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).
There is a footman who becomes rich off his invention but is still hesitant about rising above his station. There is an entire separate but not quite equal world of bourgeois Black Brooklyn. When George Russell (Morgan Spector) finds himself overextended financially, it miraculously turns out that land he was buying for his transcontinental railroad also contains valuable copper. Whew!
It’s probably that version of the Gilded Age that Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick fantasize about, a kind of ode to hats, jewelry, seating plans and white men who win. Those in the working class mostly know their place and there is little actual poverty on view. The show touches on the struggle for women’s suffrage but there’s not much about what it meant to be a poor woman back in those times, although there is a visit to a house of ill repute. The sexism of the time pops its head out occasionally, as does the racism, but it’s mostly all kept at a polite distance.
I’m not the only one who delights in the distraction of this show. This season was its most popular and it has been renewed for a fourth. Serving up the foibles and follies of the rich as a form of escapism is nothing new; writers from Boccaccio to Edith Wharton to the creators of “Real Housewives” have done the same. Stories of the troubles of the wealthy are a way of processing our own.
But all that entertaining distraction — those beautiful costumes, the glamorous limestone townhouses, the bickering over social position — doesn’t matter in real life, when our government is scheming how to Make America Gilded Again. (Mr. Trump has already started on the White House, after all.)
I grew up in a well-off, well-connected Manhattan world. Like Christine Baranski’s cranky Agnes van Rhijn, I benefit from some of Mr. Trump’s regressive taxation. Yet benefiting from it doesn’t make it less horrible to watch. My great-grandparents arrived as immigrants: Mr. Trump is trying to keep other people from having the same opportunities.
It’s important to be cleareyed about Trump world’s nostalgia for a time that never existed. This love of the Gilded Age is about more than just a wildly inflationary tariff scheme that is somehow supposed to bring back American manufacturing but seems in fact to be largely a cudgel to bludgeon countries that displease the president.
Missing from the show are the slums, the factories, the disease. It was a time of almost no regulation, and we know what that was like; Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was published in 1906. The era wasn’t so glamorous for the 146 workers, mostly young women, who were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. We now have workplace safety regulations that would bar a factory from locking in its employees, or at least we are supposed to, for now, while our capitalism still has at least some regulations.
It’s not hard to see ourselves hurtling toward a crisis engendered by the anti-regulation financiers and oligarchs who make up Mr. Trump’s inner circle. They get theirs and the rest of us don’t matter much.
The ladies of “The Gilded Age” worry about their places in society and their reputations, but they have no idea of what is ahead of them: two world wars, the Great Depression, revolutions worldwide. Today we are faced with war, famine, A.I. and climate change and our wealthy seem just as disconnected, scurrying about on their private planes and yachts, taking over Venice for their elaborate weddings.
The show is a delicious distraction, but a return to anything like the real Gilded Age should not be anybody’s goal.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast, an MSNBC commentator, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
Source photographs by Alison Rosa/HBO and Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.
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