“Hey, Trump voters! Yesterday, Trump had a press conference in the Oval Office. He said, ‘You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff-based. We had no income tax. Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let’s charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country. And the country was never relatively—was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth, we didn’t know what to do with our money. We had meetings. We had committees. And these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject. We have so much money. What are we going to do with it? Who are we going to give it to?’
Did you know that you know an actual expert on the period of 1870 to 1913?
It’s me. I am.
I’ve been studying this time period for two decades, and I don’t mean reading a Doris Kearns Goodwin book every few months. I am a trained scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
There’s a lot of us who study this period. In fact, I was in a room with many of them over the weekend. We stared at Trump Tower in Chicago while we met. It was… motivating.
Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost single-handedly controlled the nation’s money supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.
There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905, there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8-hour work day.
Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity laws, obsessing about sex, and white women’s purity. Creating instability in the Phillipines, the Caribbean, and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women’s suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled down on segregation laws and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.
Sound familiar?”
— Dr. Lauren Thompson, Historian, as posted on Facebook
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Jim Crow. Gone now, but we have an opportunity to Make America Great Again.
This is brilliant! Thank you, Dr Thompson!
Does Trump not know what happened to President McKinley? He was shot by a guy who had had it with being screwed over by the oligarchy.
I used to have relatives old enough to have lived through that period. I heard tales of the coal miner’s strikes in Southern Colorado. And the deaths at Ludlow, Colorado. It’s on Wikipedia. The workers were virtual slaves, bound to the company store, company church, company school. They were paid in company script, which was worthless outside the mining camp. Besides being underpaid, they couldn’t move because they had no money. It was an ugly time in history.
Because of those strikes, my uncles could live a comfortable old age, with a generous pension. Their wives got pensions too. The miners literally paid with their blood. I’m not surprised Trump loves that era. It was a billionaire’s paradise.
Nostalgia for some past time is always based on fantasy and imagination, because the person doing the fantasizing either didn’t actually live during that time or enjoyed a privileged existence during said era.
I used to read a lot of Tom Clancy when I was in college. In one of his books, either “The Hunt for Red October” or “Cardinal of the Kremlin”, a fictional Soviet official visits another at their well appointed dacha in the countryside. This older person at the dacha laments how the younger generation had become too decadent and westernized, instead of being austere and hardcore like he was in his youth. The irony being that he was saying this while living a lifestyle that was very elite by Soviet standards due to his political standing. Tom Clancy always wrote what his characters were thinking, and the one who visited was thinking (not saying of course) that the official had no concept of reality because his entire life had been spent in this privileged alternate reality compared to the average Soviet citizen. So of course he would idolize leaders like Stalin, etc. He didn’t have to live through the terror and subsequent poverty that most people had to endure during that era. Today this fictional Russian character in real life is Vladimir Putin, who wants to recreate a horror filled hybrid version of the Soviet Union and Czarist Russia, because in his mind true democracy and the breakup of the Soviet “empire” was the worse thing he witnessed as a KGB official.
Oligarchs love to point back to a time that they dream was great. The time Dear Leader thinks was great was characterized by many things, chief among them expansionism. The west through manifest destiny. Then beyond through the Spanish-American war because one of our ships exploded in Cuba (“Remember the Maine!”). Then President Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet that sailed around the world, showing America’s new standing as an imperial power. Never mind the abject poverty and suffering experienced by most folks, the persistent Yellow Fever and cholera epidemics, the social unrest, the economic panics, the violence towards minorities and immigrants, the constant feuds and coal miners strikes/wars in Appalachia and the genocide of the Native Americans. America was great during this time because Dear Leader’s chosen history books say it was. Much like people who say the Bible is a perfect book because the Bible itself says it is- well then it must be true!
Many of my ancestors who lived in that time period were dirt poor, literally living in houses with dirt floors. On my mother’s side, these were white people in the South, so they were busy making sure black people knew “their place”. My great-great-grandfather owned a farm worked by himself and his 8 sons and 6 daughters, and he made extra money making abd selling illegal moonshine. On my father’s side, they were doing a little better living in Pennsylvania manufacturing cities of Bethlehem and Allentown. I doubt if my ancestors would consider themselves living in a golden era.
My parents were born after 1915, so I have no personal information about that time. However, since there were no antibiotics, frequent epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, typhoid fever and other nasty diseases, lots of individuals died early. Many women died of pregnancy complications. How could it be “a Golden Age” if many lives were threatened by illness, famine and storms? Buildings were heated by fire, as was cooking. Buildings were drafty, too warm in summer,and too chill in the winter. Plus “the whole world smelled of horses” (to quote an old episode of the Ironside TV show). Back then horsepower meant Equines. Even the rich and powerful had to accept epidemics, smoke smells and horse droppings. No thanks!