Quotes About Gilded Age

In America the share of national income going to the top .01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top .01% got in the Gilded Age."9

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

Grover} Cleveland, this product of good conscience and self-help, with his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, was a taxpayer's dream, the ideal bourgeois statesmen for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price. He was the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age.

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.

People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.

The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.

her 1935 memoir of life in Gilded Age New York, "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age, Bessie

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

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lavish coverage in the Boston Post gave Kennedy those three key elements of the Gilded Age business model: the appearance of wealth, a supply of other people's money to speculate with, and a dignified reputation.

They are moral choices. And they are being made by a self-dealing network whose private-sector members have been handed control of the public trust to a degree unprecedented in the United States, even in the Gilded Age.

the history of the Gilded Age delivers one certainty, it is this: there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.

This effervescence was on boisterous display in the big cities, magnets as they were for talent and ambition of all kinds. Here, labor unionism most closely overlapped with a second current of defiance against the Gilded Age system: revolutionary political movements such as socialism of various stripes, or anarchism.

Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia

The Gilded Age was much like today; the rich went on a rampage, gutting, by fair means or foul, any institution or principle that protected ordinary people against organized greed. At the end of it, the majority of the American people insisted, against enormous opposition, that the government's powers, structure, and values be modernized to reflect the interests of ordinary people rather than solely those of the wealthy.

the Gilded Age Senate was in fact more subservient to established interests than the current one. It was during this period that the Senate came to be called "the Millionaire's Club," because industrial and banking magnates, having amassed huge fortunes, often bought themselves Senate seats so they could protect their wealth on the spot.

This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who.

By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression. In 2007 the richest tenth of Americans accounted for half of all income, while the richest 1 percent had seen their share nearly triple since 1994.8

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.

There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.