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

Jack Beatty (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 10, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Atlantic Monthly editor Beatty (The Rascal King) clearly invokes a comparison with the present in writing of how, he says, corporations, not the people, ruled America in the Gilded Age. He examines the role of the railroads as the engine of capitalism, the role of protectionist tariffs in raising prices for the common man and how "representative government gave way to bought government." But Beatty ignores the latest literature on that period by the likes of Charles R. Morris, Maury Klein, David Nasaw and David Cannadine. Instead, the post–Civil War industrial boom depicted by Beatty mimics that described by the now largely discredited Matthew Josephson—author in the 1930s of The Robber Barons—whose works Beatty cites. Beatty also references other now-marginalized class-warrior historians, such as Gustavus Myers, in portraying capitalism as a sort of zero-sum game where a dollar pocketed by one individual is inevitably a buck stolen from someone else, overlooking the notion of visionary entrepreneurs creating a surging tide of capital upon which all boats rise. Beatty's view of history seems guided by his liberal impulses and his disillusioned view of American democracy today—not the best way to approach history. B&w illus. (Apr. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Indicting the Gilded Age, Beatty adopts an essayist's persona to flay iniquities of the period. Its mystery prompts the author to ask, "What reverse alchemy transformed mass enthusiasm [for politics] into policies disfavoring the masses?" Turning over explanations, Beatty gives extended play to the eminent historians of Reconstruction, C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner, and delves into Civil War reforms, such as the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments and the Homestead Act. However, such reforms were thwarted by atrocities against blacks and land-grant shenanigans that advantaged railroads over farmers. Also prevalent in this era was corporate buccaneering, which to Beatty is best represented by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Jay Gould, and Andrew Carnegie, and which flavors his wider account of depressions, strikes, and elections. Weaving episodes of corruption into his narrative, and culminating with the Populist Party of the 1890s, Beatty maintains an opinionated indignation throughout. The NPR pundit's lively interpretation of the era should engage those interested in social and economic history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040280
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040285
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #866,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gilded Age One June 19, 2007

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

"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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Fables of the Reconstruction June 21, 2007

By Utah Jack Squint

Format:Hardcover

_Age of Betrayal_, I have to say, was a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read. Mr. Beatty, who demonstrates his probity, erudition and understanding time and again on NPR's _On Point_, easily imports these virtues into writing. His is politically inflected historiography in the best sense, comparing favorably to marxian British historians of previous generations like E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones. For the author, what is past is incontrovertibly prelude, and his treatment of the Gilded Age offers the perceptive reader as many insights into his own historical moment as of historical ones.

To his credit Mr. Beatty wears his learning and convictions lightly; the polemic is always subtle, never heavy-handed, and is seamlessly integrated into the prose; the gusto with which he tackles his subject proves infectious. Some chapters, such as those treating the rise and spectacular collapse of the Populists, and the labor unrest at the Carnegie steelworks, have a tragic sweep to them that will leave only the most jaded eye unmoist. As one who studies late-nineteenth century British literature, I really have to credit the author with deepening my understanding of events on this side of the Atlantic during the same period.

I do, however, have two quibbles with the text. First, the author's prose style, while generally graceful, does show a proclivity toward terseness, as well as Chicago-Manual economy of punctuation, which sometimes make even more formidable the dense thickets of data the author frequently drops his reader into. Second, while in the main Mr. Beatty confines himself to the period stated in the book's subtitle, 1865-1900, he does at times look forward to FDR's New Deal, and offers as a coda some words of Woodrow Wilson's in 1913. What the author fails to discuss in his small leap forward into 1913 is another significant event of that year, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a puzzling omission given that Lincoln's greenback paper currency and the free-silver of the Populists occupy such important places in his narrative.

Puzzling because the Fed did exactly what Lincoln did, and what the Populists proposed: replace metal-back currency with fiat. The only twist -- and a critical one, keeping with the theme of betrayal -- is that the power of fiat was removed from government and placed in the hands of private bankers through legislation drafted by representatives of the reviled caesariat of robber-barons. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest single greatest betrayal, ensuring as it does that the everyday wage-worker will lose around three percent per annum the value of his labors' fruits -- and it is one the author never mentions. I'd be interested to hear how the author would defend the creation of the Fed as an innovation on what the free-silver folk, whom Beatty, following Milton Friedman, claims would have triggered inflation of low-double digits. I am therefore led to ask: Is the steady, inexorable march of three-percent inflation preferable to that which the free-silverers would have engendered? Is it simply the rate of the progression that makes the former palatable? To me, this is like saying the prisoner condemned death by _lin chi_ died before the thousandth cut, and thus did not die by _lin chi_.

These are of course ancillary considerations, and they do not prevent me from recommending _Age of Betrayal_ as an instructive, entertaining read. I also recommend Louis Menand's magnificent _The Metaphysical Club_ for discussion of another dimension of the same era.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything old is new again March 7, 2010

By Stan Kravit

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a superb book, with the kind of historical information from which American history should be taught at the college level. Although this book takes some work to understand, it is worth the effort for every citizen who would like to understand America. And the Author makes it possible to understand - the book's greatest virtue.

The research is meticulous and the Author's writing skills and analyses make it possible to see the real economic development of the United States. We get an understanding of the interplay between uncontrolled greed and corrupt government through which our railroads were built and other industries devloped. The endless advantages conferred upon private corporations, how investors were frequently swindled, how millions of acres of land were given away, the amazing scope of the fraud perpetrated, all in the name of the economic development of our nation. The growing nation needed railroads, of course, and unparalled economic growth was inevitable in a country as blessed as ours was with natural resources, technological advancement and unlimited territory. But this book raises the question of who this country is for. Lincoln's idea of government FOR the people was lost in an orgy of corporate fraud and favoritism that is still hard to believe.
The best thing I got out of this book is a perspective on what has been going on in our economy in the past decade. Banking and business is so in control of our government that now government just gives hundreds of billions away when modern versions of fraud threaten to virtually destroy the economy. A trillion dollars has been spent to bail out the banks and businesses that have failed us as a nation. The perspective to which I refer is that these actions are merely the modern extenion of fraud and favoritism made possible by business control of government. We spent a TRILLION DOLLARS to enable business to provides war services ancillary to combat in Iraq; and, if we consider Blackwater and other security services, even combat was contracted. How did we win WWII without this system? The Bush administration gave another trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy. Of course, we cannot afford universal health care; we encourage investment by U. S. companies in other countries; the working classes are so hard hit by declining income and now by rescession that local tax revenues no longer adequately support public services; and we vote our fears and prejudices, if we vote at all.

It seems that every time corrupt business interests bring the economy to its knees, the "people" are there to restore vitality to America. Can we do it again? I wonder.