Getting the Gilded Age All Wrong

A book that could have been written 80 or 100 years ago.

Even ignoring its title, which seems more fitting to a polemic than a work of history, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (Knopf, 512 pages, $30) starts off badly. Jack Beatty, an editor at The Atlantic and author of The Rascal King, a biography of Boston’s Mayor James Curley, is in a state of high dudgeon because the nation’s railroads adopted standard time in 1883 on their own initiative. “Who elected the railroads to govern?” he demands.

Well, no one. Congress, pushed and pulled by various political forces, had been unable to do anything about the ever-increasing problem of coordinating local times in an era when the railroad and the telegraph had shrunk the world by many orders of magnitude.

Since Congress couldn’t act, the railroads did, deciding to use four standard time zones. Once adopted by the railroads, standard time proved so convenient, so logical, and so easy that everyone else soon started using it as well. Within a very few years a world without standard time had become almost unimaginable, as it is to us.

How long was the country supposed to wait for Congress to stop dithering?

This anger that the people of the latter half of the nineteenth century often did not run their world as Jack Beatty thinks they should have permeates what is a remarkably old-fashioned book. From its tone (utterly unforgiving of human nature and an earlier generation), style (orotund, what William Jennings Bryan might have written had he been better educated), and historical perspective, Age of Betrayal might have been written 80 or even 100 years ago, when the Victorian world was deeply out of fashion.

While the author relies extensively on such ancient books as the highly tendentious History of the Great American Fortunes by Gustavus Myers (1910) and the flatly dishonest The Robber Barons and The Politicos by Matthew Josephson (1934, 1938), he often ignores the work of later historians, especially those of the last 30 years, who have brought a different and far more balanced perspective to the age of the “robber barons” and to the often remarkable characters who dominated it.

For instance, he quotes, approvingly, a contemporary who described Jay Gould as “the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Christian era.” Who said that? The notes ascribe it to “fellow swindler James R. Keene.”

First, is a “fellow swindler” a reliable authority on another man’s character? Second, James R. Keene, like Gould, was a speculator and played the Wall Street game by the rules of the day. Those are not the modern rules by a long shot, but that does not make Gould and Keene swindlers by the standards of their time and place. J. P. Morgan, who did not suffer swindlers gladly, often used the highly skilled Keene, “the silver fox of Wall Street,” to help float stock issues.

This animus against the times and the people he writes about often leads him into error. Mr. Beatty writes that only banks and the wealthy bought federal bonds during the Civil War. Actually the banker Jay Cooke invented the bond drive and sold bonds to an astonishing 5 percent of Northern households when far less than one percent of households even had bank accounts. The bonds were issued in amounts as small as $50 to make that possible and could be paid for in installments.

He writes of the McKinley-Bryan election of 1896, “Republican managers paid $5 a vote to southern Negroes [a very old-fashioned term in 2007, it might be noted] they imported into Louisville, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore, some casting as many as sixteen ballots for William McKinley; and another Republican went to the White House.” A stolen election, right? Well, maybe so, but since McKinley carried Pennsylvania with 62 percent of the vote, and Illinois and Maryland each by 57 percent, one wonders why the Republican managers paid so handsomely for landslides.

The great Wall Street panic of 1873 was, according to Jack Beatty, “Jay Cooke–induced.” Jay Cooke’s unexpected bankruptcy in 1873 indeed set off the panic that had, undoubtedly, been coming soon anyway. But to say that it was “Jay Cooke–induced” clearly implies a deliberate act. Not many people go bankrupt on purpose.

The basic problem here is that the author commits the historical sin of temporal parochialism. We have learned what rules and government structures are needed to make a modern economy function for the benefit of the many, not just the few. But it took the better part of a century and much political and economic Sturm und Drang for what was needed to evolve by the always messy democratic process.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism was just in the process of being invented. It was a whole new world, one in which power was shifting rapidly and unexpected complexities (such as dealing with time itself) developed seemingly overnight. The people of that era, like the people of every era, were pursuing their self-interest at the same time as they tried to make sense of this new world. It is hardly surprising that it was an era of both capitalism red in tooth and claw and profound governmental corruption.

Yet it was also an era in which the modern rules were being born. In the 1870s, bar associations were formed to police the legal profession and the courts. The 1880s saw the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and federal civil service reform. In the 1890s, Wall Street banks and the New York Stock Exchange began demanding that corporate books be audited by independent accountants.

Another problem with Age of Betrayal is that it often seems not to have been edited, except, perhaps, for spelling and punctuation. Consider this by no means atypical sentence: “The sale of government to business offended Henry Adams; and that is how cultural history has tended to encode Gilded Age corruption—as an incitement to epigrammatic sighs from the species Roscoe Conkling labeled ‘the man-milliners of reform.’” Wow.

“In the 1850s,” Beatty writes, “Americans set their watches to eighty local times—thirty-eight in Wisconsin alone, twenty-seven in Indiana, twenty-three in Illinois.” It must have been a lot more than eighty: 38, 27, and 23 add up to 88.

He reports that “Vincent Astor paid an estimated $1 million” under the Civil War income tax, which expired in 1872. Vincent Astor was born in 1891 (his wife, Brooke Astor, is still alive). He means William B. Astor, Vincent’s great-grandfather.

He calls shipping costs going downstream in the flatboat era “conscionable.” The word, long obsolete (it’s one of those “lost positives” of which the English language is so fond), usually meant “conscientious,” not “reasonable,” when it was still in use three centuries ago.

On a technical note, there is no bibliography. While the bibliographical information can be found in the notes, it often must be hunted for, as only the first reference to a book contains it. This method may save a few pages, and thus a few cents per copy for the publisher, but only at considerable expense to the serious reader’s convenience. It is a publishing trend that should be stopped.

I’m sorry to say it, but Age of Betrayal is an almost unredeemedly terrible book.

—John Steele Gordon writes “The Business of America” for American Heritage magazine. His most recent book is An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins).