Tag Archives: History

Essays, History, Politics

Politics & History: ‘The Gilded Age Never Ended’

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THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 24, 2025):

When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.

Hierarchies of power are intrinsic to human societies, no doubt, and sometimes the best we can hope for is that those on top become devoted to a higher ideal of education or common welfare or simple beauty.

What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act.

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Book Reviews, Essays, Literature

Book Reviews: ‘Silent Catastrophes – Essays In Austrian Literature’

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LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 21, 2025): Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his flame. Her latest tribute to Sebald is a translation in a single volume of his two collections of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (‘The Description of Misfortune’) and Unheimliche Heimat (‘Strange Homeland’). Written mostly in the 1980s, these essays preceded the semi-fictional works, culminating in Austerlitz (2001), that made Sebald internationally known. They represent something rare in German but common in English: literary criticism, occupying the space between academic study and journalistic discussion. And they say more, and say it more searchingly, profoundly and pithily, than a cartload of academic monographs.

Sebald rapidly became alienated from the old-fashioned Germanistik he encountered at the University of Freiburg in the early 1960s. The professors, he felt, had culpably failed to reflect on the relations between literature and the recent German past. He found intellectual and ethical stimulus in the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and the idiosyncratic, always marginal genius Walter Benjamin. References to Benjamin and a range of psychologists and sociologists pepper these texts, reinforcing Sebald’s own insights.

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Book Reviews, History, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Art Of Walking In London’

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (February 13, 2025): When, in his 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay announced he would instruct his readers on “How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night”, he firmly positioned his account between two different modes of representing the city. Like Ned Ward’s The London Spy, Gay’s poem acknowledges the chaotic energy – and the dirt and odours – the pedestrian is likely to encounter. At the same time, it offers an account of good conduct and urban sociability like that found in Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator, albeit adapted to the busy streets of the commercial city. In so doing, Gay’s generically playful poem – which borrows from epic, georgic, and pastoral to produce a commentary on modern urban life – raises fascinating and still pertinent questions about what it means to be a walker of the city’s streets.

Taking its cue from Trivia, my book The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700-1830 considers what representations of pedestrianism can tell us about how the metropolis was imagined and experienced – by writers and artists, visitors and inhabitants – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the popular imagination, the idea of eighteenth-century London evokes a Hogarthian underworld of dirty streets, daring pickpockets, and chaotic scenes in which new arrivals trace well-worn routes to poverty and prostitution, criminality and death. This image of eighteenth-century London as dark and dangerous has helped to shape a common misconception that only criminals and the poor walked the streets, while Romantic-period poems like William Blake’s “London” and Book VII of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude suggest that the early nineteenth-century was defined by a sense of alienation, as captured in the latter’s pronouncement that “‘The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery’”.

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Essays, History, Law

History & Law: ‘Beyond Logic And Freedom – The Dred Scott Decision’

The Imaginative Conservative (February 13, 2025): With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as the presidential election of 1860 approached.

I. The Historical Background

On March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan took the oath of office as president of the United States, the Supreme court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F.A. San[d]ford.[i]The case was complex and the decision long in coming. In 1834, an army surgeon named John Emerson reported for duty at Rock Island, Illinois.With him was Dred Scott, a slave whom he had recently purchased in St. Louis. Emerson kept Scott with him at Fort Armstrong for two years, despite an Illinois state law forbidding slavery. In 1836, the army posted Dr. Emerson to Fort Snelling, located in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, in what was then Wisconsin territory and which subsequently became the state of Minnesota. As before, he took his slave Dred Scott with him, although the Missouri Compromise explicitly prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’. While stationed at Fort Snelling, Emerson bought a slave woman named Harriet, who eventually married Dred Scott, although the law did not sanction slave marriages. After several years, the army again transferred Emerson, whose slaves returned with him to Missouri.[ii]

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III. Consequences & Significance

Not since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 had the Supreme Court employed the principle of judicial review to overturn congressional legislation. The court’s ruling that neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ban slavery, in effect, renounced both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty. Taney had made it clear to Republicans that even should they win control of the national government they could not execute their pledge to keep the territories free of slavery. Slavery could only be proscribed after a territory became a state. By then it might be too well entrenched to remove. It appeared both to the opponents of slavery and to the advocates of free soil that Taney and a majority of the Supreme Court were parties to a vast conspiracy among slaveholders to take over the government.

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History, Literary Journals, Reviews

Hemingway & Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Paris Journal’

LIT HUB (February 7, 2025): In November 1923, Ford Madox Ford, “like everyone else in Paris,” was sick with flu. Yet he was optimistic. He dashed off letters from a typewriter set on “a table across my bed.” In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, and edited its first fifteen issues. Now, as he wrote his daughter, he was “at my old game of starting reviews” again.

The Transatlantic Review had an almost preternatural birth. Paris “gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks.” Ford had a “vague sense rather than an idea” of what to do about this “immense seething cauldron” of artists, who “bubbled and overflowed,” but lacked a practical vision. His brother Oliver suggested a magazine. (The original name of the magazine was to be the Paris Review. The name was switched because the first serial advertisement was from Compagnie Transatlantique.)

Ford soon promised H.G. Wells that the first issue of his new magazine, to be published in January 1924, would be better than the inaugural edition of The English Review, which boasted work from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Ford hoped that the magazine would “[widen] the field in which the younger writers of the day can find publication.”

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Book Reviews, History

History Book Reviews: “A Century Of Tomorrows” – The Story Of Futurology

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 7, 2025): Invited to compose a message for posterity to be buried in a time capsule at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and opened five thousand years later, Albert Einstein sounded a dour tone: “Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”

A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson

His gloom must have disappointed the sponsor, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which was promoting the fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” alongside other paragons of American industry. The Ford Motor Company featured the road of tomorrow, the Borden Dairy Company had the dairy world of tomorrow, and, most popular of all, General Motors presented Futurama, where visitors lined up for an eighteen-minute ride on a conveyer belt across an imagined landscape said to represent the marvels to come in the year 1960. Life magazine said it was “full of a tanned and vigorous people, who in twenty years have learned to have fun.” As they left, each visitor received a badge that read, “I have seen the future.” They really hadn’t.

Einstein was thinking about the looming war, of course, as was Thomas Mann, whose time capsule message was, “We know now that the idea of the future as a ‘better world’ was a fallacy of the doctrine of progress.” 

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