12. GLORY

THE LAST DAYS OF THE GILDED AGE (1900-1914)

The gilded (gold-plated) classes   The "West" (Europe and America) is prospering as it has never before in history.  European royalty and aristocracy live in unprecedented glory.  But so does a rising class of industrial and commercial entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic who have made themselves enormously rich through the new industrial revolution – a technological development resulting from the skillful use of science in the art of conducting war (the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 1800s, the American Civil War in the 1860s, and wars of imperialism in Asia off and on during the entire 19th century). The working poor The working classes – yeoman (independent) and peasant farmers and industrial laborers – are not doing so well, although according to European aristocratic traditions this was not a matter of great political and social importance.  Peace in Europe has been both a blessing and a curse for the poor: it has produced among them a greater survival rate – but has expanded the numbers of working poor faster than the industrial economy can accommodate them.  For this reason workers' wages remain deplorably low – and the profits of the industrial owners shamefully high. The American shelter America remains the "pressure valve" that allows Europe’s excess working class population to relocate to – although the frontier with the Indians has been closed (Indian lands absorbed into the expanding Anglo culture).  Immigrants crowd into American cities where jobs are still to be found – rapidly expanding the size and altering the character of urban America, inserting into Yankee America a very alien-feeling urban culture.  America remains, however, still basically an agrarian/small-town culture.  But this new alien urban America will begin to push itself ever forward – stirring among some Yankees sympathies for the European poor who crowd there, and among other Yankees animosities because these immigrants do not share the basics of Yankee culture (Anglo language and literacy, Protestant Christianity, the dignity of property-ownership). Potential class war The situation is potentially explosive with this rapid growth of population and this rapidly mounting energy of industrial society.  Marx and other radical socialists have predicted a great class war which will sweep away the privileges of the rich and redistribute this new industrial wealth and its privileges among the poor.  This idea frightens not only the upper classes but also the rising middle class which has as its goal the duplication of at least some of the accomplishments of the upper classes. Nationalism But all this explosive energy gets turned in another direction, away from class conflict – toward national competition, especially in the imperialist playing fields abroad.  A rapidly mounting sense of being English, or French, or German or Italian or American (Spain, Russia and Turkey however are having great difficulties getting their nationalist acts together) gives these "nations" a highly romanticized sense of collective destiny.  This skillfully overrides industrial class distinctions.  Bismark, in uniting the Germans into a single empire (1870), and then extending unprecedented social benefits to the lower social orders of German society, forges a national spirit which will provide plenty of Darwinian challenge to the other aspiring nations of Europe (and eventually America). Imperialism During the 1800s most of this energy gets directed to Asia (India, China, Southeast Asia) and then to Africa.  Europeans (with Germany and America coming to the game later than the others) carve up these Asian and African lands – with little regard to the ethnic, historical or political character of the lands they are absorbing into their Western empires.  What counts most is simply the size of the territorial gain achieved by the Westerners in this global land grab.  It is all about imperial prestige.  All of this gross gaming is moralized in clever ways:  the English call this their "White Man’s Burden"; the French term it "la mission civilisatrice" (the civilizing mission); the Americans term it the "Monroe Doctrine" (America must intervene to protect "democracy" in Latin America from European ambitions – but also from its neighbors’ self-inflicted political and economic folly). Wars of 19th century imperialism (at least since Napoleon’ defeat in 1815) have remained largely local and limited:  the English and French insertion into China during the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-70), America's "opening" of Japan (1853-54), the British-Russian Crimean War (1853-56), the British crushing of the Sepoy rebellion in India (1857), the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the Spanish-American War (1898), the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901).  But with the success of the West in fully dominating the rest of the world, the West is running out of overseas playing fields. The Boer War of 1899-1902 actually pits two European peoples against each other in South Africa.  The English "win" – but are so scandalized by the "immorality" of how they treated a fellow European people (interning Dutch-speaking Boer families in concentration camps) that they surrender their ‘gain’ over to the Boers.  And the ‘unclaimed’ Sultanate of Morocco twice (1905 and 1912) nearly brings the Germans to blows with the English, French and Spanish – which could have set off the war of raging European egos that run just below the political surface.  What is rapidly developing is a turning of this nationalist-imperialist energy back onto the Western players themselves – a tragic Darwinian drama of "the survival of the fittest"  – right on their own home turf. The Gilded Calm Before the Storm At the turn into the twentieth century most of Western society seemed to be clearly at the top of its game.  Many already called this the "Gilded Age" ... where everything seemed to be gold-lined.  True, the world was still engaged in rapid social change and perfection had not yet been fully achieved.  But all this change seemed to be in a direction entirely positive in character ... and seemed to promise that utopia was at hand.  The common people were enjoying unprecedented new powers as designers of their own destiny.  Even kings and emperors seemed to have been brought under the power of the people.   Wealth was clearly expanding, though reaching the lower classes only with difficulty.  But even in this matter, just as the middle class had recently secured vital political and economic rights wrested from the old feudal order, socialist reformers were certain (Marx had clearly demonstrated to them how this all was an inevitable historical development) that soon the working classes would be wresting those same political and economic rights from the middle class industrialists (or "capitalists").  Such utopian progress was certain ... and just around the corner. But storm clouds were gathering that would change this game plan dramatically ... in a way few observers anticipated in those first years of the twentieth century.  Europe was about to go through such a nightmare of events that even in finally getting through it all, Europe would never be the same.   The Gilded Age was about to come to a dramatic close.

Go on to the next section:  Great Britain

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  Miles H. Hodges