07-04-2025
Trump, Heritage Foundation's rosy view of Gilded Age ignores bloody reality
The recent commentary, 'What made America great in the Gilded Age,' by Mario Loyola of The Heritage Foundation is an ahistorical journey into the absurd.
Loyola opens by asserting that President Donald Trump is correct in saying, 'We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,' and then proceeds to proclaim the 'genius of the Gilded Age' because it was free 'from the stifling burdens of progressive government and tax policy.' He then expresses his wish that Trump will use the Department of Government Efficiency team to strip away the progressive reforms of the past century.
First of all, I'm not sure whom Trump meant when he said 'we were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,' because, by most measures, more than half of the U.S. population lived in poverty in 1900. We the people were not doing so well at that time.
As for Loyola's praise for the Gilded Age, I can only say he ought to be glad he didn't live in it. While he admits the 'period had its dark sides — political corruption, 'Robber Barons,' child labor, and environmental degradation,' Loyola's list of concerns falls well short of the mark. He fails to recall the joys of Reconstruction violence, forced displacement and wars against Native Americans, disfranchisement of African American men, the onset of Jim Crow, lynching, the struggle for suffrage and women's rights, and, lest we forget, blood-soaked labor disputes.
Since Loyola's piece focuses on economics, let's concentrate on that last item in my list. Why was the Gilded Age racked with workplace turmoil? It has a great deal to do with the absence of those dreaded progressive reforms Loyola detests. Workers in the Gilded Age had virtually no workplace safety protections, compensation for injury, minimum wage, right to organize, no old-age safety net, and were governed at the state and federal levels by the aforementioned corrupt politicians funded by the robber barons.
While these unfettered conditions may have allowed the United States economy to grow rapidly, the American people paid for that with their flesh and bone. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in 2023 there were 5,283 workplace deaths across the country. In 1913, the workplace death toll was 23,000 for just industrial workplaces. The nation had four times more deaths in just one economic sector in a population that was less than a third of what it is today (under 100 million then, compared to 340 million now). The families of only half of those killed on the job received any compensation in 1900, with an average payout of only half a year's salary. Such limited compensation was hardly enough to replace a crucial breadwinner for a typical household, and many never recovered from the loss.
Tragic events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 people burned alive or died after leaping from the flaming building's ninth floor, happened because government allowed employers a free hand to do as they pleased. Such conditions, combined with the 'dark sides' of the Gilded Age, produced an environment that allowed Americans to have an average life expectancy of 47.3 years of age in 1900. Pressed to the wall by a largely unregulated economy, poverty level wages and poor work conditions, late 19th and early 20th century workers fought, often quite literally, for and gained benefits such as the five day work week and eight hour day that have improved our lives steadily.
While the fireman-held safety nets failed to save the women who jumped rather than burn during the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the economic safety net created by progressives in response to the horrific conditions of the Gilded Age has provided greater longevity and better security for generations of American workers. We ought not let the overly rosy and outright false (Franklin D. Roosevelt's court packing scheme was never implemented) historical memory of Loyola, the Heritage Foundation and the DOGE cuts they advocate strip away those hard-won benefits.
The separate and unequal world of the Gilded Age that Loyola and the Heritage Foundation romanticize benefits only the new robber baron billionaires who lined up behind Trump during his inauguration. Allowing them to reimpose it would, just like his inauguration, leave average Americans on the outside looking in.
