The Gilded Age
Social Climbing, Class Sniping, & Showdowns in the Wild, Wild East

2,771 words

I’ve often said that to most Americans history begins with Elvis Presley. TV especially is the land of the magic kingdom; not of Disney, but ephemera. It’s noteworthy that in 2022 HBO presented The Gilded Age, a series set in 1880 when America, having been massively industrialized during the Civil War, now projected that technological and economic power in both politics and culture.

The title, taken from Mark Twain’s 1874 novel, is satiric if not sarcastic, referring to a society and civilization that is not quite either. It is seen as a tawdry period of robber barons, a Congress for sale, and the domination by a Republican Party that had metasticized from its free soil, Lincolnian roots into the servant of money and privilege; morphing from The Battle Hymn of the Republic into The Public Be Damned. In 1931 Lewis Mumford wrote The Brown Decades, arguing that American idealism and utopianism in the antebellum period had been overtaken by postwar crassness and philistinism. He described the brownstone, a popular apartment building style of the era, representing a drab, nondescript urban life dimming under the weight of industrialization and a society cosseted by unrestricted capitalism.

Such a series could easily become brittle and sour, matching the political cartoons of the era depicting the uncontrolled financial and political scandals, from Tammany Hall’s rule to the massive looting of public funds from Boss Tweed to the Grant administration. Instead, we have a watchable delight, both verbally and visually, demonstrating the subtle but serious turns of societal warfare and class struggle. Not keeping up with the Joneses, but keeping them out- if their money is too new and they don’t set a table in proper order as deemed by the 400, who ran New York’s upper class.

Julian Fellowes is the series creator, best known for his iconic Downton Abbey, and you might say The Gilded Age is Downton Abbey with American accents. The viewer will note the same concerns of class, wealth, walking the line between societal conformity and a modern perspective of individual freedom.

The American upper class slavishly copied their English cousins in all social matters, but the interests of a landed aristocracy and dealing with parvenus is timeless. The HBO series Rome had the same struggle, and Dennis Wheatley wrote in The Devil and All His Works that Rome’s ruling class:

Resided in pleasant villas, and the lives they led were very similar to those of an English country gentleman or colonial official of the Georgian age. If a Roman lord could have resumed his body and gone to dine with any English nobleman of the eighteenth century, the interests of them would have been so alike that they would have talked the night through. And they could have done so, as they both spoke Latin, albeit with very different accents.

But if we are in another Downton Abbey, we are also in Edith Wharton territory, and those who have read The Age of Innocence or seen Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1993 adaptation will be right at home.

The story begins in Pennsylvania as Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobsen), dressed in severe black to mark grieving her dead father, goes to New York and her aunts, Agnes Van Rhijn and Ada Brook (Christina Baransky and Cynthia Nixon). Agnes, the matriarch, isn’t bothered at all by her brother’s death. She is steely and tart. Like the Bourbons of France, she neither forgives nor forgets, and her brother apparently was very forgettable.

But Marion is family, and in old New York society family is to be protected and properly guided to a social purpose, which means never taking employment, but instead a well-connected marriage. Marion must forsake her mourning dress for the latest fashions (“can’t have you looking like a crow,” mutters Agnes),and indeed the costuming of all the women is delicious eye candy in whatever scene takes place. Brown decades? Not in this series.

Marion is trained to be a proper Van Rijn, and of course this means hating the right enemies, in particular the Russells, who have just set up a new, gleaming palace across the street. George and Bertha Russell (Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon) are loosely based on the Vanderbilts. Their mansion is a direct confrontation to Agnes and, by implication, all of old New York. George is a railroad tycoon, and, judging by the excellence and luxury of his mansion, is a very successful one. An opening scene shows George use his railroad to drive a competitor out of business because the man wouldn’t make a deal, so George put up a rival line to destroy him. George is gracious and offers a quiet, dark demeanor to the public.

When I see the Russells, I’m reminded of John Singer Sargent’s 1897 portrait of Mr. And Mrs. Isaac Newton Philip Stokes. Mrs. Stokes is younger than Bertha and smiles happily into the canvas with all the assurance of old money, her straw hat jauntily held at her waist. Phelps is in the background, darker, bearded, arms folded and straight; almost a specter, a man of power and a spiritual strength behind his wife’s open charm. Likewise, George stands in the background to Bertha’s continual social battle to scale the ramparts, but asserts himself when she is openly attacked.

When a popular charity auction refuses the Russell’s ballroom as a venue, Bertha nurses the snub. George enters the auction, offers one hundred dollars for each booth, after which said booth is shut down. George closes what was to a few day’s auction in less than an hour. It’s a reminder that, in the end, the upper class has old blood and status, but George and his kind have the money, power, and presumably the glory. It’s a reminder that the Gilded Age was the gestation of the American Empire.

Here it is feeling its financial sinews, building up for 1900 and the Spanish-American War, when America entered the world stage.
The Russells are the main characters of The Gilded Age, and their slow campaign of acceptance recalls another couple, the Macbeths. This is not to place George as a man of evil. He is a determined businessman and defends his turf, but I’m impressed how much George and Bertha compliment and play off of each other. Like Lord and Lady Macbeth, they are a team. Shakespeare made the Macbeths one of his most devoted and loving couples, although their domestic energy was malevolent to anyone who got in their way. As we see, this is likewise for New York.

While Agnes keeps fighting the Russells, her spinster sister Ada is more open to change and quietly stifles under Agne’s dominance, a thoughtful intermediary between Agnes and Marion. Ada wants to be part of both worlds. Agnes is portrayed by Baransky as a mix of ruthlessness and judicial fairness. Like many cynical and distrustful matriarchs, her antennae in judging people is very good. An old suitor, a reticent charming older man, returns to spark an accepting Ada. Likewise, Marion is befriended by Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel), a Pennsylvania lawyer smitten with her, and their growing love develops throughout the season. Agnes distrusts both suitors, and her estimation turns out to be remarkably prescient.

The tennis match of social climbing sparkles in each episode as it expands the family conflicts of both the Russells and Rhijns. Oscar Rhijn (Blake Ritson) has a crisis as he begins wooing the Russell’s daughter. Oscar needs her for two reasons. He needs Russell money to keep his lifestyle going. Oscar is also homosexual, and she’ll be a perfect beard to cover for his closed-door preferences. His homosexual partner resents this, but also understands. Gay society was not exactly suppressed but kept under wraps, tolerated if social niceties were observed. America, like England, was determined to keep the social order and its classes intact, democracy notwithstanding. Oscar Wilde’s persecution came not because he was gay, but because he openly exposed its mores in court over the Queensberry affair. For doing that, Victorian society came down hard.

Unlike Downton Abbey, race is brought up in the subplot of Peggy Scott (Dence Benton), a black woman who reluctantly befriends Marion on her way to New York. Peggy winds up becoming Agne’s secretary. While it seems contrived and a sop to political correctness, Peggy offers a study of the black upper class in the 19th century, and the conflicts she has with her father over not wanting to join him at his pharmacy because she wants to be a writer.

Peggy tries to enter a white world reluctant to admit her. She writes a short story that, to her surprise, a white publication will accept, but only if she changes her story about a black child and make it white, so as not to offend readers. While this is meant to show an example of racial prejudice, it also depicts the hazards of publication. Years ago I submitted one of my stories. The editor liked it, but since it was a women’s publication, she asked me to make my leading character female instead of male. I did so which made the story no worse, and was published and paid.

Peggy and Marion form a bond that is tested when Marion drops in unannounced on Peggy and her semi-quarreling parents. She is received with a social chill just as firm as that inflicted on the Russells by the 400. The line between black and white is partly racial, but also indicates class divides in Victorian society, where even a black upper class, for all its modesty, had barriers. But Marion and Peggy’s relationship grows, since their impromptu meeting at that Pennsylvania depot was a part of Peggy’s story, as she had returned in search of a terrible secret that will define the end of season one and doubtless spill into season two. I also noted a bit of P.C. where the black editor of the newspaper Peggy writes for reminds her Edison didn’t create the light bulb: it was a black assistant of his. I found this funny, an example of black rewriting of history, showing this mania far older than the 1960s.

The Russells, with their mix of bravado and brashness, have much strength but still keep fighting society’s reluctance to let them enter, as Agnes defines Bertha as coming from “potato diggers.” This would likely mean Irish, although the Russells look dark and Jewish. Diane, their daughter, is almost an Anne Frank lookalike, but this is 1880, just before the Jewish diaspora flooded America.

The humor in Fellowes and Sonia Warfield’s writing is always understated. A high point is Bertha’s visit to Newport to possibly build a cottage (I’ve been to Newport; those “cottages” are mansions), and rival that of Mrs. Astor, the queen of society. Bertha, while Mrs. Astor is out, enters the mansion to have a look and get ideas for her own, when a crisis occurs as Mrs. Astor unexpectedly returns, and loathes Bertha. Bertha is shooed out to the back door by her frightened sponsor, and it’s hilarious seeing the normally assured and defiant Bertha, dressed to the nines, flee past servants plucking chickens, beating carpets, frowning at her as chicken feathers fly in her face. The expression of terror in Coon’s eyes is marvelous, and one of the funniest moments of season one.

As in Downton Abbey, there are subplots dealing with the domestic help, and I enjoyed seeing Bertha stumble through all these servants whose labor made the entire class system work. It also recalls that in this era, six percent of working Americans were servants. The characters battle to preserve or change society are the primary focus of The Gilded Age, but historical events edge their way into the episodes. One event is a social display at night when Bertha, with most of the cast, witness Thomas Edison switch on the electric lights in the New York Times building. Everyone, from Bertha to Marion to Peggy, the entire crowd, black, white and whoever, is stunned and delighted seeing magic come to life. It reminds us of the technological “miracles” this period offered, creating our own world.

In a park is displayed the hand of the statue of Liberty holding the torch…they were still raising money for the rest of Miss Liberty.
A cultural issue that intersects with the storyline is the Academy of Music’s refusal to allow nouveau rich like the Russells to became part of its operatic crowd. A new opera company is created, The Metropolitan (“The Met”: guess who wins?), and season two will focus on this societal Kulturkampf.

I enjoyed a concert depicted in the Academy featuring a symphony by John Knowles Paine, one of America’s earliest composers of classical music. It reminds us that American high culture was achieving a maturity along with America’s financial and industrial power. Indeed, a strong selling point in The Gilded Age is simply showing historical America. The series has some of our best talent, and if it’s ironic that Fellowes, an Englishman, had to bring out an American series. It seems Americans simply can’t do it. I recall Ride With the Devil, an extraordinary film about the Civil War in Missouri, was directed by Ang Lee.

In Thomas Wolfe’s In Our Time, he addressed this subtle control British culture had on American entertainment:

During the 1970s it dawned on me that PBS stood not for Public Broadcasting Service but for Petroleum’s British Subsidiary. Every drama I watched was from England; every accent was British; and after every show a little sign appeared on the screen: “This program was made possible by a grant from the Exxon Corporation,” if it wasn’t Mobil.

I brought this up in my essay “The Scarecrow“, recalling how American public television from NET and PBS did offer American drama and themes in the 1970’s, but was supplanted by corporate love of British culture. This is almost traditional. In the early years of America, American artists were given short shrift by an upper class still looking to London for guidance. Ralph Waldo Emerson mused that America only begins west of Appalachia.

The Gilded Age was originally planned for NBC, who backed out and HBO rushed in. This was for the best. Network television has shown a dismal inability to handle period drama, especially regarding American history. In 1975, when Upstairs Downstairs was a hit on PBS (via the BBC), CBS offered Beacon Hill, a series about American rich-servant doings in Boston. Well regarded critically, it only lasted for eleven episodes. A major problem is American audiences are unused to dealing with their own history and any kind of thoughtful examination of it. Also, a premise of the story was that the Lattimers, a newly rich Irish family, would have made it to Boston’s most exclusive neighborhood. Never would have happened.

Showing upper and lower class struggle in America had to wait until 1978’s Dallas, when, transferred to contemporary Texas, a mass audience responded. Boston makes Americans shrug. Texas is sexy. So much so that, as I recall in 1980, the three overwhelming questions the public had would Reagan beat Carter, how would we get the Iran hostages back, and who shot J.R.?

One historical fact of the Gilded Age was that by 1900, the upper class tried to offer themselves as America’s true aristocracy. One millionaire even spent time trying to make polo our national sport. The problem was that the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers et. al were not greatly liked by the mass of American people. The wholesale control of state legislatures, railroads grabbing all property rights and charging exorbitant shipping fees (See my essay “California Discontent: Part 2“), and the corporations using armed Pinkerton men to break up strikes was still fresh and raw in the public memory. You tell the public to be damned, they damned well remember it. In this era, there were no apologies about wealth, like in The Philadelphia Story where the Lords have to be nice and social, letting wary reporters know they’re really just decent folks, don’t you know. In The Gilded Age the rich have power and prestige and aren’t shy about displaying it. But America, as it filled in, expanded, and assumed its imperial shape, did psychologically crave and need an aristocracy, and they got it: from Hollywood, which is glitzy, ephemeral, and semi-democratic…more fitting to the American palate.

The Gilded Age offers shadows and sunshine of American power in its imperial infancy, and I was pleased to see our history presented so artfully and elegantly. The third season begins later this year, where instead of cowboys and Indians, we have corsets and hard collars. Julian Fellowes’ foray into American class society is well worth watching.