Enjoying the Sweet Stink of The Gilded Age in the Age of Billionaires

When Mark Twain coined the name “Gilded Age,” it was no compliment; he meant that the era was a turd wrapped in a tawdry film of gold leaf. This is because the late nineteenth century was a time of abject poverty, environmental degradation, shortened life expectancies, absent of workers’ rights and rampant with political corruption and cronyism. It was also a time of astronomical riches and gross displays of wealth for the lucky few. Sound familiar?

Our current era has more than a soupçon of Gilded Age stink. Workers at Amazon struggle to pay for food and shelter, while Amazon’s executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, sails the seas in a yacht so monstrously huge that it has to dock alongside cruise ships and needs its own baby support yacht, complete with helicopter hanger. Voter suppression is back in vogue, and deregulation threatens to bring back air pollution, foodborne illnesses and good old-fashioned bribery.

With these Gilded Age social woes swooping down on us like Oz’s flying monkeys, why has Julian Fellowes’ Max series, also called The Gilded Age, enjoyed so much popularity? I believe that it is, paradoxically, comfort television.

The focus of the show is the clash between old and new money in New York high society, a sort of Real Housewives of the nineteenth century. The stakes are low; season one revolves around invitations to a ball, and season two is a battle over opera boxes. There are nods to poverty, worker unrest, racism and female disempowerment, but even these are quaint and candy-coated.

The most syrupy example is a steel mill strike meant to represent the famous Homestead strike of 1892. Instead of thousands of workers barricading the mill to protest wage cuts and fatally dangerous working conditions, we get a few dozen men protesting in an organized fashion under a remarkably blue sky.

Instead of a bloody firefight that involved women and children, we have a peacemaking robber baron who halts the conflict, indignantly declaring that “these men have families!” Instead of state militia occupation and capitalists crushing the union under their boot heels, we are left with a sense that the noble workers won.

Similarly, while there are non-rich people depicted in the series, there is no representation of the squalor endured by the poor or the filthiness of New York in the Gilded Age, when the streets were choked with garbage and mountains of horse manure filled open lots. The Black characters are largely surrounded by enlightened white people, and the racism they face is genteel for a period which historians call the nadir of post Civil War race relations.

Working women are portrayed as having a good deal of agency and success, and while many are based on real people like Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross, and Emily Warren Roebling, who was recognized (posthumously, of course) for building the Brooklyn Bridge, these women were the Gilded Age exception that proves the rule, the rule being that women had very little power.

The result of these creative choices is a pleasant, gauzy portrait of late nineteenth century New York, a theme park version of real events. There is comfort to be had in this vision of the past sanitized of its ugliness, particularly right now, when the news is a firehose of reminders that we’re facing many of those same problems in our own gilded age.

The television sitcom Happy Days was similarly popular in the 1970s, when seismic cultural shifts were tearing apart the fabric of traditional American families. It was comforting for viewers to immerse themselves in the lives of an ordinary midwestern family unconcerned with civil rights or feminism.

At the outset of the new millennium, when the US government seemed exclusively focused on impeaching a president over a blowjob and then in waging pointless wars in the Middle East, we sought comfort from The West Wing, with its fantasy administration full of brilliant individuals who are in firm possession of moral compasses and care deeply about the future of the American people.

Now we have The Gilded Age, where billionaires aren’t all that bad, the poorest people are gainfully employed and well dressed, interactions are mostly civil, men treat women with respect, and racial relations are largely harmonious, at least above the Mason-Dixon line. It is a salve for our current societal inflammation.

An interesting aspect of this soothing effect is that viewers get to experience a little bit of the protective bubble wealth can provide. I doubt that anyone watching relates primarily to the servants or striking workers; just as we like to claim that we are descendants of royalty and not the statistically much more likely peasants, a show like The Gilded Age encourages us to imagine ourselves peacocking around gorgeous mansions.

The central focus of the plotlines on small issues of social rank, pushing larger systemic problems to the periphery and leaving them in soft focus, is not dissimilar to what psychologists say is the experience of billionaires. Money can buy distance from the hoi polloi and can purchase an insulating layer of sycophants who say only what the rich person wants to hear.

Unsurprisingly, as a consequence, the problems of the world fade into the distance while personal issues take center stage, like who has the bigger yacht or the best seats at the opera. One would think that living in such a state would bring much more comfort than watching an episode of The Gilded Age, but strangely, billionaires seem in a state of agitation, both on screen and off.

None of this is to dismiss the show—I have great respect for comforts of all kinds, and the craving for this particular one speaks volumes about the discomforts of our times. When the world around us is in turmoil, we have a responsibility to do our part to make things better, but propping our eyes open Clockwork-Orange-style to take in every cockamamie bit of news is not helpful and may just drive us insane.

Spending an occasional hour in the cool opulence of Gilded Age parlors where disputes are civilized and gowns are fabulous might just be the medicine we need right now.

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Forged by Danielle Teller is available via Pegasus Books.