“In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs,”…. We had a president, you know McKinley? Remember Mount McKinley? He was a very good businessman, and he took in billions of dollars at the time. We were a very wealthy country at the time.” President Donald J. Trump
“Trump is no better as a historian of the 1890s than he is of the Civil War. No, it wasn’t America’s wealthiest time. No, McKinley wasn’t a businessman.” Historian and Pulitzer winner T.J. Stiles.
Mark Twain referred to the 1890s as the gilded age not golden age.
President Trump in his characteristic inaccurate and hyperbolic way proclaimed the 1890s as the “the Golden Age.” Mark Twain referred to it as the Gilded Age that is the age of monopolies and robber barons, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Rockefeller. It was also the age of extreme poverty. It witnessed the Depression of 1893 and the first March of Washington to demand jobs in 1894.
Historian Nell Irvin Painter has pointed out that “‘Gilded’ is not golden. ‘Gilded’ has the sense of a patina covering something else. It’s the shiny exterior and the rot underneath.”
I hope that by this time, people who follow me recognize that I am a self-proclaimed radical. But to be clear, I am radical in the tradition of Rep.Thaddeus Stevens and Sen. Charles Sumner, the Radical Republicans who made our freedom possible through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. Not to be confused with the racist, white supremacists of the present MAGA Republican Party. As such, my intention is and will always be to get to the root of things to uncover the ”rot underneath”.
I do this also because of the many ways America may be accurately described, it is also the land of glaring, unremorseful hypocrisy. And that hypocrisy has always been demonstrated in its dealings with African Americans, first as enslaved people and now as descendants of the enslaved.
So when this President Trump talks about making America great again, like it was in the 1890s, I am alarmed, and you should be too. For poor white folks, this means recession, depression, and higher prices. For African Americans, it could mean a return to Jim Crow laws and lynching.
Yes, I am a radical student of history, a political scientist, and a lawyer. My training and experience teach me that the Gilded Age was also the age of the return to slavery in all but name.
So when Trump promises to make America great again, we now know exactly what he means. It was certainly not a golden age for African Americans or the vast majority of Americans. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the point and to sound the alarm of the imminent danger of Trump 2.0. Lest we forget, and in preparation of what may come
The 1890s
The first March on Washington was in 1894. The people who came to Washington, DC on April 30, 1894, were white, and they came to “demand a solution to unemployment.”
In the 1890s, the majority of American families lived in poverty, with 11 million out of 12 million families earning less than $1,200 annually. The average annual wage during this period was $380.
It has been said that “When America catches a cold, Black people get pneumonia,” so you might expect that the circumstances for black folk in the 1890s were far more severe than for the population at large.
- During the 1890s and early twentieth century, the once confederate south passed numerous laws intended to prevent us from voting.
- Among the unscrupulous ways they used were property taxes. You had to own property to vote.
- Poll taxes were simply a tax paid to exercise the right to vote guaranteed by the 15th Amendment.
- Literacy tests required a black person who wanted to vote to demonstrate to an “election inspector” that he could read and interpret a passage of some document, to the inspector’s satisfaction.
- Then there were “grandfather clauses” that allowed these tests to be waived if a voter’s ancestors had voted before Reconstruction, that is, before the end of slavery.
- The results were devastating: by 1895, black voting in the South had decreased by 65%, and by 1900 it had practically ceased altogether.
- White and Colored signs were posted all over the South.
- These included drinking fountains, restaurants, bathrooms, hotels, and train cars.
- The Supreme Court held that such laws were constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),
- During the 1890s, lynchings of black people became the order of the day.
- During the 1890’s an average of 187 lynchings occurred every year, for an average of two lynchings per week.
- These lynchings were publicly condoned, and often at the hands of elected officials.
- These lynchings had a large following, where citizens took turns torturing the victims.
- The reasons for these barbaric acts could be as simple as speaking disrespectfully of to a white person or even being too successful.
This then is the golden age that Trump promises to return America to. It only bodes well for his billionaire donors, tech giants and the uber wealthy. These are the persons and entities that Trump intends to reward at the expense of everyone else. Donald Trump wants to return to the 1890s to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Where will African Americans be in America’s new Golden Age?
