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You have a recent piece in Law & Liberty called “Gilded Glory.” It starts off by noting that the Gilded Age is having something of a political moment. People are very interested in this time period, and they keep comparing it to our present one. What is going on with that?

Commentators are making a historical analogy between the Gilded Age—which refers to the post-Civil War generation and a half, maybe 1865 to 1910—and the present. The term “Gilded Age” implies that there were fantastic fortunes being made, and everyone else was scrambling. And it seems maybe that’s what we’re going through today with Elon Musk and everyone else.

Now, I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding about what the Gilded Age was all about. It is absolutely true that fantastic fortunes came about in that period; this was when the American economy took off like a rocket. But it was also the introduction and the perfection, I might say, of the phenomenon of mass prosperity. So, my first reaction was, well, to call this a new Gilded Age is arrogant. We’re some little whippersnapper trying to say we’re the best economy in the history of the world, because that’s really what the Gilded Age was.

You write, “The American economy in the quarter century after 1865 remains, without exaggeration, the greatest example of material development and the expansion of mass prosperity in world history.” Tell me about that.

The American economy became the largest in the world during the greatest boom of what we call the second Industrial Revolution. Your head spins if you look at the statistics. The two greatest decades of American economic growth, if you look at the blunderbuss GDP statistics, are the 1870s and the 1880s. Six percent growth per annum, and off a high base too. Ours is 2 percent today, if we’re lucky. So, we’re talking about triple the current rate of economic growth for 25 years. It’s just stunning to me that we would say, “Oh, we’re just like that.” No, we’re stagnating compared to that.

It really is difficult to conceptualize that rate of economic growth, but you make it concrete in the piece by pointing out how that affected the material standard of living.

Tell me about what was going on with housing during that time period.

I draw on a remarkable book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which Robert Gordon, the great economic historian, published about 10 years ago. It’s an absolutely comprehensive statement of what happened to the standard of living after 1865. One of Gordon’s points, and he has a ton of them, is that the housing stock in the United States completely turned over after 1870. And he points out how exceptionally high quality these structures were, including, astonishingly, the tenements of New York City. A tenement was defined as a building that had three or more living units. And in New York City, these things sprang up like crazy. They were networked for plumbing, for heating, and then soon for electricity and communication systems. Before, these services were almost unheard of—there were maybe a few places in cities that had that stuff—but they became de rigueur from 1870 through 1900. So, we hear that we’re in a new Gilded Age and our big vexation today is that young people can’t afford homes, but that is completely different from the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age pioneered the concept of young people being able to afford homes. There was a massive amount of new housing, it was cheap and high quality, and everyone bought it.

You also explore what was going on with food and clothing production during the Gilded Age.

The United States after 1865 moved decisively away from having to preoccupy itself with the rude necessities of life. Clothing had been mass-produced since the 1810s, but all of a sudden, closets had to be added to homes because people started to have so many ready-made outfits. And food is another section entirely. One might say that the greatest economic advance of the Gilded Age came from farm engineering. The mechanization of agriculture essentially eliminated the problem of food production.

You claim in the piece that the mechanization of agriculture enabled both ecological conservation and a rebirth of architecture Tell me about that.

The American people needed every ounce of land that they had, dating back to the colonial period, in order to push crops out of the ground and to raise livestock. In the original aerial photography of this country from the earliest days of aviation, you can see these incredibly large distances that are just clear-cut. And that was what caused the ecological disasters of the 19th century, the elimination of species and all that stuff. Well, mechanization and other scientific advances in agriculture reversed that after 1865. The number of farm plots sank like a stone. And then you just had land available for whatever you wanted to do with it. Some of it was preserved in the national parks, Yosemite and so forth. Some was built upon. The plat books of this time are amazing; all these farms were zoned into housing and buildings. And then the third option was you could just let it reforest. There was a great reforestation in the 20th century that coincided with suburbanization, and that process got started in the Gilded Age.

And the thing I have to say about architecture is, boy, was the architecture good.

American architecture owes its origin to the fantastic economic successes of the Gilded Age. The newly available land and the development of an urban society, which required huge agricultural production, enabled American architecture. I mean, what are the American architectural highlights prior to 1865? Really, they’re almost confined to the colonial and federal period, which was kind of hardscrabble. After 1865, you have a society that can confidently feed itself, develop the land, and build not only monuments to itself, but great spaces to live and conduct its business.

Now, this is a very counterintuitive narrative of the Gilded Age, but you do have some serious caveats in your piece, right?

Yeah, there’s absolutely no reason to romanticize the Gilded Age. I mean, the economy was fantastic, which is why so many immigrants came to the United States during that period, but all societies have their problems. There were often employers and businessmen who were rapacious, and that did give a fillip to an unproductive labor movement, government employment, and other alternatives to the market economy. Political corruption was the name of the game in many ways, and the solutions to the political corruption were not ideal.

You also make a big distinction between the period up through the 1880s and the 1890s, and you say that, actually, the 1890s might be a fair comparison to our current era. Why is that?

Yeah, there was a big depression in the 1890s that was completely engineered by the federal government. They passed a huge tariff in the 1890s and had no idea what to do with their monetary system. So economic growth collapsed for a little while there in 1893, and it was kind of a slow crawl back, and that’s when you had the real labor agitation. So, I’ll take that as a comparison to 2008.

You also write some interesting things about what you call “the self-discrediting system of taxation and civil service that they had at the time.”

Can you explain what was going on with taxation and the civil service at that time, and how that system was self-discrediting, and why you nonetheless have a sort of optimistic view about how things were functioning under that system?

Two major ways that the government taxed and spent in the old days before 1913 had, at their core, self-discrediting mechanisms. And I think that was very important for the success of the country at large. What I mean by that is the tariff, which is duties on imported goods, always openly advertised itself as a favor-trading machine. Captains of industry always said, “Oh yeah, I’ve bribed a congressman so I can get this tariff on sugar, so I don’t have a competitor.” And it was always clear that these congressmen were being paid off by lobbyists because of the tariff. So, the assumption was that the tariff is dirty, and therefore it should be small. Maybe we have to tolerate it for government revenue, but because it’s so nasty, it should be small. And what did it reel in? Two percent of GDP. Government was three percent of GDP. Small government, great economy.

I think the same thing applies to how the government spent its money. It was self-discrediting. It spent its money on government employment, which had an absolutely terrible reputation in the 19th century. In the first entry in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the entire opening chapter is dedicated to how unimpressive it is to work for the government. I sense that opinion was global in American history in the 19th century. So, government employment was self-discrediting; it advertised itself as not an impressive thing to be doing. Therefore, the economy did not demand a lot of it. Just like with the tax system. Oh, the tax system’s lousy, have a little bit of it. The government spending system’s lousy, have a little bit of it.

Now, we have the opposite situation where the tax and the spending system are not self-discrediting but self-praising. The income tax presents itself as moral; we’re taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And the spending system sees itself as necessary and good, almost noble. Of course, our economic performance has been much worse since 1913 than it was before. So, I think it would be very useful for the United States to reintroduce itself to the idea of self-discrediting tax and spending systems.

Another big difference between the Gilded Age and our current era, besides different rates of economic growth, would be the sense of optimism in society. How do we recapture that sense of optimism that characterized the Gilded Age?

Yeah, the funny thing about the Gilded Age was that, while it certainly was optimistic and can-do, it was also somber. As Mumford says in his book The Brown Decades, its mood was autumnal, which may be why all the colors of the architecture and the art were so russet, so deep red and brown. And that darker mood came from the Civil War, which killed 660,000 people in the United States. Everybody in the Gilded Age had a shelf full of daguerreotypes and photographs and portraits of their relatives who were killed in the war. So, there was that somberness. But there was also an optimistic streak. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, the narrator is this woman in the attic who just sits there and mumbles through the 1890s about all the terrible events that happened during the war. However, that’s not what happened at large in the country. In general, people took the hit of the Civil War. Lincoln said, “the Almighty has his own purposes.” They took the hit and said, “Okay, let’s be somber, but let’s get down to what we can control. And we can control having the greatest economy and the greatest culture, so let’s go.”