The ignoble years: Jack Beatty examines the many uncomfortable parallels between the Gilded Age and our own.

• Author: Wolfe, Alan
• Position: Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 - Book review

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

By Jack Beatty Knopf, 496 pp.

The "betrayal" in the title of Jack Beatty's remarkable new book, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, is the abandonment of black equality in favor of economic inequality. The era Beatty covers is an eventful one. It starts with the end of the Civil War--a war that represented a hideously brutal rending of the American social fabric, but one, alas, necessary to abolish slavery and hold out the offer of full citizenship for newly freed blacks--and ends in an orgy of corruption dominated by a powerful cabal of business leaders and supine politicians working in tandem to line their pockets with wealth while leaving those newly freed blacks in wretched poverty and without the right to vote once so promisingly held out to them.

Symbolic of the hopes with which the era began was the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed that no person would be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In so doing, the amendment established a constitutional basis for the idea of equality that had played such a prominent role in the Declaration of Independence. (By turning a blind eye to slavery, the original Constitution had never made that promise.) For the first time in American history, all persons born or naturalized in the United States would be treated as full citizens of the society in which they lived.

But because the era ended with the solidification of a plutocracy, that promise remained unfulfilled. Think about it this way: Unprecedented numbers of America's youth gave up their lives in the belief that the Civil War was about the elimination of slavery. A similar number of black Americans were convinced that, however extensive the bloodshed, the North's victory would open the door to their advancement. And then all of it--the broken families, the hospitalized victims, the burned cities and towns, the heroism, and, of course, the dead--went unredeemed because a few brilliant lawyers invented a new jurisprudence, more than a few rapacious businessmen saw unlimited opportunities for profit, and the leaders of both of America's political parties did not mind setting a historical record for mediocrity so long as their cautious conservatism allowed the plunder of favorable government contracts and the repression of worker's rights to continue. To complete the scandal, the American public sat back and watched it all, allowing the red flag of race to distract them on those rare occasions when they understood that something unseemly was happening...