The New Gilded Age : With the rise of Steve Forbes, Americans’ traditional hostility to the rich seems to have evaporated. : Evil? Society Now Celebrates the Plutocrat

There was a time in America when an affluent presidential candidate who proposed a tax scheme to further enrich the wealthy would have been reviled as a self-serving plutocrat, and a time when an heir to a vast industrial fortune who went loco and murdered someone would have been adduced, unfairly or not, as an example of the degeneracy of the rich. No more.

Today, when multimillionaire GOP presidential hopeful Steve Forbes describes his wacky flat-tax plan to make himself millions more, he meets not with howls of protest but with earnest consideration. And today, when John E. duPont is arrested in the murder of wrestler David Shultz, he is not regarded as an obvious lunatic who had long been coddled by the system because of his money; he is just a man who snapped.

What the Forbes campaign and the DuPont killing demonstrate is that America seems to have lost any sense of overt class antagonism. Europeans have always had a refined sense of class conflict, and their political parties often serve economic constituencies: Conservatives vs. Laborites in Britain; Gaullists vs. Socialists in France; Christian Democrats vs. Social Democrats in Germany.

In America, on the other hand, it has been decades since ordinary citizens thought of Republicans as champions of the wealthy and Democrats as champions of the working man. Where once these labels stirred souls and sparked debates, they now seem relics from another era. Americans just don’t think that way anymore.

Part of this has to do with our mythic inheritance. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed after touring America in the 1830s, ours was a society where class distinctions were virtually nonexistent. “The social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic,” he wrote.

Here, fortunes were not passed on from one generation to the next--a system that, in Europe, had created a permanent caste of indolent aristocrats. Instead, said Tocqueville, partly because of confiscatory inheritance taxes of the sort Forbes wants to rescind, each American citizen had to make his own fortune. Such distinctions as did exist were a function not of birth but of character.

It was an inspiring picture--this classless society of hard-working yeomen and honest merchants. But it wasn’t entirely accurate. Tocqueville underestimated the real tensions between rich and poor in America, even as the election of Andrew Jackson provided a vivid, if relatively short-lived, example of class politics.

In New York in the 1830s, New Year’s Eve revelers would march from the poorer precincts of Manhattan to the richer ones, where they would intimidate the wealthy by banging garbage-can lids and disrupting their celebrations. Similarly, a group of working-class citizens pelted the Astor Place Opera House with stones during a performance of “Macbeth” and shouted at the rich patrons inside to take off their “kid gloves” and come outside.

As long as the wealthy were perceived as effete and snobbish but essentially harmless, protests like these would remain sporadic. Within a generation, though, the rich would change, and so would the perception of them. No longer aloof patricians, the new rich of the Gilded Age were robber barons (men like banker J. P. Morgan, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel captain Andrew Carnegie, railroad tycoon Jay Gould), rapacious plutocrats who sought to protect their interests by commandeering the political system with a brutality that would have been unseemly for prior generations of genteel wealth.

If politics thrives on demonology, the robber barons provided a powerful one, though the major political parties couldn’t yet accommodate it, beholden as they were to moneyed interests. Instead, splinter parties emerged to channel the public’s widespread anti-capital sentiment. The largest and most famous was the Populist Party, formed in 1892 by agrarians with the express purpose of challenging the plutocrats who held the mortgages on the farmers’ land. “Wealth belongs to him who creates it,” decreed the Populist platform, taking aim on investment wealth.

Of course, the robber barons weren’t idle during these attacks. To counter the idea that they were plundering America, they promoted a demonology of their own--portraying the complaining farmers and laborers as dangerous radicals out to subvert the meritocracy of which the barons were allegedly the outstanding examples. The robber barons’ beneficiaries in the Democratic and Republican parties agreed. After a series of bloody railroad strikes, President Rutherford B. Hayes’s secretary of state went so far as to declare that suffrage should be restricted to “moneyed qualification.”

It was only after a devastating depression, beginning in 1893, that the Democrats turned to William Jennings Bryan, a rabble-rousing populist who led the charge against Eastern moneyed interests. Labeled a threat to the economy by his opponents and outspent by perhaps as much as 12 to 1, Bryan lost the 1896 presidential election to William McKinley by 700,000 votes. But he helped redefine U.S. party politics by dragging the demonization of Big Business from the margins to the center of political life and legitimizing it as a political issue.

Of course, the barbarity of the industrialists helped. When Carnegie hired goons to fire on striking workers at his Homestead steel plant and the goons killed nine of them, the public erupted against him. When workers struck Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. in 1904, and the militia sprayed a workers’ tent with gunfire, killing two women and 11 children, Rockefeller was vilified. One historian labeled him, “the most hated man in America.”

From the mid-1890s to the outbreak of World War I, one didn’t have to look far to see the rich being castigated. The Yellow Press, spearheaded by Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal in New York, caricatured industrialists as bloated and greedy, and so did the muckraking magazines of the day. Realist novels of George Norris and Upton Sinclair portrayed the rich as steel-hearted murderers, trading their workers’ lives for profits. Silent films showed them as fat, unctuous schemers.

So widespread was this sentiment that even GOP President Theodore Roosevelt joined the fray, swinging his cudgels against trusts that threatened to trample competition under their heavy boots. Though the boom ‘20s gave capitalists a respite from criticism, the Depression made them villains again--”economic royalists” in the memorable words of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So what happened? How did we get from loathing the rich to accepting an economic royalist like Forbes as a possible president? What happened is new demons arose to deflect attention from the old ones. The Cold War gave us communists, and the Republicans, still largely protecting the interests of their wealthy benefactors, shaped an entire generation’s politics around this Evil Empire and its alleged minions in this country. The old anti-capitalist demonology gradually disappeared, and anyone who sought to revive it was likely to be demonized himself exactly as the robber barons had tarred their foes: as a radical.

Though the Cold War is over, a legacy remains: Talk of class antagonism is still considered seditious. Even as America has become the most class-bound country in the world, with the largest disparity between rich and poor, the custodians of the social order pretend social mobility is as robust today as in Tocqueville’s day, and woe to those who say otherwise.

The rich and the Republicans obviously have a vested interest in this vision--which is why poor Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has had so difficult a time attacking Forbes on any basis other than his inexperience. Rather than engage the issue of class, Republicans have spent the last 25 years successfully concocting a whole new demonology--where the heroes and villains have changed places. These days, government is not a weapon against insatiable plutocrats; it is the enemy. And the poor aren’t victims of plutocracy; they are con artists, looting the Treasury.

Democrats could challenge this demonology, but they are far too timorous to do so. Instead, we get the sorry spectacle of a plutocrat telling people that if they lower his taxes, America will be a better place to live.

A century ago, there would have been outrage. Where is William Jennings Bryan when you need him?