The Coronavirus

[David Horn]

(05-03-2020, 09:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 1950s had quite a few similarities to the gilded age, as S&H defined it (and I agree with their dates). The Age of Hate mirrored McCarthyism, and the end of Reconstruction matched the end of reform under Eisenhower. Progress toward human rights and equality pretty much ended in both eras, and as the name suggests, the Gilded Age matched the materialism of the "progress is our most important product" era of the 1950s and early 60s. Much building and industrial growth occurred in both eras. Prosperity grew in the Gilded Age, as in the American Decade, but the bourgeois mentality predominated over the slowly-growing labor activism and socialist thought, much as civil rights controversy and economic inequality was beginning to stir activism in the 1950s, but not getting too far yet.

I'll disagree with this. What made the Gilded Age what it was centered on the inequality of hyper wealth and abject poverty, with more in the latter class as time went on. To the contrary, the 1950s were the labor renaissance. Inequality dropped as the economy soared, because labor unions were strong and the government had their back -- more or less. Then, stagflation happened, and the Gilded cycle started again .. but not before!