Dan Snow's History Hit - The Gilded Age

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

The Gilded Age was a time in American history when the economy grew at its fastest rate in history. This had wide-reaching cultural and social effects, including a broadening tier of self-made millionaires, the rapid growth of the working class and a burgeoning black middle class.It is against this backdrop of rapid change that Julian Fellows, creator of Downton Abbey, sets his new drama. We sat down with the show's historical advisor, Dr Erica Dunbar to help us understand the opportunities, challenges and tensions of this time.​​The Gilded Age is available in the UK on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW from 25 January. For US audiences, it is available on HBO from the same date.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit, The Gilded Age. The Gilded Age is what Americans call the period from the Civil War, the late 19th century into the early 20th. The US economy grew at its fastest rate in history as new technology transformed the economy and as the job of occupying and settling the whole of the North American continent was pretty much completed. Mark Twain coined the term the Gilded Age as the title of his novel, The Gilded Age, a tale of today. And that gives us a sense. The Gilded Age looked shiny. It wasn't quite what it purported to be. And we're going to find out what it in fact was now with Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

She is the Charles and Mary Baird Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She has just come off the back of a great project. She was the historical advisor to a new HBO drama from the team that created Downton Abbey. Yes, our own Julian Fellows has crossed the pond and is now making huge shows about what was going on in the US, whilst the residents of Downton were shooting grouse and doing what they did. It's a giant new show. It's on HBO Max in the US. It sounds at the moment in the UK. It's streaming on Now streaming service. It's also on Sky Atlantic. So check it out, The Gilded Age. And I got Erica on to tell me, you know, did they listen to her?

How realistic is it? How accurate is it? What are you going to find out now? So what's The Gilded Age? And what's the TV show like? It's fascinating stuff. If you wish to watch documentaries about the 19th century, we've got plenty for you.

Yes, we do. On History Hit TV. It is a digital history channel. It is a streaming service. It's got plenty for you. Yes, we do. On History Hit TV. It is a digital history channel. It is a streaming service. It's like Netflix for history. You simply go to the link in the description of this podcast. You tap on that link. You get taken on your clever smart device to our sign up page. You sign up. You get two weeks free. You get to check out all documentaries. We've got a huge drop of documentaries coming soon. And then you subscribe and you enter a lifetime love affair with history documentaries. And all the podcasts are on there too, without the ads. If you don't like the ads,

go listen to them there. So head over to the link in the description. But for now, listen to the very brilliant Erica Dunbar. Erica, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Oh, so happy to be here. Well, I love talking about the Gilded Age because in the UK, we don't really have a Gilded Age. It's exciting. It's a period of anxiety in the UK about the sunset of empire and this kind of stuff. So it's a good example of where US and UK kind of history and culture radically diverge. Tell me, what's it mean? What are we talking about? What period exactly are we talking about? Typically, when historians and professors like myself teach the Gilded Age,

we're usually referring to that time period following the Civil War up through the early years of the 20th century. And it's really, in many ways, the sort of birth of modern America. And similar to what you've just said, there's still a lot of anxiety and tension. And when we're thinking about U.S. history at that time, we're really literally rebuilding a nation following a devastating civil war. But also at that time, we see the humongous growth of industry and sort of a change when we're thinking about immigration, when we think about different kinds of rights that are being extended or retracted from people. So it's a very kind of wild moment for some, a moment in time in which a very small percentage of the population amasses great wealth, which is how we get this sort of term, the Gilded Age. So let me get this right. Gigantic technological transformation that creates

massive oligarchies and monopolistic. That's interesting. That sounds strangely familiar. Okay. So let's talk. The word is really interesting, right? Because gilded, right away, you're starting to think, hold on, it's not a golden age. This is something that looks shiny.

But if you scratch the surface, you're into kind of other materials. That's exactly right. It's part of the reason when I teach, I actually don't use the phrase Gilded Age. On occasion I do, but you're right. It's a nod to just sort of how superficial and sort of an inch deep this idea of wealth and the transformation of wealth actually sort of appeared in the United States. And it's a theme that is very palpable and relatable, I think, today, this idea that a very small percentage of people lived with extremely opulent conditions, with wardrobes in China and purchased goods that made their living spaces quite opulent. But the majority of the nation did not live that way.

Let's break those down. Let's talk about, first of all, where's this wealth coming from? Is it industry? Is it new opportunities, new technology? Tell me about who is able to take advantage of these new innovations. From the early 19th century, we start to see the beginnings of a sort of factory system work, a move into a wage labor system before we hit the Civil War, the 1860s. So that by the time we're in this Gilded Age, for the most part, Americans have transitioned to expecting a daily wage or perhaps a weekly wage. And we see the growth, the expansive growth of factory work, of labor that's required to continue to build railroads that are expanding across the nation. And honestly, to rebuild much

of what was destroyed throughout different parts of the nation during the Civil War, there's the steel industry, the sort of growth of modern buildings. And then, of course, the one kind of technological advance that changes really the nation, if not the world, is the expansion of electricity that finds its way into commercial spaces by the 1880s and then begins to expand throughout residential areas. So in almost every sector, there's expansion, but it also changes the way people think about labor. And I'm thinking about those who are still in service, who are working in homes as domestics.

There's a sort of change in the feel of what that was. At one point, that was a career. And that was true for shoesmiths and seamstresses, right? That that was a career that one would count on for the rest of their life. If you were in service, if you served a family, that could be something that you did for the entirety of your life. That began to change. And we start to see real transition in work where people understand or think about those

types of employment as temporary stopgap measures before something better came along. And I guess just coming back to your railway point, you know, you see towns like Birmingham, Alabama, or you're able to access the vast interior of the US and get the coal out and get the natural resources and take people. It's acting as a gigantic kind of accelerant, I guess. Why do we associate with robber bands? Why did wealth become so, we think it became so concentrated in this kind of gilded elite? Well, I use the elite cautiously.

What happened there? Is that just what happens when you invent new technology? Because we've seen it in our generation as well. Well, I think that's a great point that you make when we think about the 21st century and the development of, say, new technology. While everyone might have an iPhone or a smart television or what have you, there's a very small percentage of people who are making immense wealth from that technology. And we see something similar playing out in the late 19th into the early 20th century, that there's a concentration when we think about real estate, when we think about who has the actual capital to invest in companies,

whether it's railroad titans or something of another nature. You have to have the capital in order to invest, right? So who has enough capital? Also, when we're thinking about the agrarian parts of the nation, there's a boom there as well in terms of who's gobbling up land. Is it small farmers who are making lots of money off of tobacco? No, it's the growth of tobacco companies, of money off of tobacco? No, it's the growth of tobacco companies, right? In the late 19th and early 20th century who are gobbling up little pieces of land, little farms, paying off farmers, and they're able to purchase the mechanization that's required for tobacco companies to sort of rule the world by the end of the 19th, early 20th century. That's what's happening across the nation. And once again, when we think about where that wealth is located, for the most part, we can say it's wealthy,

white men and women, mostly men, who have control of just about every industry in the nation. And they are New York, Manhattan becomes, again, we associate that, the architecture, the opulence, the apartments, the parties, and then obviously in New York's hinterland in the summer. Tell me about that world. New York, of course, becomes that sort of ground zero or the central location when we think about the opulence of the Gilded Age. But I also sort of tip my hat to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to these other cities. Even when we're thinking about places like Charleston and later on in the West Coast, kind of San Francisco and what have you, where we also have growth in terms of the popular imagination. New York is always at the center, right? Because we

think about shipping. We think about more specifically banking, right? It's the banking industry. And when you think about that, okay, right. The banks are in New York and they're lending money, right? But they're also in charge of, they're controlling mortgages. They're controlling life insurance policies. It is really the central hub from which everything branches out. And it's in New York where we start to see also a sort of movement within the elite who's coming, who's newcomers, who are not necessarily welcomed, newcomers who are not necessarily welcomed, old time moneyed folks who are having to perhaps share a little space at the table with newcomers. And there's tension there as well. The other piece is that there's a physical migration in New York in the 1870s, 80s, 90s,

where there's a literal move north up the island of Manhattan. And so with that movement, we see larger homes being built, kind of palatial homes that still stand today. This is the Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about the Gilded Age. More coming up. Ever wanted to know more about some of the greatest stories in history? Kings, queens, knights, monks, peasants, battles, castles, love, hate, treachery and revenge? They're all waiting in the greatest millennium in human history.

Well, yet anyway. I'm Matt Lewis and my co-host Dr Kat Jarman and I are waiting to tell you some of the most exciting, exhilarating, fascinating, and less well-known stories of the Middle Ages. What are you waiting for? We've Gone Medieval with History Hit. Are you coming? I'm Matt Lewis. To be continued... rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Let's now talk about the people paying the price you mentioned a little bit about domestic staff but what is it like to live and work and try and scratch a living in this well to arrive in america

but also then to try and raise a family live there at the other end of the economic scale once again it's a kind of a relatable theme or idea to the present. And I am one of those folks who like to make connections from the past to the present. But the phrase you just use scratching to sort of get by, that's what people are doing. It's a moment in which we see tremendous immigration, especially into New York and its surrounding regions, from Europe, from Italy in particular, but also from Asia. And it's a moment in which we see Chinese immigration, which by law is actually sort of shut down during the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Act, as we see more and more immigrants coming into New York in particular,

but also the number of Black migrants from the South who are looking for opportunity, The number of Black migrants from the South who are looking for opportunity, moving away from the cotton fields and the violence of the South, looking to cities like New York, like Chicago, like Philadelphia for different kinds of work and opportunity. All of those things sort of come together. And of course, there's a tension that arises at the same moment. And we see very real kind of nativist attention growing and building during the Gilded Age as well. So it's gilded for some, but very, very obviously violent and difficult for others who don't necessarily or can't claim either the United States as their place of birth or origin, for those who speak a different language, for those who physically are not white or male, to be very honest, that those

are the folks who are left scratching to get by. Is the reason, one of the many reasons, that we don't see the kind of same march of socialism in the 19th century that you do get in many European countries is that there isn't a kind of ethnic homogenous class of working people who can express solidarity which are like was it easier for the oligarchs to divide recently arrived eastern European Jews from Americans of color, from Chinese immigrants? Like, was it harder to organize for the working men and women, given that kind of heterodox nature of the working class? That's a really great question and point that you're making, which is that by the Gilded Age, when we think about working America, the people who are building the railroads,

about working America, the people who are building the railroads, the people who are building the buildings. They are diverse. They come from wildly different backgrounds. Some are not permitted to even do the most basic and what we would consider arduous work because of racism, because of nativism. So there is a very kind of splintered understanding of what we would call the working class now, or those folks who are working with their hands, who are working with their backs every day. And it's for that one of the reasons, I'd argue, as well as a real attempt to hold down organizing. It's the moment in which unions are becoming popular. When we think about populism moving across the nation, there's a very sort of organized

attempt to shut that down by those who have immense wealth, by those who own the companies. And there's the fear that comes with sometimes the violence against those who are attempting to unionize for better wages, for better opportunities, for the working, what we call them the working poor now. And so I think you're right that there is a very kind of splintered population that are, for the most part, controlled or at least taken advantage of, or continually oppressed by those with great wealth. I always think when I meet historians who act as historical advisors on huge projects, like historians always imagine what their subjects look like and what the past would look like and taste like and feel like. You're one of these very few now who's had a multi-million dollar budget

thrown at all of your fantasies, your waking dreams. Like, what is that like? That must be exciting. You know, it is and it isn't. I mean, when you come up in the Academy as a scholar, you never sort of imagine yourself in a situation where you are doing storytelling and helping to create world-making for millions of eyes, right? We're usually in our silos writing our books,

and if a few people buy our books, great. But this has been a real opportunity to tell multiple narratives in a way that is attractive, engaging, and that is also not didactic. It's not, I'm trying to teach you American history in this production. No, but I do slide it in. And that's very important for Julian Fellows. He is quite adamant about having authenticity about the time, the time period in which his characters live. And so you want to make certain that everything from the way characters are dressed to the material culture of the period, that a room is dimly lit when you walk in, when a viewer will see a dimly lit room and understand that there's no electricity yet in people's homes. So yeah, it's kind of dimly lit in most places.

All of those things were super important for Julian, for HBO. And so that allowed me to sort of come in as a historical consultant and in other ways to lend an eye not only just to the larger kind of story, but to also think more specifically about Black life and the Black elite in New York at that time, which so few people have been introduced to in television or film. Well, let's quickly talk about the Black elite. Why has their story not been told, do you think? What has happened to their history? You know, I think that in the popular imagination, we're used to, there's this sort of narrative of the Civil War and slavery, and then you jump to like the Harlem Renaissance, to like the 1930s,

or what have you. And there's this sort of 50 year window, which is the Gilded Age, which really hasn't been represented in television in a way that centers Black life. And the reason for that, I think, has more to do with who's at the table, who's creating story, who's given the opportunity to create shows, and also this sort of perception that perhaps that might not be of interest. I, of course, beg to differ as a historian, but also now as someone who's doing real sort of world making and television, that what we want really are fascinating stories, and we want new stories, right? So what better time to think about this parallel world of the Black elite, these folks who have amassed wealth in maybe one

or two generations removed from slavery. Some had never been enslaved in New York. To think about these folks who are living a completely different world than the Astors and the Vanderbilts and the others that we tend to think about during the Gilded Age. There are Black men and women in New York in particular who are building their own societies, and they have to do it in part because of segregation and because of the sort of rigid rules that prevent Black men and women from really interacting in a public way with white folks. their own saloons, their own taverns, and that have created this world that attempts to protect them from the indignities of racial violence and injustice. So we haven't seen these folks. And one of the things that's great about this production is that now we do.

I love it. What other moments on the production, every historian must have moments on the production where the director's like, we're going to do this thing. And you're like, oh, I don't know if that's going to work. Are there moments you've intervened and you've succeeded? Like, do they listen to you? I hope they do. The entire creative team was really committed to authenticity, right? And they knew that the work that I was going to do was exactly that. Okay, I understand that this is, it's fiction, right? It's a fictional show with some characters who were real life people. And I never faced an experience where people said, absolutely not. No, there was always a willingness to find common ground,

even if it didn't sort of work with a sort of dramatic storyline. And I think that's what viewers have to remember. And I had to train myself as a historian who's used to facts and dates and, you know, we're going to get this right, exactly right, that there's a little loosening of that when you think of this is not a documentary, right? This is not a documentary at all. And for that reason, you have to be somewhat nimble, yet authentic in world making. So our characters in many ways are composite characters. They're sort of a little bit of this person, a little bit of that person that maybe no one ever knew in order to create these worlds that are exciting. And so, yeah, sometimes as a historian, I had to sort of

swallow deep and breathe and recognize that it wasn't going to be exactly the way it would have happened. But I think for the most part, the show really does appreciate authenticity. Listen, Erica, we love historical drama. You know, we love reading your history books and listen to your podcast, but we also love the fun. It's the guilty pleasure of drama and seeing it realized. And so all of us are looking forward to seeing that. So congratulations. Well done for keeping them on the straight and narrow. Thank you. That's my job. Exactly. Glad you're in there. So Erica, where can we go and see your handiwork?

We can see it now. It's streaming for audiences, both in the UK and in the United States. And we're excited and really hoping that viewers appreciate and fall in love with the characters on The Gilded Age. We're going to. Thank you. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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