If God seems missing in action [as a social critic today, since no clergy rail against excess private wealth as they did a century ago], so too a once vigorous and diverse culture of political opposition barely survives as an etiolated remnant. However brazen, celebrants in Dunlop's "Gilded City" could never be entirely oblivious to the ringing denunciations reverberating from the prairies of the rural Populist insurgency, from the mordant militias of urban anarchists and socialists, from the outraged petty bourgeoisie in towns and small industrial cities all across the country, scandalized as much by the moral turpitude as by the predatory economic behavior of gilded age monopolists and their political confederates. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the 1890s, the country was bitterly divided down the middle over its political response to the massing of private economic power. Utopian fantasies like Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" and Ignatius Donnelly's dystopian horror, "Caesar's Column," or weighty exposés like William Demarest Lloyd's "Wealth Against Commonwealth" and Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" were not only bestsellers but national events, precisely because they punctured the illusions of the gilded caste. Howells was joined by dozens of lesser novelists in excoriating the moral consequences of gilded avarice. What is there today to compare in scope to this sort of culture of political resistance? To ask the question is to answer it. And its absence breeds a certain reckless disregard.
[Full text: http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-27571,00.html]
Carl
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