Introduction: Due Credit; or, Humor in the Gilded Age

Perhaps the Gilded Age codified the idea that the business of the United States is not democracy, never mind a strong defense of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. In fact, as Calvin Coolidge put it to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925, the business of the US is, well, business.1 Or, to be fair, it is the business of “the people”—a populace concerned with production, consumption, investment, and prosperity, which is to say all the tricks and trades of the American dream.Perhaps.It is, of course, not insignificant that Coolidge made this comment at the midpoint of the Roaring Twenties and that he himself was born into the era of industrial revolution and presided over an economy in the so-called age of prosperity but turned over the presidential reins to Herbert Hoover just before the onset of the Great Depression. From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, American culture was defined by financial magnates and captains of industry, by businessmen and political figures with imperial leanings, and by citizens as laborers and consumers. Indeed, the Gilded Age was nothing if not a period of personages, Cornelius Vanderbilt, aka the commodore. Andrew Carnegie, aka the prince of steel (and the ostensive patron saint of libraries). John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, aka the Napoleon of Wall Street, who is reputed to have rescued the US from financial ruin before and after the turn of the twentieth century and who was—incidentally—a good friend of Coolidge. And John D. Rockefeller, the oil king, like Vanderbilt the quintessential robber baron. Such personages are those we tend to credit with establishing spoils systems and political machines, with institutionalizing social Darwinism, and with embodying the answer to the perennial question of what is man, that is, humanity. This question goaded the lash of Mark Twain’s pen; in one instance he answered it via a disquisition qua philosophical dialogue written under the question as its title and in another instance through a comic essay that defines humankind by curtly mocking Darwin’s descent of man.In that first take, Twain puts a young man in conversation with an old man. The youngin’ is insistent that human beings are unique among creatures because of their capacity for self-determination. They make themselves. No, says the old man. That is a foolish ideal, he claims. There might be such a thing as a “self-made man,” who toils to elevate himself from humble beginnings to wealth or power (or both), but every human being is in essence a machine. The young man reluctantly goes along and agrees it’s foolishness, not wanting to play the fool. Whatever we are, the old man elaborates, we are machines in the sense that we are made, influenced by heredities, habits, and associations. Sure, we can make steel mills, railroads, oil, and money. But those things make us. Any merit and credit we might earn is based on our performance as machines, “moved, directed, [and] commanded” as we are “by exterior influences.”2 By eras, for instance. The only thing personal to each of us is an innate impulse to satisfy our own desires. Selfishness (personal, corporate, nationalistic) derives from this impulse. Survival of the fittest does, too. And money! Well, money is the maker. The almighty dollar. What the old man designates a symbol of “spiritual desire” (94). No wonder Twain names in his mock taxonomy Homo sapiens as “the lowest animal.” Human beings, says Twain, are “a rickety poor sort of” machine, full of “infirmities and inferiorities,” constituting “a basket of pestilent corruption.” Funnily enough, elsewhere Twain laments the culture that seemed to celebrate men who built their industries and went after their manifest destinies in the light of day while others sat in the darkness scarcely able to curb or constrain the march of civilization. Funnily enough, then, “corruption” might just be a more operative word than pestilence or infirmity or inferiority or any other designation.A funny thing about the Gilded Age is precisely that a lively comic spirit emerged during it to grapple with those strange glory days. It does not take an episode of the HBO series The Gilded Age (2022 –) for us to know that the heyday of industrial growth and prosperity was nothing if not covered over by a patina of American exceptionalism that did not suppress something darker or uglier but rather represented a dark, ugly thing unto itself. Twain’s revision of the catechism, published in September of 1871 by the New York Tribune, suggests as much, holding that “the chief end of man” is to get rich, with or without honor and honesty, and that there is only one true god in the American civil religion: money.3 To that god was given full faith and credit. From that religion came a corrupt creed.Observations made by yet another American chief of state, Rutherford B. Hayes, echo Twain. By the mid-1880s, it was clear to Hayes that the business of America was no longer the business of “the people.” As he put it in a diary entry, given the concentration of “vast wealth and power in the hands of the few,” ours was “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It [was] a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”4 That industrialists and imperialists should seize control of social, political, and economic affairs by hook or by crook and take credit (in both senses of the term) for the means of cultural production along the way was just part of the natural order. In the deep fissures between the haves and the have-nots, in the panics and bank runs and disagreements over free silver and gold standards, and in the sheer, bad faith capitalization of society, a profound tendency to be seduced by the idea that it all amounted to a natural order persisted—and this despite the philanthropic activities that were also signs of the times. Twain typifies a comic spirit of these times, a spirit conveyed in his and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). Twain alone made this spirit clear by virtue of his decades-long struggle with the fact that human history is awash with men of means doing their profiteering and calling it business as usual, but if anyone not so well off is perceived to be lying or cheating or stealing, well . . .Perhaps we find ourselves in similar circumstances. In 2017, Larry M. Bartels proclaimed that stark socioeconomic disparities were fomenting grossly undemocratic inequities that would usher in a “new gilded age.”5 Lately there is talk of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement being a campaign to restore the spirit of the 1890s and launch a second Gilded Age. Money is most certainly power. In the first months of Donald J. Trump’s second presidency, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, served as a quasi-copresident, moving fast to break as many of the federal systems of government that he could with little to no regard for checks, balances, or the will of a majority. And he had fun doing it.In late February 2025, Musk, the tech billionaire and head of the makeshift Department of Government Efficiency, attended the Conservative Political Action Conference, where the president of Argentina presented him with an enormous red chainsaw that had silver, ahem, gilding and the slogan “Viva la libertad, carajo” (“Long live liberty, damn it”) engraved on the bar. Musk, clad all in black with a MAGA hat and sunglasses, brandished the chainsaw on stage with childlike glee in front of a doting crowd, christened it “the chainsaw of bureaucracy,” and swung it around while hooting and hollering like a madman. President Trump openly encouraged Musk and other “broligarchs” of the tech world to cozy up to political authority, comporting himself less like a steward of the people and more like a man content to steer the ship of state in collusion with today’s captains of industry, all displaying his brand of authoritarian impulses, which is not surprising given his own felonious and adulterous history and his track record of grift and graft. The battlelines of a general imperiousness in newfangled cultural warfare have been drawn by Trump’s expressed desire to annex Greenland, make Canada the fifty-first state, take back the Panama Canal, and invade Mexico on the pretense of fighting drug cartels, and in attacks on the civil service and the complex networks of diversity, equity, and inclusion.It is hard to look on the present realities and their historical precedents without seeing them through a looking glass, comically. I, for one, cannot see what is going on now and recall what came before without being reminded of an editorial cartoon by Samuel Ehrhardt that appeared in 1889 in Puck captioned “History Repeats Itself—The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages and the Robber Barons of Today” (fig. 1), featuring those familiar fat cats standing for war, tariffs, and monopoly, wearing trust as badges of dishonor, clutching their legislative rapiers, and lording over a peasantry scrounging for wages.I cannot unsee Joseph Keppler’s cartoon in the same magazine from earlier in 1889 (fig. 2) captioned “The Bosses of the Senate” and portraying the bloated magnates of steel trust, oil trust, and so on, towering over the legislative body in the north wing of the capitol building as they seek to ensure that the chamber would remain “of the monopolists, by the monopolists, and for the monopolists.”Furthermore, I cannot separate comic renditions of men from Boss Tweed to King Monopoly from caricatures drawn by cartoonists like Ann Telnaes, who renders Musk as a wannabe emperor with a golden corona civica and a scepter with a middle finger for a finial, Trump as variously a “lyin’ king,” an imperial president, and an infant, Trump supporters as the sheep of his state power, and, at the start of his second term, the aforementioned broligarchs bending their knees and giving their dear leader bags of cash.6 History repeating itself? Perhaps. Or maybe just a rendition of that Joycean nightmare from which we cannot wake.The point of recalling these editorial cartoons is not to suggest that they represent a singular modality of humor in the Gilded Age, then and now (although they do), but to that humor is a in for with the cultural and the political culture of a by the business of and and and and to to the personages of a to (and strange the and of power and in the Gilded Age. History might be repeating itself. But as the in this make the Gilded Age was with to and be a then as is to be in the business of Twain in was reputed for his and his his of the of the so in The Gilded Age, and for his in fun at with the almighty To be it is not clear he that money is the of all or that the of is a of money. 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D. with his on what was as a at a US in the the that should be under and as well as this and other of imperial To be it is as if (and Trump have the at the cannot but recall another in the from 2025, and of As a comic on of or just a of of the up like make would ensure that have to And the is that is of is that is a little a to no longer the is not from any the might is an is not a It is just a given in the it fun of the fact that it just is what it is the of the comic of and late They from to Trump’s of who in the in and the to for They also to the and then of Musk as a sort of and to the for and the into they the point made by in a editorial cartoon of President Trump captioned “the grift is it might also be a bad a symbol of for the or a from the of This is nothing if not a to the that is not because the Gilded Age a now in the century but rather because it what might in the of a to the of humor in the Gilded Age is, now more than a to credit where credit is

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