Who built the Gilded Age?

Lessons from the past on the benefits of immigration

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept.” President Donald Trump, 2025

Lately President Trump seems to have fallen in love with the Gilded Age. Iconic families populated the era with names we all know like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Astor. It was a peak for high living and high society.

The industrial revolution propelled the arrival of the age. Railroads and factories. Steel and coal. The birth of modern finance and the rise of great cities like New York and Chicago. Those who rose to wealth and fame sat atop these industries and cities.

The Gilded Age dated from just after the Civil War to the early 20^th century. Naming the period came about in a 1920s reference to a book, A Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day by Mark Twain and his Connecticut neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. The book was written on a bit of a lark after their wives challenged them to write a great novel together. The book was a satire on social conditions and chasing wealth which Twain and Dudley saw as faults of their day in the early 1870s. In Twain’s portion of the book, the impoverished Hawkins family chases wealth by trying to swindle people into purchasing 75,000 acres of land in Tennessee. The Hawkins family members chased the American dream, “To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; There is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.” However, it didn’t pan out. The Hawkins family remains poor and never realize their goal.

This was the underside of the Gilded Age. The name suggests an era where everything shimmered but in reality, the sheen of the industrial titans was simply a veneer covering up an ugly time for most. Although a few rose to the top and accumulated vast wealth, most lived day to day, barely scraping by. It was a time of poverty and disease. In New York City masses of the population lived in dilapidated tenements without sanitation and one to two percent of the population died each year from various infectious diseases like cholera, smallpox, and tuberculosis.

It was also a time of widespread political corruption. Behemoth railroad companies bribed politicians to acquire government granted lands to build more track and more wealth. Fraudulent invoices were submitted for multiples of the true cost of building government projects. The politicians didn’t care as long as they got a cut. Workers lacked rights to fair wages and safe working conditions. Unions were scarce. If workers dared to try to organize, their, and their family’s, physical safety were at risk. Strikes were not tolerated. They were broken up by violence and the work was done by scab employees. Worker safety was barely a thought in this pre-OSHA era. Mining towns were run by the firm. Schools, churches, and stores were all owned and run by the mining company. Many towns were truly one firm towns that took care of you or abused you at their whim from cradle to grave.

As I wrote two weeks ago, it was a time of the tariffs of which President Trump is so fond. He seems to admire the era both for the wealth and cunning of the robber barons and equally for their tariffs. However, tariffs cost workers and the regular person more than they do the wealthy. That’s why the progressive movement ushered in the income tax to make sure that the robber barons and other affluent people paid their fair share. With only a bit of cynicism, one can see why it is an era that President Trump would idolize. Those of his ilk did well, but they arrived at their wealth through questionable practices and the exploitation of workers who had little protection from corrupt governments and employers.

However, one thing stands out from that age that President Trump would hate. It was the greatest generation of immigration our shores have ever seen. From 1870 to 1900 the US population nearly doubled. It rose by 37 million people from 39 million to 76 million. Of this increase, 12 million were immigrants newly arrived to the country from foreign lands. Most historians ascribe to the idea that our great economic expansion during this period owes much to these immigrants. They earned low wages and populated jobs in unsafe conditions in factories and farms across the land. These immigrants labored to build cities, canals, and railroads that propelled our growth. It was their labor that created the burgeoning industrial and financial might of the US.

Much of the wealth of the Gilded Class was created by the labor of these immigrants. Three economists (Sandra Sequeira, Nathan Nunn, and Nancy Qian) estimated the effect of immigration on the economic performance of counties across the country. Counties that had at least the median influx of immigrants during the period from 1850-1920 had more than a 50 percent greater level of manufacturing output per capita and farms had a 39 to 58 percent greater value by 1930 relative to counties with scant numbers of immigrants. Further, these effects carry forward to the present day. As of 2000, these same areas that held the greatest number of immigrants in the late 19^th and early 20^th century have 20 percent higher income and a poverty rate that is three percentage points lower.

Immigration propelled the rise of the United States to a global economic power. The tired, the poor, and the huddled masses, brought labor that created great wealth and the US couldn’t have risen to such economic heights without the dangerous and arduous labor they provided. Folks who want to make America great again should remember this lesson. Our economic success can’t happen without the immigrants of yesteryear and those of today.