Local opinion: Was the Gilded Age really Paradise Lost?

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

A recent op ed by Mario Loyola, a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argued that President Trump was largely correct to describe the years from 1870 to 1913, often dubbed the Gilded Age, as a sort of American paradise. The “genius” of this lost era, he argued, lay in a combination of high tariffs, low taxes, and few federal regulations to inhibit state government aid to business.

This magic sauce supposedly produced four decades of unbridled economic growth, a tripling of the population, and the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading industrial economy. Admittedly, Paradise came with a few wrinkles, such as political corruption, child labor, and environmental degradation. But, overall, this purported Eden persisted until wrecked by the calamitous meddling of the Progressive Era in the early-20th century and especially the New Deal of the 1930s. The poison apples of the federal income tax and regulatory state practically killed off market-based dynamism and innovation, leaving entrepreneurs surviving on the fringes of the economy.

No reputable historian of the United States would recognize or endorse this fantasy. One could “nitpick” and call out such imperfections as the Gilded Age’s pervasive racism, oppression of labor, destruction of the Western Indian tribes, the denial of basic voting and legal rights to women and minorities, the conquest of the Philippines, and the vast economic inequality between the wealthy and working class. Moreover, the era’s economic growth was punctuated by several severe depressions, especially during the 1870s and the 1890s.

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In fact, it was these persistent shortcomings that motivated Progressive reformers and then New Dealers to expand federal powers. They recognized that the modern industrial economy was national in scope and that large corporations dwarfed the power of local and state officials to regulate effectively. Without the right to organize labor unions, individual workers were powerless when facing corporations like U.S. Steel or General Motors. Blacks and other minorities could not overcome pervasive discrimination without support from federal courts and new national legislation.

But far from stifling innovation and wealth, Progressive and New Deal reforms ushered in over a century of remarkable American economic growth, innovation, and social equality. These reforms, over time, made the United States the richest and most innovative nation on earth. This country has led the world in medical innovations, new technology, and has gradually redressed many of the social problems inherited from the Gilded Age. Life expectancy has nearly doubled since the 1890s. Even new “problems,” such as undocumented migration, are evidence of success: this is where people from nearly everywhere else want to come.

Before trying to re-create an imagined paradise, we should ask whether life was really better — and for whom — during this fictional Utopia. Other than a handful of self-serving plutocrats, billionaires and crypto-pirates, would most Americans really prefer living in the Paradise Lost of the Gilded Age?

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