HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s frothy, decorous, lavishly set-decorated historical soap opera set amid the social-climbing robber barons of New York City in the 1880s, is having its Season 3 finale on Sunday night. The show is worth watching for Agnes van Rhijn’s withering propriety and Bertha Russell’s dresses and millinery alone.
But don’t be fooled: The show itself presents an entirely sanitized portrait of its era, a Darwinian time in New York (and America) when great industrial fortunes were being built with little regard for the general welfare of those exploited in building it. It’s not a show that knows the average life expectancy was around 48 and many children didn’t live beyond their fifth birthday, dying of the sorts of things we (at least for now) vaccinate against. (Some spoilers ahead if you have not been watching this season.)
It is sometimes noted that we live in a sort of second gilded age, with the rich ever richer and inequality on the rise. The finale comes just a few days after President Trump unleashed tariffs at rates in line with the actual Gilded Age, a time which he openly pines for, when ruthless patriarchs like one of the show’s main characters, the robber baron George Russell, ruled the world, coercing and outflanking their less-clever rivals (Assuming, that is, that Russell survives an assassination attempt, just as Mr. Trump himself did.)
Lest you think I’m being hyperbolic, Mr. Trump said shortly after taking office: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income-tax concept.” Similarly, Howard Lutnick, now the commerce secretary, mused last fall about how much he preferred things back then, when “we had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.” Mr. Lutnick has called that era a “golden age,” when “we had so much money that we had the greatest businessmen of America get together to try to figure out how to spend it.”
So, it’s not a stretch to say that a return to the Gilded Age is a goal for Mr. Trump and his administration: They pretty much said so out loud. So it seems worth noting that the actual Gilded Age was not the tidied-up one depicted on the show. I’m not saying the show needs to be this gritty downer — that wouldn’t be any fun — but it is a fantasy.
At the start of Season 3 we find the ambitious Russells having made their way in the Manhattan society that had spurned them as arrivistes, much as Mr. Trump was once. Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) has a plan to marry her daughter off to the Duke of Buckingham, while Mr. Trump had to make do with his daughter marrying the son of a disgraced New Jersey real estate developer. There is a discreet gay couple who stay discreet, and one of them is killed off by the end of the current season (run down by a horse-drawn carriage — another danger of that era that we don’t need to bring back).
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The post Let’s Not Make America Gilded Again appeared first on New York Times.
