Are We Living Through Another Gilded Age?

The Gilded Age spawned reformers of all kinds.

I think this is happening today, as well. Do you?

Can our time be compared to America’s Gilded Age, the 1870-1900 period marked by immense fortunes, political corruption, and social upheaval? I’ve read many such comparisons lately, and the similarities are striking.

This is why I’m reading The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. In their book, they write, “Looking back to a time Mark Twain disparagingly called the Gilded Age turns out to feel eerily like looking in the mirror.”

Among the similarities between the Gilded Age and our own are enormous concentrations of wealth. Political corruption. Public distrust of institutions. New technologies disrupting every aspect of life. Growing inequality. The hollowing out of rural America. A sense that ordinary people have lost control of the forces shaping their future.

In the Gilded Age, industrial titans seemed able to get away with anything which also seems similar. But unlike our own day, then political machines dominated cities and child labor was commonplace. America then was troubled, as it is today.

Yet, if our time is akin to that one, I believe there is reason to be hopeful: Once we hit bottom in the Gilded Age, WE THE PEOPLE began to change things.

Out of the excesses of the Gilded Age period came the Progressive Era. Reformers across American society gradually brought about sweeping changes that touched nearly every aspect of the nation’s life: working conditions, public health, education, elections, immigration support, consumer protection, conservation, and the rights of women and children.

But the Progressive movement did not arrive fully formed. No one woke up one morning and announced that the Progressive Era had begun. It started small.

An important lesson for us today is that great reform movements are difficult to see when they are spooling up. They begin as hundreds or thousands of small efforts that only later become recognizable as a coherent movement.

As I look around, I see signs that something similar may already be underway. Do you?

Organizations devoted to protecting democratic institutions have multiplied dramatically over the past decade: Indivisible, Braver Angels, Democracy Docket, and many others. Community groups are experimenting with new forms of civic dialogue.

It goes on: Americans frustrated by online outrage are rediscovering the value of face-to-face organizing. Volunteers, very hard to find until recently, are serving in growing numbers as election workers, tutoring children, mentoring young people, staffing food pantries, restoring neighborhoods, and creating spaces where strangers can once again become neighbors.

None of these efforts by itself constitutes a movement. Taken together, however, they may be the beginnings of one.

I also see it in my own small corner of the world. A retired psychologist—me—wrote a book about the power of WE THE PEOPLE and began a blog calling for democratic renewal. My friend John Smith created Senior Citizens for America to persuade retired people to get out of their easy chairs and stand up for democracy. Many other friends are doing their part, too.

It’s also interesting to notice the subtle change in the questions some civic and political leaders are beginning to ask. Does this mean reform is coming?

Rather than promising to solve every problem themselves, I hear some politicians speaking about what citizens can accomplish together, emphasizing the importance of participation over spectatorship, contribution rather than consumption. This is still a minority voice in our politics, but it reflects a deeper understanding of democracy—not as something government delivers to us, but as something we co-create together.

None of these efforts will make the history books. But perhaps that is the point. History is made before it is written—and most of the people making it never become famous.

Perhaps another Progressive Era is coming. If so, it will not arrive because a charismatic national leader announces it. It will emerge because millions of ordinary people decide that democracy is not merely something to defend every four years at the ballot box. It is something to practice every day—in countless acts of responsibility, service, courage, and shared purpose.

We may be living through another Gilded Age. But the more important question is whether we are willing to become its reformers.

What are your thoughts about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. And please forward this to someone under 40.