Isn’t that why it was called the gilded age? The point was that it looked superficially great but hid a ton of inequality and problems underneath. It was taken from a Mark Twain quote iirc
It didn’t look superficially great though. There were people and estates that looked and were fabulously wealthy. But in the context of the country just coming out of reconstruction… It’s not really so much that things were terrible and getting worse. It’s that things were terrible. Got better and then stagnated. Instead of the entire country developing economically in equal measures a select few entities were sucking up all of the resources.
To put it another way in the year 2024 our policies are very heavily driven by the Reaganomics policies of the 1980s. Just like the early 1900s were very heavily driven by the end of the civil war reconstruction Policies knock on effects.
