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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

The Gilded Age that Donald Trump so badly wants to recreate might be a faint memory from American history class, so let’s review a few key concepts and people from the time period (roughly 1870 to 1900) that will help you remember why we never, ever want to repeat it.

The name came from Mark Twain, who co-wrote a novel called “The Gilded Age” published in 1873. This satirical work features themes of greed and political corruption.

The Gilded Age we teach about in school is defined by corruption, laissez faire capitalism, monopolies, extreme wealth inequality, poor working conditions and immense human suffering.

Two prominent forms of political corruption during the Gilded Age were graft, in which leaders used their political authority for personal gain, and the spoils system, in which officials rewarded loyal supporters with government jobs rather than hiring people based on merit.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 helped curtail the spoils system. It set up a system of competitive examinations to fill government positions with qualified people, protected civil servants from firing except for incompetence or misconduct, and reduced the number of political appointments that could be used to reward loyalists.

The Gilded Age was marked by little regulation of industry, and it produced wealthy magnates such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan.

The tech billionaires with front row seats at Trump’s inauguration (Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sergey Brin) are like the robber barons of over a century ago, as we are approaching similar levels of wealth inequality.

During the Gilded Age, the top 10% owned approximately 75-90% of the wealth, and the top 2% controlled 30%.

We are almost back to that level. Currently, the top 10% control about 60% of our wealth, and the top 1% control about 30%.

On the flip side of that massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few during the Gilded Age is “How the Other Half Lives.” You may remember Jacob Riis’s pictures of destitute families crowded in airless tenements and hungry children huddled in the streets of New York City.

You may remember Lewis Hine’s photographs of scrawny children laboring in coal mines and working barefoot next to dangerous machinery in cotton mills. Children who contributed their meager earnings to their families by the age of 10 or 12 rather than attending school.

People looked at these pictures and did not like what they saw. They read stories by “muckraking” journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens and lost their tolerance for Gilded Age excesses of the very rich at the expense of everyone else. They didn’t buy “Social Darwinist” rationalizations that the wealthy were the strong who naturally dominated the weak, or that capitalism should be laissez faire.

In practice, these Gilded Age features led to terrible exploitation, the destruction of competition and the growth of monopolies.

It was too much.

But Trump is blind to that. He only identifies with the very rich. Their gain is all that matters to him. Everyone else is just the weak to be exploited.

And now Trump is wielding tariffs the way that wealthy, impulsive Mr. Toad drove motor cars in the Wind in the Willows (1908) — recklessly, with no regard for anyone’s safety and crashing car after car, never learning to be more careful. Except in this case it’s not a car Trump is about to heedlessly wreck, it’s our economy. For some small business owners, it’s their livelihoods.

The appalling aspects of the Gilded Age spawned an era of reform. It led to the formation of farmer cooperatives like the Clarks Grove Cooperative Creamery established in 1890, which served as a successful early model for cooperative creameries across the state. Farmers also formed cooperative elevators and oil associations. The Freeborn County Co-op Oil Association was founded in 1925 and is still serving this area a century later.

Rural areas of Minnesota were a key part of the populist resistance to the Gilded Age, and the Farmer-Labor Party coalesced in 1918 around an agenda for reform that gave workers more rights and protected farmers and small businesses from corporate monopolies. The Farmer-Labor Party is still here too — it merged with the Democratic Party in 1944 to form the DFL.

Trump is fast filling the Oval Office with gaudy gilded frames and gilded bric-a-brac as he pounds us with tariffs and as Elon Musk ruthlessly tries to chainsaw the civil service and our social safety net to fund tax breaks for billionaires.

The Gilded Age was defined by wealthy people hogging money at the top and using their political power to exploit other people and keep labor cheap.

The antidote to this destructive greed, today as back then, is to stand with each other and to defend workers’ rights.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.