The Last Time America Made Robber Barons

Tesla just approved a pay package that could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. In the same country, 36 million Americans live in poverty. Forty-eight million live in households that run out of food. Seven million kids don't always know where their next meal is coming from. 770,000 people are homeless. Millions more are one medical bill, one layoff, or one car repair away from financial collapse.

The real scandal isn't the numbers. It's that we've stopped blinking at them. One man with more money than entire countries. Millions of people who can't afford rent. And somewhere along the way, we got used to it.

Meanwhile, the people making decisions in Washington are cutting food assistance. Cutting healthcare programs. Cutting the rules that keep big companies in check. Not by accident. On purpose.

We've been exactly here before.

The Last Time

The late 1800s look a lot like right now, if you're willing to look directly at them.

New technology — the telegraph, then the railroad — changed the economy faster than any law could catch up. A handful of men built fortunes bigger than anything the country had ever seen. Workers moved from farms into cities, leaving behind land they could feed themselves on. Now they depended fully on wages. There was no safety net. Almost no rules. No floor.

The 1900 Census counted 1.75 million children ages 10 to 15 working for pay. Kids younger than seven worked 12-hour shifts in fabric mills for 48 cents a day. Mining killed three workers out of every thousand each year. Factory floors were full of exposed machinery, pressure boilers, and toxic gas — with no safety rules of any kind.

Andrew Carnegie built the most powerful steel company in the world. He did it by buying out his competitors, locking up the businesses that supplied him, and using inside information from his railroad friends — the kind of thing that would be insider trading today. By 1910, the richest 1% of Americans owned roughly 45% of everything.

In 1892, Carnegie's workers at the Homestead steel plant in Pennsylvania asked to renegotiate their contract. His manager Henry Frick locked out 3,800 of them and hired 300 Pinkerton agents — private armed guards — to break the strike. The Pinkertons lost a 12-hour gun battle to the workers. So Frick called in the Pennsylvania National Guard. 8,500 troops. Gatling guns. The whole town placed under martial law. The union collapsed five months later. Strike leaders were charged with murder. None were convicted. The Pinkertons and the soldiers faced no charges.

Meanwhile, Congress was either too slow to act or actively bought off. Presidential elections were decided by razor-thin margins, with historic turnout, intense partisanship, and political violence. There was an impeachment. Two presidents lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College anyway.

Sound familiar?

What's the Same — and What's Harder

A lot of what made the Gilded Age what it was is back.

Technology is outrunning regulation again. AI and social media this time, instead of telegraphs and railroads. The people who built these technologies have spent enormous amounts of money to keep the rules at bay while they consolidate their lead.

The political money is the same playbook, just with bigger numbers. The fossil fuel industry alone spent $450 million on the 2024 election cycle. About 88% of that went to Republican lawmakers. Another $11.8 million landed in Trump's inauguration fund after the votes were counted.

The wealth concentration is back, too. The top 0.01% of Americans — roughly 18,000 families — now owns 10% of all U.S. wealth. In the late 1970s, that group owned 2%. Their share has grown by five times in forty years.

And the political chaos rhymes uncomfortably. Razor-thin elections. Historic turnout. Political violence. Impeachments. Presidents who lose the popular vote and win anyway. Congress flipping between parties without solving anything. People sorting themselves into two tribes that hate each other more than they agree on anything. It's a near-perfect match.

But some things are genuinely harder now.

Union membership has fallen from over 30% of all workers in the 1950s to under 10% today. That's the biggest tool workers had to push back against bad treatment, and it's mostly gone.

A century of cheap goods and constant entertainment has changed us, too. People in the 1870s and 1880s had just been forced off the land into factories in a single generation. They remembered what self-sufficiency felt like. The change was sudden and undeniable. Today, the loss is slower. It comes through gig work, layoffs, automation, and rising rent. It's easier to ignore, because it's easier to absorb one bad month at a time.

And then there's a third difference. The one most people aren't talking about. The one that makes this era harder to see and harder to fight than the original.

The Extraction Has Gone Underground

Carnegie was brutal. But he was building.

His workers were exploited. Their unions were crushed. Their safety was ignored. But you could point to the factory. You could name the boss. You could walk to the front gate, stop the work, and make the cost of that exploitation visible. The Homestead workers did exactly that — and lost, but not before making the fight impossible to ignore.

Today's extraction is harder to point to.

In recent years, the S&P 500 — the 500 largest public companies in America — has been spending more money buying back its own stock than the entire U.S. business sector spends on research and development. In 2024 alone, those buybacks hit $943 billion. That's not building anything. That's not hiring anyone. That's not inventing a single new product. It's the largest companies in America using their profits to make their own stock price go up.

It gets worse from there.

Private equity firms buy profitable businesses, load them with debt to pay themselves back, cut workers and corners to hit short-term numbers, and walk away — often leaving the company itself weaker, sometimes bankrupt. Toys "R" Us, Sears, Red Lobster, hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes. The pattern is the same.

Big tech buys differently, but the result is similar. When Google or Facebook acquires a startup, venture capital investment in that product space drops by more than 40% in the next three years, according to research from the University of Chicago. Investors stop funding competitors because they know the giant in the room will eventually buy or copy whoever shows up. The acquisition isn't really a growth strategy. It's a way to kill what might have grown up to compete.

The results are showing up everywhere. New business formation in America has dropped by a third since the early 1980s. The four biggest beef packing companies controlled 25% of the U.S. market in 1977. Today they control 85%. Across the economy, roughly 70% of industries are more concentrated than they were in the late 1990s.

The damage is real. It shows up in stagnant wages. In small towns where the only employer just got bought and gutted. In quiet bankruptcies after a private equity firm finishes squeezing what it bought. But there's no Homestead plant to point to. The mechanism is financial, scattered, and invisible to the people it's happening to. You can't strike against a stock buyback the way you can strike against a factory owner.

That's not a coincidence. Invisible extraction is harder to fight. That's why it works.

How Different Choices Got Made

Here's the part of the story most people don't know — because it happened before the famous part.

The Sherman Antitrust Act passed in 1890. For more than a decade, it was barely used against the monopolies it was written for. Not because no one knew the monopolies existed — everyone knew. Because no president was willing to take them on.

What changed wasn't the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt. It was that for decades before Roosevelt took office, labor organizers, journalists, and local activists had been building public awareness, one event at a time, at huge personal cost. Some were killed for it. The work was slow, unglamorous, and mostly invisible.

In 1905, Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants. His book The Jungle sold a million copies in its first year. The public outrage was so loud that the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act both passed Congress and landed on Roosevelt's desk the same day — June 30, 1906.

Roosevelt himself was not a radical. He believed in capitalism. His Justice Department filed antitrust cases against 44 corporations. The case it filed against Standard Oil — which controlled roughly 90% of U.S. oil refining — eventually broke that company into 34 independent pieces in 1911. He did this not because he invented the idea, but because enough public pressure had built up that a president willing to act could act. He didn't create the moment. He was the door that decades of organizing had finally pushed open.

The result wasn't a revolution. It was the Progressive Era: child labor laws, workplace safety rules, food safety, antitrust enforcement. Specific wins, fought for over years, using rules that already existed. The laws were on the books. What changed was the will to use them.

The Tide Has Risen Before

We have the resources. We have the capacity. That's true. It was also true in 1900.

The tide did eventually rise for American workers. Not through charity. Not through billionaires deciding to be generous. Not through a single election or a single leader. It rose because enough people decided not to wait for someone to rescue them. They organized where they worked. They wrote and shared journalism that named what was happening. They ran for city councils and school boards. They showed up, again and again, for years, without knowing if any of it would work.

The honest version of hope is not that things will get better on their own. It's that they have gotten better before — under conditions that weren't obviously easier than these. The extraction was more visible back then. The lever of union power was stronger. And it still took decades of unglamorous, sustained pressure to find the political moment that made reform possible.

We are not at the end of this story. But we are in it — the same way Americans in 1895 were in it. Pushing against something that felt permanent and wasn't.

Cutting food assistance while creating a near-trillionaire is a choice. A deliberate one, made by people who benefit from it. So was the choice not to regulate the railroads. So was the choice, eventually, to enforce the laws that were already on the books.

The tide rises when people choose to push it.