The Gilded Age Never Ended (2025)

Today’s plutocrat, on the other hand, sees the cultural élite as part of the burdensome past. One prophetic peculiarity of Donald Trump’s rise in New York was his scanting of any philanthropic role—those who did fill that role, as he felt acutely, had rejected him. Almost uniquely among New York real-estate tycoons, he never served on the board of any important cultural institution—at least until he staged a coup at the Kennedy Center. There will be no Trump museums, except those devoted to his glory.

This turn away from patronage has been gradual, evolutionary, and partial. David Geffen could still play the classic plutocratic part a decade ago, using a fortune that he’d made in entertainment to sustain the permanence of art, while Bezos clearly was on his way to the older role—the purchase of the Washington Post was a classic plutocratic gesture, the billionaire saving an American institution—when the new reality caught up with him. Where the plutocrats of the first Gilded Age built the New York we love, our own plutocratic class has scarcely built a monument or public building of beauty.

Everyone likes anarchists. When Charlie Chaplin called the Marx Brothers “anarchists,” it was taken as high praise. Insert an anarchist philosopher into a play and he will walk away with the action. Indeed, in Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia,” the anarchist Bakunin, played by Ethan Hawke on Broadway, always upstaged the actual hero of the play, the liberal Herzen. Bakunin’s character was not merely more leonine; he was more lovable. The anarchist Emma Goldman’s autobiography remains read nearly a century after its first appearance and is one of the golden books of its time—in its novelistic detailing and historical sweep, it’s a superior “Reds.” Meanwhile, the memoirs of the humbler Fabian politicians of the day are left to the dry dust of secondhand bookstores. Anarchists were fierce but somehow funny. In the silent-movie era, they were still so much a part of the fabric of American life, or at least of its mythology, that a Billy West comedy centered on the pitching back and forth of anarchist bombs, those bowling balls with lit fuses, and Buster Keaton innocently turned the same kind of bomb into a cigarette lighter in his film “Cops.”

This despite the reality that what the Gilded Age anarchists mostly did was kill people, or try to, and mostly pointlessly. The Haymarket anarchists in Chicago in the eighteen-nineties may not all have been directly responsible for the bombs that killed seven policemen on a fateful day, but at least one of them had certainly built the bombs. Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley, in Buffalo, was inspired in part by Emma Goldman, who later wrote in his defense. And Goldman herself—under the crucial influence of the anarchist philosopher Johann Most, who impressed on her the anarchist ideal of “propaganda of the deed”—worked hard on a plan to kill Frick, sending her lover, Alexander Berkman, off to Pittsburgh with a revolver that he didn’t know how to use. Neither Goldman nor Berkman knew anyone in the labor unions that were striking against Frick, nor ever asked them if his assassination would be helpful to their cause. (It wasn’t; it only helped turn popular opinion against the unions.) But few remember the organizers who in the same period helped build the American union movement, while Emma Goldman’s name still rings.

Why is this so? Henry James, once again, explored the allure of anarchy in what may be his finest Gilded Age novel, “The Princess Casamassima”—this one a major book by a great author with a hard-to-remember title. Published in 1886, it tells the story of a young man, improbably named Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes entangled in an almost love affair with a radical-chic aristocrat, the princess of the title. It’s notable that the names of the characters in this book about violence and poverty are pure, high James: Hyacinth Robinson, Paul Muniment, Christina Light (the princess), Lady Aurora Langrish—these are meant to key us into the fact that this is thoroughly stylized fiction, less a realist novel than an allegory of anarchism and its temptations.

Hyacinth has a dark background (his mother has murdered his father and is now in prison), and he has become involved with an anarchist philosopher named Hoffendahl, who has entrusted him with a nebulous plan to assassinate someone important, though Hyacinth isn’t sure who. The princess is a philanthropist who has taken a subversive turn, and whose purpose is to elevate Hyacinth, whom she flirts with without ever consummating the affair. James is quite tough-minded about the limits of radical chic. To the princess, “it’s an amusement, like any other,” Hyacinth’s anarchist minder, Paul Muniment, says dismissively, and we are meant to think he’s right.

Though the novel is European rather than American in setting, what is remarkable and universal is the connection drawn between the aestheticism of Hyacinth’s nature and the magnetism that anarchism holds for him. Much of the novel is taken up by Hyacinth waiting to learn what his mission is while discussing with the princess the necessity of some mission. Hyacinth is drawn to the propaganda of the deed not for any specific purpose but because it is the fulfillment of the romantic ideal. With Marxism tainted by its aggressive materialism, and mere democratic socialism so mere, anarchism could be imagined as a series of defiant spiritual acts. This is both the contradiction and the appeal of Goldman’s memoirs. Famous for her love of dancing and celebration and her rejection of the puritanical side of the Marxist inheritance, she saw no contradiction between that sensuality and random acts of violence directed against the plutocrats. They were both steps in the same dance.

Hyacinth has a harder time reconciling his political convictions with his increasing love of beautiful objects, a struggle that culminates in a trip to Venice in which he writes to the princess and bemoans, in a voice improbably like James’s own, the contradiction between the beauty he loves and the social creed to which he is committed: “There are things I shall be too sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I tell you le fond de ma pensée, as you used to say?—I feel myself capable of fighting for them.” He means “the monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilization as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which all the same the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable.”

At one level, the novel is a simple saga of a hero’s choice: pursuing beauty with the princess in a Venice of the mind or advancing democracy with the anarchist Muniment through the murder of a stranger. As Muniment instructs him, the assassination will be a purely theatrical action: it will be helpful to the democrats that “the classes that keep them down shall be admonished from time to time that they have a very definite and very determined intention of doing so.” The anarchist act is meant as an ornamental admonishment, not as an actual accomplishment.

Yet as the novel moves along, and the target chosen for Hyacinth by his anarchist superiors—an unnamed duke—hovers into view, the tangle of motives becomes subtler. We see that the appeal of the anarchists is essentially churchlike, akin to the appeal of Catholicism in parallel nineteenth-century novels and lives, rooted in the seductiveness of mystery and of obedience. “I was hanging about outside on the steps of the temple, among the loafers and the gossips, but now I have been in the innermost sanctuary,” Hyacinth says of his assignment, and the language is ironic only because it italicizes the original religious spirit so well: “I have seen the holy of holies.” Just as the Catholic Church would hold a perverse appeal to the decadents of the period, eventually drawing in figures as seemingly resistant as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, anarchism held out a similar enchantment at the other end of the political spectrum. Catholicism offers ritual without the tedium of rationality; anarchism offers revolutionary action against inequality without the taint of materialism, the prospect of personal gain. Anarchist violence is an unworldly action, a protest against fallen existence itself on behalf of the possibility of a beautiful life, rather than an act of practical and therefore mundane consequence. Indeed, the future that Hyacinth thinks will be secured by the anarchist assassinations is comically innocent: a “vision of societies where, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked of art, literature and history.”

This double nature, both appealing in its sweetness of soul and alarming in its lack of realism about what a program of public murder can achieve, is central to the first Gilded Age’s anarchist philosophy. Prince Kropotkin’s famous condensation of anarchist beliefs, “The Conquest of Bread,” is notable today for its techno-optimism. The world has been conquered, agriculture is amazing, we can do anything now: “The wild plants, which yielded nought but acrid berries, or uneatable roots, have been transformed into succulent vegetables or trees covered with delicious fruits. Thousands of highways and railroads furrow the earth and pierce the mountains.” (In the same spirit, the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, in the first decade of the twentieth century, “Combustion engines and rubber tires are divine!”) Yet this complacent optimism sat side by side with an apocalyptic appetite for random assassination, the propaganda of the deed. Anarchists offered a perpetually moving Möbius strip, encouraging violent acts and dreaming of abundant dinners, shooting emperors in the back while dancing in their hallways.