“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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