"The hall was crowded with the fashion of the town--the concert was one of those fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas, which have no meaning without the setting. There is the comic basso on such familiar terms with the audience; the attitudinizing tenor; the soprano who warbles and trills and fetches her breath, and ends with a noble scream that brings down a tempest of applause. Just as the soprano was in the midst of that touching ballad, 'Comin' Thro' the Rye' (the soprano always sings [it] on an encore), there was a cry of Fire!"
In 1873, when Mark Twain published The Gilded Age--his renowned roman clef of modern social climbing, cynical financial speculation, and governmental graft--the grist for his storytelling was an era of entrancing new technologies and the corresponding hunger to control their commercial potential. As ever, the mechanisms of big business seemed a bottomless fountain of bounty, and much of post-Civil War America raced to drink deeply of its messy cascades.
Part of that cash-drenched sweepstakes involved malleable politicians eager to flex the levers of government in the service of those who funneled them a steady supply of what's known in this century as "soft money"--unrestricted donations from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals under the frighteningly vague banner of political fund raising. While much of the action in Twain's admonitory novel takes place in the U.S. capital ("It's democratic, Washington is," observes a senator in the text, "money or beauty will open any door"), the book examines an entire culture--whether quaintly rural or self-consciously cosmopolitan--as it collectively denies its limitations.
The subtitle of Twain's novel--written with Hartford Courant associate editor Charles Dudley Warner--is A Tale of To-Day. After rereading it during the sordid conjunction of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' justice-poor trial, the dissolution via Wall Street of the dotcom investment craze, bipartisan hearings over sleazy pardons by recent Democratic and Republican presidents, and continuing contests on Capitol Hill to abscond with the much-coveted intellectual property of others, the book still seems awfully topical.
The Gilded Age (which named for posterity the debauched period it depicted) blended Twain's practiced penchant for satiric observation with his journalist-collaborator's inquiring perspective on the political and business scandals of the time--including the corruption that infested the second presidential administration of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the Credit Mobilier scheme to secure illicit government funding for the Union Pacific Railroad, and the trial of Tammany Hall leader William "Boss" Tweed, who defrauded New York of millions of dollars through crooked contracts and political bribery.
The point of studying history is to heed its lessons while eschewing its pitfalls, since no amount of wrongs make a right. Crime is by definition unjust, senseless, or disgraceful. Yet it's popular these days among many status-quo-seduced members of the Fourth Estate to find often specious precedents for contemporary evils in order to dismiss them. (The oft-cited ancient Anglo-Celtic heritage of so-called "murder ballads" is an example, those raising it conveniently ignoring that most such songs were cautionary moral fables seldom authored by felons in a position to profit from their dissemination.)
Just as prevalent in our current culture is the mercenary, anti-historical practice of splicing something noble and selfless from the past onto something mundane and grasping in the present, such as the unspeakably crass "exploitation" (to use NAACP chairman Julian Bond's withering word) of doctored footage from Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic 1963 "I Have a Dream" civil-rights speech during the March on Washington, D.C., in a new TV/print ad for Alcatel Americas, a branch of a French firm that deals in voice and data networks. Bearing in mind that King died for the cause articulated in that speech, one assumes we'll soon see the press photos taken of Memphis' Motel Lorraine balcony in the aftermath of King's 1968 assassination being used in a TV spot for some similarly banal product or service. In all the above instances, the fact that these strategies can make a great deal of money becomes the trite alibi for such aggressively graceless insensitivity.
The rise in the 1840s of the private corporation--which was derived from the chartered companies of early colonial America but adjusted in the Gilded Age to meet new financial needs like the development of railroads--was both helpful to citizens and hazardous. Investors could buy pieces of a project--i.e., shares that yielded proportionate dividends from profits and similar voting power--while enabling the corporation to acquire cash to a degree not otherwise readily attainable. In an overheated economy, corporate stock-trading assumed the temper of a lottery, with those who had large blocks of stock and inside knowledge of the corporation in a position to cue and promote the canny shifting of shares in advance of market fluctuations.
As J.C. Furnas wrote in The Americans: A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914 (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1969) regarding the notorious turn-of-the-century manipulation of the emergent railroad industry, "Promoters so diligently imitated their cynical device of stock watering--a term said to derive from the cattle drover's trick of causing steers to drink heavily just before the purchaser weighed them--that our railroad economy still shows the ill effects." Such tactics were antique equivalents of dotcom stunts like declaring "pro forma net income"--i.e., fictitious characterizations of one's "core business" or other euphemisms for whatever's functioning in a dysfunctional corporation--by excluding non-cash charges like depreciation and line expenses like payroll taxes. Earnings figures are thus as bloated as a steer before he drains his bladder.
As with manipulators of 19th-century railroad stock, many new fortunes have been made by insiders at Nasdaq companies who unloaded their shares between late September 1999 and the last days of 2000. This is the callous, high-handed sort of elite Twain attacked in The Gilded Age, who likewise took profits from companies never positioned (or in some cases not even intended) to succeed.
Twain published The Gilded Age via subscription publishing, a 19th-century forerunner of on-demand biblio-production whereby technological strides in papermaking, printing, and binding made cheap editions possible of what had been a luxury item. A flashy book sample was hawked to homebodies outside of major cities, then printed and mailed based on orders. Subscription publishing provided door-to-door sales jobs for decommissioned Civil War soldiers or their widowed wives and helped transform the selling and cultural penetration of books; but despite decades of predictions, it never replaced regular book retailers.
Twain got rich from such publishing methods but was ruined financially shortly after publishing Gen. Grant's two-volume memoir by subscription. After hot initial sales, Twain's operating costs mounted, and his fashion-conscious subscription audience eventually got restless and bolted, exiting another tarnished dream.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
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By Timothy White ce da Newman