Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (Vintage) Review

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Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (Vintage) Review"This book tells the saddest story: How, having redeemed democracy in the Civil War, America betrayed it in the Gilded Age." That is that start of _Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865 - 1900_ (Knopf) by Jack Beatty. But Beatty, an author of previous histories of that age, isn't just sad. He is angry. It may be futile for a historian to be angry over the unchangeable actions of corporations, government, and citizens so long ago, but a reader cannot help but pick up on it and share the indignation. Beatty has packed one disappointment and betrayal after another into a big book thick with human folly and greed. He cannot help making comparisons with current times, although the comparisons are not pointed or emphasized. He does such things as quote President Hayes's diary about "the rottenness of the present system", "the excessive wealth in the hands of the few", or "This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations." Beatty's case for this being true of the time about which he writes is overwhelming, and that can only increase suspicion that such forces are at work in our own time.
The great innovative industry of the time was railroading. The government made it easy for railroads by giving over 150 million acres in land grants, which the companies not only used but developed and sold. The corporate bosses and politicians enriched themselves, and kept themselves in power to continue to do so. The benefits handed out by government were not all directly to the railroads. There were protective tariffs for manufacturers, a system that grew out of the civil war to procure emergency funds but then prevailed for decades because it benefited the companies. The tariffs did help transform the nation into a leading industrial power, but not only were the benefits not passed onto the workers, the consumer paid higher prices on common articles, a type of tax that was "a very sly one" according to Woodrow Wilson. Beatty's greatest bitterness is against the astonishing reapplication of the 14th Amendment, which had been enacted to protect the rights of millions of former slaves, but became an assurance of continued protection of corporations. There was some redemption in Populism. In this dark book there are few heroes, but the dirt farmers who changed the Farmer's Alliance into a third party refused to play the money game of the main parties. Southern Populists even tried including the poor black farmers, and maybe even risked their lives in preventing lynchings. Workers did strike against railroads when they knew they would be blacklisted from the industry, and did so in solidarity with fellow workers.
But _Age of Betrayal_ is bleak and massive and well referenced. When Beatty does call upon comparisons to our time, it is pointed and accurate. He quotes Mark Hanna, "William McKinley's Karl Rove", who said "All questions in a democracy are questions of money." We are even measuring candidates now by how much money they can raise in their campaigns. Inequalities between the richest and the poorest of our nation were severe then, improved in beginning of the last century, but are severe again now. Lobbyists have seemingly bottomless pockets, then as now. The rich of that time arranged to keep taxes on the rich down, as happens now. We got through the Gilded Age, and its problems are not our own, but Beatty forces us to consider whether we have entered a Gilded Age Two.
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