Echoes of Rage
Our new age of violence looks a lot like the Gilded Age
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to post occasional midweek pieces on historical topics to supplement the usual Sunday newsletter. Here’s the latest. As always, if you want to support my work, you can subscribe to the newsletter as a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get access to the archives and the satisfaction that comes from supporting all of the work that goes into this project.
If you looked at it from a certain angle, it appeared to be a golden age.
The American economy was growing at a rapid clip, averaging 2.5% growth per person per year. New technology seemed to emerge every day, revolutionizing transportation, communications, and manufacturing; people’s everyday lives would have been unrecognizable to those who lived just a few decades before. The new technology created jobs, too, as startup firms transformed into behemoths that employed tens of thousands. Cities exploded in population and the country welcomed immigrants from the far corners of the world.
But, despite all of this progress, the era didn’t feel very good to many people living through it. It was an era of political discontent and economic turbulence. Americans were especially furious with business and political elites, who were, it was thought, taking too much of the period’s wealth for themselves.
Mark Twain called the era the “Gilded Age” — beneath the glittering surface of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a darkness.
Things feel that way now, too. Though, by many measures, the economy has been great — low unemployment, a booming stock market, and robust economic growth make this look, on paper at least, like one of the best periods in American economic history. But if that’s true, why is everyone so angry?
I’m not going to try to answer that question right now, but I am interested in the parallels between our Gilded Age and the last one. We, too, live in an era of deep, formless anger. Conservatives and progressives don’t agree on much other than the fact that America is on the brink of destruction. People on social media compete to see who can have the most apocalyptic takes. Nobody trusts the elites and experts who are supposed to be leading the country. Almost everybody thinks things are getting worse.
This roiling, unfocused discontent found a point of convergence recently with Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This act of violence has captivated the country partially because the murder was so shocking and cinematic. But it also seems to have captured our angry zeitgeist, the ethos of a country that is so fed up with its elites and institutions that, in some circles at least, people are celebrating the murder of a father of two.
Magione’s crime doesn’t feel like an isolated event. We’ve seen an uptick in violence and threats of violence against politicians and business leaders. The first Gilded Age saw waves of violence against elites, too, and many of those killings became public sensations just like Thompson’s murder has.
So what can we, in this second Gilded Age, learn from the violence of the first?
Carter Harrison Sr. was the dominant political figure in the country’s most dynamic city. As mayor of Chicago on and off between 1879 and 1893, he guided the city as its population surged and it became the rail hub of the country. He led a coalition of Catholic and immigrant union members; the Protestant elites of the city never really liked him.
Harrison’s first stint as mayor came to an end after the Haymarket affair in 1886, when a strike turned bloody after a protestor threw dynamite at the police and the police opened fire on the crowd in retaliation. But, after a peripatetic “retirement,” he re-entered politics just in time to be the face of the 1893 World’s Fair, Chicago’s biggest moment on the world stage.
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Harrison gave a big speech as the closing of the exposition approached; he went back home, ate dinner, and then fell asleep on his couch. His doorbell rang around 8:00; the maid answered it and was a little surprised when the caller, a small, intense young man, followed her into the house as she went to wake Harrison. The mayor had a short, heated conversation with the intruder, Eugene Prendergast, and then Prendergast shot him at point-blank range.
After briefly fleeing from the police, Prendergast went to the closest precinct, turned himself in, and confessed: “I did the shooting and this is the gun I did it with.” In his trial, he tried to plead insanity, with the help of celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow. It didn’t work; he was hanged the next year.
What motivated this 25-year-old man to end the mayor’s life and ruin his own?
It seems that Pendergast was, like so many of our own era’s violent actors, a deluded, disgruntled young man. He had flirted in his teenage years with extreme political movements and developed an exaggerated sense of his own importance and ability. He came to believe the mayor owed him a job because he had supported Harrison’s mayoral bid in 1893. After the election, he harassed Harrison’s underlings for a while, demanding employment for which he was not qualified. Eventually, he got fed up and shot Harrison.
Harrison wasn’t the only politician to be murdered during this period. President James Garfield was killed by Charles Guiteau in 1881 in another case of a deluded office-seeker. Guiteau had bounced around in life, spending an unhappy stint with the utopian Oneida community in New York, failing as a lawyer, and marrying unhappily (when his wife demanded a divorce, he slept with a prostitute and then asked the sex worker to testify about the affair in court — seems like a delightful fellow).
He finally threw himself into fringe religious movements and politics, two camps that attracted lost men with the same intensity that they do today. During the 1880 campaign, he gave a couple of speeches in favor of Garfield and somehow became convinced that he had been instrumental in securing Garfield’s victory. After Garfield won, Guiteau expected to become a diplomat in Europe. When the new administration blew him off, he started using newspaper reports to track Garfield’s movements, following administration officials around town to badger them.
In the end, Guiteau snapped and decided to take revenge for Garfield’s supposed slights against him. He bought a gun, waited for Garfield at a railroad station, and shot the president. Garfield survived for several agonizing months; after he died of his injuries, Guiteau was tried for murder.
Guiteau’s trial became a national sensation, mostly because he behaved so strangely. The defendant reveled in the press coverage, giving as many interviews as his jailers allowed, even using his interviews to try and find himself a new wife. At the trial, he argued that “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him” (he might have been right on that count — Garfield died from infections after doctors probed inside his wounds with unwashed hands). When found guilty, Guiteau swore loudly at the jury; he was hanged a few months later.
Some politicians were killed for purely political reasons, like Frank Steunenberg, the governor of Idaho. He had been a fierce enemy of unions, calling in federal troops to quell uprisings and holding union leaders without trial. He said stuff like:
We have taken the monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it. No halfway measures will be adopted. It is a plain case of the state or the union winning, and we do not propose that the state shall be defeated.
Steunenberg was killed in 1905 by a bomb rigged to detonate when he opened the gate to his yard. A union member named Harry Orchard confessed to the crime, saying that the Western Federation of Miners hired him to do it.
Orchard was sentenced to death, but his punishment was later lessened to life in prison. State officials put union leader “Big Bill” Haywood on trial for hiring him, but he was acquitted (with the help of Clarence Darrow, who was showing up everywhere!).
In perhaps the most shocking political assassination of the era, anarchist Leon Czolgosz killed President William McKinley in 1901.
The assassin was the child of immigrants who never found a place in American society. He had always been a loner, uncomfortable socializing with others. Czolgosz had suffered from the economic chaos of the period; after a period of unsteady employment, he lost his job for good in the Panic of 1893. On top of this, he suffered from undiagnosed health problems in the 1890s, often spitting up blood and falling asleep during the day.
Radicalized by his unhappy circumstances, Czolgosz joined the anarchist movement. He was especially inspired by Emma Goldman, the zealous anarchist orator; he became a hanger-on in her circle. Goldman was generally careful not to publicly endorse violence, but she saw it as a necessary consequence of the unfairness of American society. As she later said, “It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom.”
Czolgosz eventually convinced himself that he needed to kill McKinley. He bought a gun and waited in line to shake hands with the president during McKinley’s visit to the Buffalo World’s Fair. when he reached the head of the line, he fired two shots into McKinley’s midsection. The president died a week later.
Czolgosz was tackled by onlookers immediately after shooting the president; there was no doubt that he’d done it. In his confession, he said, “I killed President McKinley because I done my duty. I didn’t believe one man should have so much service and another man should have none.”
Though he never mentioned any specific events that inspired the assassination, he told police that Emma Goldman’s words had “set him on fire.” He was electrocuted a month and a half after killing the president. In his final statement, he said, “I am not sorry for my crime.”
Politicians were not the only elites who found themselves in danger during the Gilded Age. Many Americans saw the tycoons of the era as the real villains — they pulled the strings; the politicians were just their puppets.
America’s first suicide bomber was Henry Norcross, a troubled young aspiring inventor. Norcross, later described as “a man of unbalanced mind,” believed that he’d invented a useful gadget for the railroad business. He also spent at least some of his twenties fomenting against the obscene wealth of America’s robber barons.
He decided to sell it to Russell Sage, a railroad investor and one of the richest men in the country. Norcross’ negotiating tactics were unconventional, to say the least: he filled a bag with dynamite, marched into Sage’s office, and threatened to blow everybody up unless Sage paid him $1.2 million.
Norcross picked the wrong tycoon; Sage was a legendary cheapskate, and a stubborn old grump. He said no, and Norcross detonated the dynamite. The assassin was blown to bits (his body was identified by a button that police found at the crime scene). Sage was unhurt, though his clerk was badly injured. The clerk sued Sage for using him as a “human shield.” Sage fought his clerk in court and won, cementing his reputation as the cheapest rich guy in America.
The next year, in 1892, the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman (an associate of Emma Goldman) tried to kill Henry Clay Frick, one of the most notorious tycoons in America. The chairman of Carnegie Steel, Frick ordered the vicious treatment of strikers at the company’s Homestead plant, during which hundreds of Pinkerton detectives and, eventually, 8,000 state militia soldiers crushed the uprising. Ten men were killed.
After immigrating to the United States, Berkman had become appalled at the terrible working conditions of the country’s industrial workers, many of whom were immigrants like him. This especially sickened him in contrast with the opulent lifestyles of men like Frick.
Witnessing the violent treatment of the Homestead strikers, Berkman decided that something had to be done. He bought a gun and rushed into Frick’s office, shooting Frick several times point-blank. When Frick’s guards grabbed him, he pulled out a knife and slashed wildly at Frick’s legs.
Frick survived the assault and was back at work a week later. Berkman was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in jail. He had thought that he was starting a revolution; on the contrary, the shock of his attempt on Frick’s life hurt the strikers’ cause. The company soon crushed the movement.
By this point, you’ve likely spotted the parallels.
A country undergoing swift, uncomfortable change. A small group of plutocrats who seem like they’re taking all the money and wielding all the power. A sense that the system is rigged against ordinary people, that there’s no way to change society through normal channels. A political system that seems in thrall to the wealthy, which in turn pushes people toward radical politics. Disillusioned, unstable men who don’t see a way forward in life and decide they might as well strike against the people that they’ve decided are ruining the country.
Many of the Gilded Age killings caught the public imagination not just because their targets were powerful men; they felt like they were about something. Some segments of the American public were scandalized by the violence; others understood or even endorsed it.
And the killers? They believed that they were the only people doing anything that mattered about the country’s problems. Luigi Mangione argued in his brief “manifesto” that “It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Most of the Gilded Age killers had a puffed-up sense of self-importance, too; they felt like they were great men of action rather than a parade of sadsacks. They thought they were going to change the course of America. Did they?
It’s hard to know. On the one hand, the anarchist movement, with which many of them were affiliated, was crushed in the years after the McKinley assassination when a number of states passed harsh laws targeting the movement.
But change did happen in the wake of the violence. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor, was much less pro-business than McKinley had been. The progressive movement soon emerged, reforming some of the country’s worst abuses. Did some of this change happen because of the threat of violence, because the assassinations had forced Americans to reckon with the raw anger of many of their countrymen? Or were the assassins misguided fools who set their cause back?
It’s difficult to say, honestly. As we make our way through a new period of anger and inequality, we may find ourselves asking similar questions.
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Originally published on Medium
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Thanks for this very thoughtful and informative essay.