Trump and the Golden Age: Part One- Reconstruction and the Coming of The Gilded Age
During his inauguration, Donald Trump stated "golden age of America begins right now.” The question is, for who? It isn’t America’s workers because he has spent the past 60 days attacking working class Americans at every turn. It isn’t our allies, because he has spent the past 60 days attacking them while playing up to our enemies. It isn’t the golden age for the unfortunate around the world, because he has literally pulled food out of the hands of starving people. It isn’t the golden age for America’s students, because he is undercutting public education.
So, if the poor, the workers, the hungry, children, our allies or any other person of need are not experiencing a golden age, just who is? Billionaires and Vladimir Putin- are the two who are experiencing Trump’s golden age. However, like everything else about Trump, it isn’t his idea. America experienced a similar age over 150 years ago, one that is known as the gilded age. Following the American Civil War, the rich in this country made a play to take everything and to legally enslave all workers for themselves. American writer Mark Twain coined the term “gilded age” for his 1873 novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” The story dealt with the greed and political corruption during reconstruction and the industrial revolution in America. It was a time of the robber barons and the largest wealthy distribution in our history up until now.
To understand Trump’s “Golden Age”, we need to understand what happened during the Gilded Age. In a post - Civil War United States, poverty spread across the land while a handful of wealthy individuals manipulated both the government and the marketplace to expand their wealth.
Historians place the Gilded Age from 1865-1902, beginning at the end of the Civil War know as Reconstruction to what has been called the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era is known for a call for democracy, a demand for human rights and a push for workers to organize.
The Civil War left part of the country decimated from five years of war. Congress was charged with finding a way to reintroduce the states who had seceded and try and bring the country together. On April 14, 1865, President Abrham Lincoln was assassinated making way for Andrew Johnson to become President. Part of reconstruction was passing laws that gave former slaves the right to vote. Johnson pardoned thousands of Confederate officers and supported the southern states passing “Black Codes” which restricted the freedoms of the former slaves. Johnson went along with attacking those who had been enslaved, while pardoning those who had done the enslaving. Justice in reverse, not unlike Trump pardoning the mob who tried to overturn a democratic election on January 6, 2021.
Lincoln had chosen Johnson as a running mate, hoping to set the stage for bringing the country back together following the war. Johnson had been appointed Military Governor of Tennessee after the Union Army took the state back under United States control. The murder of Lincoln, left the country with a president that didn’t have the same vision and would undermine efforts to restore a republic that worked for ALL citizens. Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to former slaves. Johnson opposed the measure and all other legislation Congress passed to try to bring normalcy back and human rights to the former slaves. When Congress overrode his vetoes, Johnson developed his own “Presidential Reconstruction” (essentially executive orders) and went on a national tour to promote his ideas and attempt to circumvent Congress. Trump is not the first to try and go around the will of the people, and use race to separate the population for his own needs.
Johnson encouraged the southern states to quickly establish governments with the pardoned confederate officers being elected to represent the southern states. While many northern citizens didn’t like Johnson’s hands off approach to reigning in the southern states, they felt it would help the south accept defeat and conform. The exact opposite happened.
Jim Crow laws were being passed across the south to deny rights to the former slaves. Congress passed the Civil Rights Law of 1866, defining citizenship for Americans of African descent. Johnson vetoed the law contending it “discriminated against whites.” Johnson would continue to undermine Congress’s attempts to provide equal protection for all citizens, and would eventually be impeached by Congress. Johnson would make promises to the swing vote in the Senate that “he would stop impeding reconstruction efforts”, and missed being impeached by one vote.
Johnson did not win the nomination for reelection, ending his impact on the new country that was being formed following the war.
The attack on DEI by Trump is very reminiscent of Johnson’s efforts to build power by pacifying the southern states following the war. After denying knowledge of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 during the campaign, Trump is using the document as the playbook for his administration. Just as Johnson used the former confederates to assemble power, Trump opened his second term attacking DEI to rally his base around him.
After Johnson lost the nomination, he watched former Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant be elected president and refused to attend his inauguration. No president after Johnson refused to attend the inauguration of their predecessor until Donald Trump refused to attend President elect Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The similarities between Trump and Johnson are significant, with history not being kind to Andrew Johnson’s presidency.
The next part in this series will deal with the rise of the robber barons Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, and how they used control of the government to ensure deregulation, erosion of worker’s rights and tipping into the tax base to accumulate their personal wealth to the determent of the country.