Chris Cutrone
Audio recording available at: https://archive.org/details/gilded-age-7-17-20
The Legacy of the American Revolution 2020 summer lecture series by the Platypus Affiliated Society
6.) Chris Cutrone on the Gilded Age and Second Industrial Revolution
The retrospective view from the present allows for regarding the 20th century as the outcome of the Gilded Age ā of the Second Industrial Revolution. We still live in the after-effects of the crisis that conditioned the 20th century. The inability to overcome the discontents of capital from a century ago still swamps us today. In the late 19th century U.S., the Second Industrial Revolution was governed by the Republican Party, which was the combined party of progressive liberalism and big capital. Progressivism emerged as a reform effort from within the Republican Party against manifest problems of Gilded Age capitalism in the 1890sā1900s ā most dramatically under President Theodore Roosevelt and his run for reelection as a Progressive in 1912. In America and Europe, discontents with the Gilded Age capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution manifested in the Socialist Parties of the Second International. Liberal capitalism was opposed by a mass industrial workers politics ā for instance the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs.
Lecture based on Cutrone’s essay “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” available online at:
<https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>