HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’ is Capitalist Trash
Image; NPR
The Gilded Age is about several upper-class families in Manhattan. We have the ingenue Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), who has just moved in with her aunts from Pennsylvania after losing everything in the wake of her father’s death; Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a young, ambitious Black woman trying to build her own way in the world of writing, and lastly, the up-and-coming Russell family who is New Money that has just moved to an upscale Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue. What follows is a dramatic story of three “outsiders” trying to succeed in a world of High Society.
I have a love-hate relationship with the rich. I love the pretty dresses they wear and the brilliant buildings they live in (something this show has in spades), but I absolutely hate the rich as a concept. I am in the camp that it's unethical for one person to have so much wealth when so many others have too little.
I was thrilled to watch HBO’s The Gilded Age because it not only has two actresses I enjoy (I am a massive Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski stan), but it provides the perfect springboard to talk about the wealth inequality in our society. We currently exist in a second, worse, more prolonged Gilded Age that has utterly warped our society. Any critique of men such as Andrew Carnegie or J.P. Morgan directly applies to the Robber Barons of today.
Unfortunately, The Gilded Age falls more in line with Downton Abbey than The Great Gatsby (something that is sadly unsurprising given Julian Fellowes’ involvement). It is a celebration of the wealthy that provides very little of the substance I was hoping for with an HBO production. A show that ends up being some of the worst capitalist propaganda out there.
The Poor Are A Bit Too Upitty
While wealth is undoubtedly a focus of the show, class is not (note by class, we are referring to describing the stratification between those who own the means of production and those who don't). We are not given many opportunities in the show to explore the more toxic elements wealth has on the working class and society-at-large. We occasionally get subplots about the staff of the Brook and Russell families, but these stories are primarily tagged-on to the larger dramas of the rich. The staff focus on romantic love, toxic exes, and revenge, not unionization, exploitation, or wage theft.
Those who do try to advance or keep their standing are often framed in a negative light. Bertha Russell’s lady’s maid Turner (Kelley Curran), who tries to move up in the world by seducing George Russell, is portrayed as an antagonist. She is not only painfully unsuccessful but ends up teaming up with Oscar van Rhijn (a queer man struggling to maintain his class standing) to leak him information about the Russell household.
Even lawyer Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) — a love interest to Marian Brook in the first season — is portrayed partially as overly ambitious. An impression that is not necessarily wrong. Though he and Marian profess a deep love for one another, the two agree that social standing is ultimately more important and go their separate ways.
Then you have the “working-class” character Peggy Scott, laboring in the Brook household as matriarch Agnes van Rhijn’s (Christine Baranski) secretary. Peggy wants to be a writer and tries to satisfy the traditional “working your way up” narrative of holding down a job while pursuing your dreams on the side — a hustle, if you will. As Peggy excitedly says to Marian, “For a New Yorker, anything is possible.”
Yet Peggy comes from a well-to-do Black family. She may face discrimination from the racism of the 1880s, but she's not a working-class figure — that’s simply a fakeout to subvert the audience's racist expectations that Peggy would automatically be poor just because she’s Black. She received a good education, which she then utilizes as Agnes' secretary. Peggy is choosing to voluntarily be working-class because of the emotional abuse of her father, who does not support her writing career. While I love that we are seeing this rarely depicted facet of history, I think as a narrative device, it allows the show to have the aesthetic of a working-class, “bootstrapping” lead without actually having one.
In a better show, they might be trying to point out that “working your way up” is mostly a fantasy only available to those with means, but we are never given a valid counterpoint to emphasize this fact. With the exception of maybe the lawyer character Tom Raikes, many of the real working-class people in the first season are portrayed as either complacent with their position in life or coded as outright antagonists.
Rich People Don’t Care About Racism
Overall the show does a lot of sidestepping, especially with Peggy’s character. Although racism does exist on the show, it mainly comes from working-class characters like the staff or disgraced rich people such as Anne Morris. It’s mainly confining racism to people who are either “bad” or ignorant (see the TROT trope to understand why this is frustrating).
The heads of the Russell and Brook households don’t seem to have a problem with racism. George Russell is shown to be tolerant, even making reference to a Jewish Banking firm. Agnes is likewise not bigoted. “It doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Marian says of Agnes' indifference to Peggy being a Black woman in her employment. Peggy is accepted as Agnes' secretary after obtaining a mere reference check from her school, which is oddly progressive given how concerned she is about standing on the show.
Throughout the first season, Agnes makes a massive deal about hating New Money. She does not let Marian participate in functions with the Russells because it would cause a scandal, but you know what else would cause a scandal: having a Black Secretary in 1882.
It cannot be overemphasized how “not over it” the elite of New York City were with not just racism, but slavery itself. While New York’s gradual emancipation law would have freed most enslaved people on July 4, 1827 (55 years before the show takes place), enslaved people born after 1817 were not freed from bondage until they became 21. This fact means that, from a timeline perspective, the wealthy people on this show potentially grew up with legally enslaved people serving them.
Although New York was an abolitionist stronghold, that feeling was not always felt in New York City. The city’s ports, banks, and other aspects of its economy had been wedded to slavery for decades. A violent riot occurred in 1863 in protest of the draft, where according to writers Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis in The Washington Post: “…immigrant artisans…attacked draft offices, Republican newspapers, and black people, killing random African Americans in the streets and even burning down the colored orphanage.” The majority of city voters did not vote for Abraham Lincoln in either the election of 1860 or 1864 (less than twenty years before the show took place).
How do you think the conservative Old Money of our show would have felt about those elections, I wonder?
Peggy being the personal secretary of Agnes would be a significant plot point, not just something she does out of obligation. High Society would judge the Brook family for it, but the show is not interested in how the rich specifically upheld racism during this period.
We know that racism exists as we do see and hear Peggy experiencing it, but our main white leads are not placed in the position of having to perpetuate these systems in front of the viewer. Sure, Marian enacts a microaggression towards Peggy by assuming her family is poor. Peggy is also denied entry places, but those are mainly individual actions. These rich people would have actively upheld institutions that harm people of color, and the show doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of how their wealth was built on racism. Our wealthy heroes are the trailblazers scoffing at these antiquated systems, not the elite keeping everyone else out (when, in reality, that's what they did).
Ultimately, the central tension is not about classism or racism but between New Money and Old Money. As Agnes says to Marian in the first episode: “…you need to know we only receive the old people in this house, not the new. Never the new….The old have been in charge since before the revolution. They ruled justly until the new people invaded….”
Hmmm, I wonder what policies progressive icon Agnes van Rhijn seems to be favoring here when she claims the “old guard ruled more justly?”
The show doesn’t say, but again, many of those “just” Old People were enslavers, so there’s kind of only one direction to go here realistically. But acknowledging that would mean making Agnes and most of High Society on this show the villains, and we can’t have that. It’s the discrimination of New Money that the show focuses on instead because while that provides tension, it’s not as terrible as recognizing America as it honestly was.
“The Wealthy Are The Future”
As a consequence of this bias against Old Money, the Russells are actively discriminated against from participating in High Society. They aren’t invited to special functions, and no one goes to their events (cue sad violin music). The ever-strong Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) breaks down in tears at one point because the Old People are just so mean to her.
This discrimination did (and still does) happen, but class interests tended to unite these divides. The late 1800s and early 1900s were packed with intense, often violent disputes between monied capitalists and the workers they abused, and you’d hardly see capitalists on the picket line. New York City was no stranger to this tension. Stikes had periodically popped up in the city for decades (see the Tompkins Square Riot, the Cigar makers’ strike of 1877, and later the Newsboys’ strike of 1899). The first Labor Day parade was held in NYC in 1882 (the year this show took place), and it would go on to be seen as an important milestone in the larger labor movement.
Men like Mr. Russell (loosely based on an amalgamation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Kissam Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould) were not on the side of these workers. Jay Gould was cruel and obtained a massive fortune partially through stock manipulation. He paid many of his workers poverty wages and brutally suppressed labor organizing.
Infamously, during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 (four years after this show started), he hired strikebreakers and Pinkerton men to suppress organizing. He then used his influence in the media, so the public focused on the violence of the organizers and not the men Gould had hired to enact violence on said strikers. While George Russell has referenced Pinkerton on the show, we have yet to see the reality of that on screen, which, to be clear, would involve him overseeing brutal violence.
Likewise, William Kissam Vanderbilt received his fortune from a family that relied on labor exploitation. His grandfather Cornelius, the man who initially “built” the family fortune, was a ruthless businessman who drew upon monopolistic practices. William’s father, Henry Vanderbilt, would continue the tradition, infamously calling on workers to accept lower wages in the middle of a recession (see the Railroad Strike of 1877). William was more interested in philanthropy than business, but he was by no means stirring for radical change.
While William’s wife Alva Belmont (the woman Bertha Russell is based on) did have a history of supporting union labor, and was a financier of some of the most militant wings of the suffragette movement in the United States, that’s not the reality we see on the show. Bertha pushes to support the Red Cross and to break into High Society. She is not looking to expand the burgeoning US labor movement. By all means, I would love to see these influences of Alva Belmont reflected on the show with Bertha Russell. Please make that a reality in season two!
Yet these historical examples do not make it to the screen. The closest “bad thing” that George Russell’s company causes is a train crash, which he feels awful for and is not morally responsible for causing. It's a tragic “accident” that he has prepared for by donating generously to the Red Cross. “Ask [Miss Barton] to get to Millbourne, Pennsylvania, if she can,” George Russell asks his wife, hoping to use the aid organization to assist in the relief effort.
This plotline frustratingly develops so that George is “unfairly” taken to court for the accident (though he ultimately is acquitted). One of his employees used subpar supplies for the train that crashed and then pocketed the profits. While the real Vanderbilts exploited workers, the show would have us believe that George couldn’t possibly have facilitated this accident. “Remember, I’m a rich man, which means I'm a villain.” George laments to his wife, suggesting that this “persecution” is ridiculous, and based on the conclusion of this arc, his resentments seem valid. In the logic of this show, he was being falsely accused and scapegoated for his wealth.
If this show were more self-aware, I’d say that they were doing some Succession-style (2018 — present) commentary on the delusional egos of the rich, but we are never given a dissenting voice to make that case. We aren't supposed to hate these people for the awful things they would have done to the poor to maintain their fortunes — i.e. wage theft, exploitation, union-busting, etc. We are supposed to pity their exclusion from High Society and admire their tenacity. These are people who get things done.
Marian, our ingenue POV character, spends a lot of time belittling the conservatism of her aunt Agnes. She pushes the old elite, and consequently the viewer, to see this discrimination of New Money as ridiculous (how groundbreaking). In episode three of season one, there is a scene where they are discussing the funding of an Opera House, and Marian, in disbelief, asks why they are excluding New Money. “But what is the point of shutting out these men and their families when they could probably build an opera house that’s 20 times better than the one we have now?”
The message is clear: the ascendancy of people like the Russells in society is an inevitable good. We are given no dissenting voice other than unlikable rich men and women incapable of change to counter this. “We must go where history takes us,” Bertha Russell tells a fellow socialite. She is referring to herself and the other New Money as that change. A crowd of onlookers admires a newly lit New York Times building in the background. The show here seems to be making a transparent metaphor between the technological development of electricity and wealth.
The New People are the future, the shows suggest repeatedly, and they appear to be a better one. After all, they don't care about someone's race, religion, or ethnicity, merely the building of wealth. If only this backward Old Money would get out of the way, we would have some real change.
A Rich Conclusion
In the end, we are not criticizing the rich as a class as much as a particular type of rich. The stodgy old money that creates a subculture based on exclusion are out, and the meritocratic rich such as the Russells and Peggy Scott, are in.
This perspective relies on a meritocratic myth about how capitalism, for all its faults, really does let those who work hard enough get to the top. George Russell was able to earn his wealth. Bertha was able to break into High Society. Peggy found herself working for a newspaper that respected her talent. Anyone can make it to the top. “Maybe we will be [invited] one day,” a servant says of possibly getting an invite to Russell’s party in the hazy future. “After all, this is America.”
Yet this fantasy is and has never been true. Those with money often get it by taking advantage of deep inequities. Something that was true with Vanderbilt in the 1800s and is true of men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. The good “philanthropy” they end up doing with that money often serves to justify their own position in the hierarchy and, in some cases, can solidify or even worsen existing inequities (see Winners Take All).
We don't need tone-deaf narratives reveling in the horrors of the Gilded Age and portraying them as cute fun. We need to see works that portray the rich of this time through the lens of the horrifying, regressive things they did to the poor. Or otherwise, we are just getting capitalist fan fiction that is all aesthetic and no substance.