This essay, originally delivered as the SHGAPE Presidential Address in April 2019, takes as a starting point the fiftieth anniversary of William Appleman Williams's The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society. It finds that Williams's claims about the agrarian roots of the modern American empire remain an important corrective to imperial denial, including to the stubborn idea of the American heartland as a locus of isolationist impulses, as a place better characterized as endangered by global forces than as a wellspring of power. Broadening out beyond Williams's export-centered analysis, this essay highlights some of the multi-directional links that connected the rural heartland to the wider world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By turning a seemingly local history inside out, it draws attention to longer histories of settler colonialism, the import side of trade ledgers, transimperial solidarities, and the networks of anticolonial resistance that emerged in land grant colleges. In addition to reframing nationalist mythologies more precisely as white nationalist mythologies, it concludes that there is no going back to the heartland of myth because it never existed in the first place.

The narrative of a second Gilded Age erroneously suggests that the current dynamics are repeating those of the late nineteenth century. Although they share certain important characteristics, these are profoundly different historical moments. Focusing on the history of capitalism and labor, and taking a global perspective, demonstrates that the two periods were bookends—the “before” and “after” to a lengthy period when the cruelest characteristics of corporate capitalism were temporarily constrained. The late nineteenth century saw the ascent of serious efforts to rein in the power of the new capitalism and force it to bow down to the needs of civil society. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we are experiencing the decline of that effort as capitalists and their ideological and political supporters push to see how far they can go to ensure the unchallenged hegemony of corporate and property rights. The slow climb toward a more humane capitalism and the rapid descent away from it constitute two very different experiences.

The man they called “Smiley” died in February 1938 on an operating table in Kingston, Jamaica. His stomach cancer, only recently discovered, was quickly deemed inoperable by a doctor in the Cayman Islands, where he lived with his pregnant wife and four children. In Cayman, there had been no public hospital. Instead, a British heiress paid to build a four-bed emergency ward and dispensary meant to serve the island's 6,500 residents. Four beds for more than six thousand. Such insufficiency represented the extent of institutionalized health care at the edge of the British Empire.

This essay surveys the changes and continuities in U.S. immigration law and policy between the Gilded Age and the 1990s–2010s. It points to how the administration of immigration law today is rooted in doctrines established in late nineteenth-century immigration cases. In particular, the essay connects current anxieties over immigration, borders, and national sovereignty to the “plenary power” doctrine that came out of the Supreme Court's decision in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889). Examining recent federal actions to “secure” the border and enforce immigration law, this essay begins to address the ways in which current policy continues to reflect Gilded Age anxieties about territory, sovereignty, migration, and diverse populations during an era of constantly shifting borders.

After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comparing our era to the Gilded Age is no longer just a metaphor: Piketty argues that we never actually left the Gilded Age. The mid-twentieth-century period of lower inequality was a massive and perhaps unrepeatable exception to what Piketty sees as the natural tendencies toward inequality inherent in capitalist societies. But comparing our current period of relentless cuts in taxes and rising inequality to the Gilded Age shows why our period cannot be a repeat of the Gilded Age: the Gilded Age itself led to so many transformations to capitalism that inequality no longer leads to the political outrage that could anchor a broad-based progressive movement. The Gilded Age led to policies that made capitalism bearable, and that is precisely what is leading now to a situation in which Americans identify their success with the free market, and resist policies to lower inequality.

One striking parallel between the Gilded Age and today is the return of the “ring” as a volatile form of governance. Rings are small bands of entrepreneurs who, through capture of key political institutions, exploit the coalition-building imperatives of party politics to rapidly accumulate large personal fortunes. The vernacular hails from the 1860s and 1870s, when the Tweed Ring, Gold Ring, Whiskey Ring, and Bank Ring, among others, scandalized the public with smash and grab practices. In the Trump era, Paul Manafort's career and the president's family business share many similarities to these classic episodes, both in the contested origin of private wealth and the circulation of profits throughout the political system. Rings thus have a tendency to recur in American political development. When electoral politics becomes financialized, speculators may seize opportunities to extract a hefty surplus from the public domain. In premodern contexts, Max Weber called this plundering phenomenon “booty capitalism.” The variant specific to American electoral institutions highlights a periodic conflict in democratic capitalism that arises over the legitimacy of political wealth accumulation.

The moniker “Gilded Age” invokes questions of wealth, class, and political economy. When paired with a subsequent “Progressive Era,” as in the name of this journal and the society that sponsors it, the implication is that economic developments after the Civil War gave rise to pressing questions of workplace safety, income distribution, monopoly, and the like, which reform and protest movements rightly sought to rectify. Whether to invoke the Gilded Age to describe the current era of U.S. history also centers on such questions: it makes sense to say that we are living in a Second Gilded Age, Thomas Piketty and others have argued, because inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power echo those of the 1880s and 1890s; or, respond skeptics like Heath Carter, it is not a helpful comparison because the cultural and organizational forces contesting inequality are so much weaker now.

The recent framing of our current era as a “Second Gilded Age” has been closely linked to economist Thomas Piketty's empirical findings regarding income inequality patterns in American history. Yet if we take a closer look at both the inequality data at our disposal as well as the broader social forces that have led to widening wealth gaps in recent decades, it becomes apparent that our current neoliberal era of rising inequality is far more similar to the Progressive Era than the Gilded Age. After arguing why the Progressive Era is a more apt historical analogy, this article will seek to explain why our contemporary moment has nonetheless been framed as a Second Gilded Age.

In 1840, Joseph Mallord William Turner, the English painter, created Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On. The painting has many of Turner's signature elements: sensual imagery, brilliant sunsets, and dramatic landscapes ablaze with color. A closer look haunts the viewer. The scattering of a severed leg, shackles, and chains floating in bloody waters capture the monstrous decision of the captain and crew of the slave ship the Zong (originally named Zorg, which means, ironically, “Care” in Dutch) to throw 132 enslaved men, women, and children overboard, one by one, through cabin windows.

This essay argues that, whatever the continuities between the religious worlds of the late nineteenth century and those of our own time, the discontinuities are significant enough that we should be cautious in deploying the notion of a new Gilded Age. In particular, the prevalence of work-class conservatism in recent decades stands in stark contrast to the roiling debates and radical departures spearheaded by working-class believers involved with the early labor movement.

In what sense are we living in a “New Gilded Age”? Facile analogies between the late nineteenth century and our own era have proliferated in recent years. Pundits such as Paul Krugman inserted this analogy into the public conversation in the early 2000s, drawing on empirical work by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. In underscoring a parallel between the two “gilded” eras, these commentators sketched out two periods marked by economic inequality, with several “anomalous” decades of relative equality in the middle of the twentieth century. This basic U-shaped narrative template has inspired commentators in numerous venues, from The Nation to The Economist, to imagine the shifts of recent decades simply as “a return” to an earlier age. Evoking social, political, and cultural resemblances, these accounts have stressed the resurgence of unfettered markets, economic volatility, government inaction, and the plutocratic reign of money.

The idea of a “new gilded age” depends on a model of history in which the tension between inequality and solidarity takes the form of a binary oscillation (often resting on a positivist social scientific form of reasoning), in turn creating the appearance of basic similarity between separate unequal periods. Under this view, however, it is difficult to make sense of the fundamentally different origins of inequality prevailing in 1890 and 2010. Instead, this article argues, historians ought to treat history cumulatively—that is, historically—finding the origins of inequality not in the previous unequal period, but in the previous solidaristic period, and tracing the connections between one period and another rather than viewing them as ideal-typical opposites.

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century), the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda), and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

As much as recent scholarship, popular outlets, and even a documentary film have asserted that we find ourselves in another “Gilded Age” since the 1980s, such a conceit has its limits. Indeed, we should proceed with caution when it comes to embracing analogies that posit a “new” or “second” Gilded Age. We might instead profitably think about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being a period of high capitalism and our current moment as reflecting a particular, if not peculiar, phase of capitalism. And, as much as our understanding of gender and sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might actually be hindered by separating “Gilded Age” and “Progressive Era,” considering gendered dynamics of our current moment—a moment that has been termed late-stage capitalism—deepens our analysis of the low-wage economy. When it comes to sexuality, we should be careful in drawing parallels between the Gilded Age and the present given that contemporary understandings of sexuality began to coalesce during the late nineteenth century. Still, debates about sex and sexuality certainly shaped the Gilded Age and they continue to inform our current moment in dynamic and even unprecedented ways. We might not find ourselves in another Gilded Age, but we should arguably build upon current interest in histories of capitalism as a means think about the significance of progressive social movements within capitalist societies.

With the current bountiful crops of outrages, provocations, and howlings, there is a temptation to evaluate everything in terms of our own Gilded Moment. The temptation needs to be resisted. Our Gilded Moment might be Trumpian, but it draws its fuel from a rebellion against a much lengthier and more complicated era that began in the late 1970s and runs into the present. Asking whether this era is a Second Gilded Age comparable to the First Gilded Age, which began at the end of the Civil War and extended into the early twentieth century, creates a blind man and the elephant problem. Examining different parts of the era can yield disparate conclusions. My task is to comprehend each era as a whole; I think that there are structural similarities stronger than particular differences.

This essay looks at Richard White's 2017 survey of the Gilded Age, The Republic for Which It Stands, in relation to other recent histories of the period. The Republic is filled with seemingly endless examples of corruption, personal venality, individual stupidity, ideological rigidity, and even good intentions gone awry. A vast and broad cast of Americans—some well-known, some more obscure—dash across the pages. But in White's republic, the changes are in the details rather than the narrative arc. Consequently, and in marked contrast to the other Gilded Age histories considered here, White's Gilded Age is neither optimistic nor tragic. Instead, it is fatalistic, a Gilded Age for our time.