gilded Age was more commonly associated in the public mind with exclusion from work.
We can once again, like our Gilded Age forebears, speak of “two nations,” geographically the same, separated by a century, one on the rise, a developing country, one in decay, becoming an underdeveloped country.
Stark contrasts in emotions, behavior, and moral sanctions grew up alongside these two divergent ways of making a living, amassing money, and organizing the economy. During the first Gilded Age the work ethic constituted the nuclear core of American cultural belief and practice. That era’s emphasis on capital accumulation presumed frugality, saving, and delayed gratification as well as disciplined, methodical labor. That ethos frowned on self-indulgence, was wary of debt, denounced wealth not transparently connected to useful, tangible outputs, and feared libidinal excess whether that took the form of gambling, sumptuary display, leisured indolence, or uninhibited sexuality.
How at odds that all is with the moral and psychic economy of our own second Gilded Age. An economy kept aloft by finance and mass consumption has for a long time rested on an ethos of immediate gratification, enjoyed a love affair with debt, speculation, and risk, erased the distinction between productive labor and pursuits once upon a time judged parasitic, and became endlessly inventive about ways to supercharge with libido even the homeliest of household wares.
Can these two diverging political economies—one resting on industry, the other on finance—and these two polarized sensibilities—one fearing God, the other living in an impromptu moment to moment—explain the Great Noise of the first Gilded Age and the Great Silence of the second? So too, is it possible that people still attached by custom and belief to ways of subsisting that had originated outside the orbit of capital accumulation were for that very reason both psychologically and politically more existentially desperate, more capable, and more audacious in envisioning a noncapitalist future than those who had come of age knowing nothing else?
And does the global explosion of OWS mark the end of the Age of Acquiescence? Is it a turning point in our country’s history? Have we reached the limits of auto-cannibalism? Is capitalism any longer compatible with democracy? Was it ever? During the first Gilded Age millions were convinced it was not. During the second Gilded Age, conventional wisdom had it that they went together like love and marriage. Indeed, it became an imperial boast as the United States assumed the burden of tutoring other nations on how they too might confect this perfect union. But then OWS articulated what many had long since concluded: that the 99% have for all practical purposes been banned from any effective say-so when it comes to determining how the resources of the country are to be deployed and distributed. Is there then a future for democracy beyond capitalism? An old question is being asked anew.
To take the measure of how we are now entails first getting a sense of how we once were. Part I will examine the “long nineteenth century,” when capitalism “red in tooth and claw” met fierce enemies from every walk of life. Part II will probe for the sources of our remarkable silence in the modern era.
This book hardly pretends to be a new history of the United States. The American Revolution, the Civil War, presidential elections, wars, and much else show up briefly, indirectly, or not at all. But it is nonetheless an attempt to say something essential about the nature and evolution of American society. How well we manage the grave dilemmas confronting us now and in the future may depend on how well we grasp the buried truths of our past.