The Second Gilded Age Is Resembling the First [View all]

[justaprogressive]

The political cartoons of the 1880s showed morbidly obese men representing the era’s trusts, their suits and top hats covering undergarments fashioned as a sack of money, perched ominously above policymakers, with the puppet strings implicit. That emblematic depiction of the first Gilded Age was burned into the public consciousness, and public outrage led to the Progressive Era reforms. The grifters of the time strained to keep themselves in power by attempting to make elections irrelevant and paying off whatever obstacle emerged in their path. Reform ultimately won out, but it took decades of hard work.

The present day has been called a Second Gilded Age so many times that it’s almost a cliché. But in Donald Trump’s second term, we are seeing history repeat in such vivid detail that I’ve actually grown large muttonchops just thinking about it.

The most prominent villains of the first Gilded Age were railroad barons like Jay Gould, who famously said some approximation of “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” But though he owned numerous railroads over his career, he never realized his goal of a single transcontinental railroad dominating shipping from coast to coast. His dream was coming into place until the Panic of 1907 created enough financial stress to scuttle a proposed merger between Gould’s system and the bounty of E.H. Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and B&O railroads.

But this week, Union Pacific, one of Harriman’s old lines, announced its intent to merge with Norfolk Southern for $85 billion. Jay Gould would be proud. Forty-three states are touched by this proposed national railroad, which accounted for 43 percent of total rail shipping last year. The combination upends the gentlemen’s agreement whereby two eastern and two western railroads split up the U.S. in their respective regions. (The other two of the Big Four, Warren Buffett’s BNSF and CSX, have been rumored to merge too.)

https://prospect.org/power/2025-07-31-second-gilded-age-resembling-first/]