Their Plutocracy and Ours

By Sam Pizzigati

A review of
Age of Betrayal:
The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.
Jack Beatty, Alfred A. Knopf.. 483 pages.

November 19, 2007

Jack Beatty, a senior editor with Atlantic Monthly, starts his sweeping survey of the post-Civil War United States in dramatic fashion, with an 1886 entry from the diary of ex-President Rutherford B. Hayes.

The United States had become, Hayes confided, “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer.” Hayes saw, in the industrializing nation around him, “rottenness” everywhere, “excessive wealth in the hands of the few” side by side with the “extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness of the many.”

Many of his contemporaries saw the same “rottenness.” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, years later, would remember the “deep feeling of unrest” that Americans felt in the late 1880s.

“The conviction was universal that the country was in real danger,” Harlan would write, “from the aggregation of capital in the hands of a few individuals controlling, for their profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country.”

In Age of Betrayal, Beatty asks questions that historians — a hundred years from now — will undoubtedly be asking about our own deeply unequal epoch. How could the United States grow so democracy-defying top-heavy? How could that immensely wealthy tiny top, in a free society, ever stay on top?

Beatty, a fine writer with a flair for the revealing anecdote, guides us through decades of largely forgotten history for the answers.

How did wealth ever flow up in such huge quantities? The Civil War primed the pump. So much money flowed into Wall Street during the war, Beatty relates, that the lunch counter had to be invented. Brokers found themselves so busy they didn’t have time to go home for lunch.

Those brokers would stay busy. Over the next generation, a corrupting combination of government subsidies and price-fixing monopoly might would keep wealth concentrating at a volume never before seen.

The “entrepreneurial genius” often credited for that achievement, notes Beatty, usually boiled down to “strategic generosity toward public officials.”

Enron anyone? But why didn’t “the people” object? That answer gets complicated. On the one hand, they did object — repeatedly, in struggles that would lead, at times, to bloodshed at levels unimaginable today.

On the other hand, the top also engaged in “a politics of distraction, based on the manipulation of real hatreds and sham issues,” that could hardly be more 21st century.

“The parties exploited sectional, racial, cultural, and religious cleavages to win office,” as Beatty puts it, “then turned government over to the corporations. Sound familiar?”

Beatty ends his book at the dawn of the 20th century. So you won’t find any happy ending here. But we can add one.

Try this: Over the first half of the 20th century, against all odds, the American people successfully undid the plutocracy the Age of Betrayal brings to such vivid life. They beat their plutocrats. Why can’t we beat ours?

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the weekly online newsletter on excess and inequality. For updates on inequality-related stats, trends, and books, just check here for a free weekly Too Much subscription.