Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900

ISBN: 1400040280

Author: Beatty, Jack

Condition: New

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. Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegies), and this was his country.At the end of the Civil War, with the rebellion put down and slavery ended, America belonged to Lincolns 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 Amendments 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 Chicagos streets, tramps are arrested, strikers are shot, and the nations 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 todays gilded age.