A brilliant reconsideration of the Gilded Age in America, when
an oligarchy of wealth triumphed over democracy, when dreams of
freedom and equality died of their impossibility. Jay Gould, the
“Mephisto of Wall Street,” never runs for office, but he rules.
This was his time and John D. Rockefeller’s and Andrew
Carnegie’s, and this was his country.
At the end of the Civil War, with the rebellion put down and
slavery ended, America belonged to Lincoln’s “plain people.” But
“government of the people” and economic democracy were betrayed by
political parties that fanned memories of the war to distract
Americans from government of the corporation.
Synthesizing the research of a new generation of scholars, Jack
Beatty gives us a fresh look at the “revolution from above” of
industrialization that forged modern America. In Age of Betrayal,
Supreme Court justices turn the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of
“equal protection of the laws” to the freed slave into the shield
of the corporate “person.” The presidents of the Pennsylvania and
Southern Pacific railroads engage in a bidding war for congressmen.
A depression brought on by railroad speculation throws millions out
of work, the hungry riot for bread in Buffalo, the homeless sleep
on Chicago’s streets, “tramps” are arrested, strikers are shot, and
the nation’s presidents avert their eyes.
In the 1890s the Populist revolt from below challenges the
revolution from above. Entrepreneurial capitalism ends in the early
1900s, as 1,800 giant firms are compacted into 157 behemoths. God
instructs President McKinley to invade Cuba and seize the
Philippines from Spain; turning from liberators to occupiers, U.S.
troops slaughter and starve the Roman Catholic Filipinos in the
name of “Christianizing” them. In perpetrating this “infamy,”
William James cries out, “We have puked up our
traditions”—revealing how these sordid decades had remade us.
A passionate, gripping, often shocking history of wealth over
commonwealth—thirty-five years of American history in which we see
the reflection of today’s gilded age.
關於作者：
Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and
news analyst for On Point, a National Public Radio news and public
affairs program. He is the author of The Rascal King, winner of an
American Book Award, as well as the editor of Colossus: How the
Corporation Changed America. He lives in Hanover, New
Hampshire.
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