 to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. It's a 5 p.m. block on a given Wednesday. And guess what? We have George Casey, and we're going to do the movie show now, and we're going to talk about the gilded age. You know, I minored in American history in college, and we read a book by Louis Mumford, who died in 1990, but who wrote this book in 1932. It was called The Brown Decades. The Brown Decades was a 30-year period from the close of the Civil War till the middle 90s of the 19th century. And I don't know why, but it was my favorite part of American history. It was the part where the country sort of graduated from the Civil War, whatever that meant, and found itself, whatever that meant, in an industrial age. And that changed things profoundly. You know, we moved a long way in those 30 years. And I'm still fascinated with it. And this movie, The Gilded Age, is pretty much the story of those 30 years. It takes me back to my studies in college in American history. George, you know, it's a documentary, so it doesn't have a plot except the reality of it. Can you sort of put your finger on the plot, if you will, of this documentary? Pretty much. It's like a historical being yet, you know, talks about right after the Civil War and how the railroad barons started to get wealthier and wealthier and more and more powerful as the years rolled by to the point where J. Pierpont-Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, they had another one. Cornelius Vanderbilt. And Cornelius Vanderbilt, right, they had ability to influence the Congress, Senate, House of Representatives on their behalf to what they wanted, right, because they had all this power, right? So power was consolidated in the hands of a few, and they even had ability to, with presidents, to tell presidents what to do because they had that much power. And the whole behind this is the woman who I've got court or whatever, the producer, the director. She wanted to show for the current day that there's similar things happening. You've got wealth, concentrated wealth, and it's becoming more and more in the hands of the few. So that's basically what she's trying to show. And it showed Pierpont-Morgan, it showed Cornelius Vanderbilt, it showed, you know, Andrew Carnegie, and then all the reformers, Henry George, Mary Elizabeth Lease, trying to think, oh, William Jennings Bryan, who ran for president in 1896, he was winning. And then he had all the workers, industrial workers, I mean, they were not for, in the end they were informed because the industrialists told them that they would be losing their jobs, they would be getting less benefits if William Jennings Bryan came in. So that's pretty much the gist of it. But then you can get into the particulars now. Okay. I found the movie took me beyond where I remembered it went in my class in American history. This was a formative period. You know, we were, you know, before 1865, we were in slavery. We were, we were all enslaved, if you will, maybe that's an overstatement, but we were all involved in that issue. The whole country was involved in that issue. We couldn't get away from it. After that, we had to get away from the Civil War. And in the Civil War, we had learned to be an industrial nation, the North, especially industry had come of age. And so this was an example of what happens when you have a part of the country that's recovering from the Civil War in the reconstruction of the South and the, you know, discovery of the West. But in the North, it was about money and power. It was about technology, about the industrial revolution as it, you know, explored itself in the in America. And it started out with, you know, this tension between the industrial power, the immigrants who had nothing, the power of capital, and the lack of power of the people, pretty much everywhere. People, when I say people, I mean the working class. Okay, then, you know, this was a turning point. And if anybody wants to read a really good book, read the book by Lewis Mumford called The Brown Decades. It's still available, of course, and it is the statement of what happened in this country in that period. One of the things that happened, and, you know, you could claim that we have great disparity now. We have disparity in wealth. We have disparity in race. We have disparity in opportunities in education. And we're more conscious of that, perhaps, than we were before. But in the 19th century, the disparity was tangible. It was everywhere. There was slums and tenements in the immigrant neighborhoods. People, you know, were essentially starving depending on what part of the business cycle you were in. And it was America finding its way. We knew we could win a civil war. We knew we had as much industry or more than Europe. We were leading Europe in terms of developing industry here. But we hadn't really worked it out. We hadn't worked out the politics. We hadn't worked out the social policy. And many, many things were happening. You know, although it was the 19th century, many things were happening all day long. So many events were disruptive, pivotal events. And America, you know, for all of its wealth, and it was relatively speaking, wealthy country in that period of time, or becoming a wealthy country, was cruel. It was uncaring. Social caring, political, you know, instrumentalities didn't really care about people. It was hard on people. And it was divisive, too, because by the time you get to the later part of that 30-year period, you have, and you referred it. Let me, we had a question come in, and I want to answer it. It distracted me for a minute. And the name of the movie is The Gilded Age. It's on Netflix, as I recall. So this is a documentary on PBS, right? There you go. It's a documentary. It's not the show. It's the documentary. And that's thank you for that. I didn't mean to try to cut you off, but I think that was the question of which of the two are we reviewing, and we're reviewing the documentary. Right, you know, I haven't seen the other one. The other one doesn't mean much to me as a student of American history. It's interesting because it trips off the same period. So, I mean, when we get to, you know, the end of that century, and you referred to it, we had the emergence of the People's Party, the populist party, you named some of the leaders of it. And here's the thing. It all came to a crunch, okay, in 1896 in the presidential election. And you were right to point out that William Jennings Bryan ran on behalf of the people, the populist side of things, the hinterland, the farmland, the small towns, the rural parts of America as they existed at the time. And the capital side was represented by William McKinley, who represented Wall Street. And, you know, clearly the number of votes, the amount of interest and passion was on the side of William Jennings Bryan. It was a great orator. Everybody remembers that. But there were tricks involved. And the capital concentrations in Wall Street, this was an election in which money counted. It was a national election of some consequence. Everybody knew that it was kind of a mandate about what kind of country are we going to have? Will it be a country ruled by the people of the people, by the people for the people in Lincoln's words, or was it going to be ruled by Wall Street? And you're right, there was misinformation. There was confusion. This was an election of propaganda. And somehow the capital concentrations in Wall Street convinced people that they would be injured if they, economically, if they voted for William Jennings Bryan and the populist. And that was the end of the people's party. It was the end because he lost. And everybody knows William McKinley won. Look, we have McKinley High School, right? We don't have a William Jennings Bryan High School, they won. And that was the mandate. So from that point forward, the capital concentrations of Wall Street, the money class had leveraged. And that showed through the next few decades, it was regrettable because they were not particularly sensitive to racial issues or to social issues. And the country really was not a sweet place after that. And for a while, and it didn't really recover in terms of the social consciousness until FDR in the 30s. We suffered. And we still are suffering arguably from the mandate out of that election. Very important. And that's why I really like the Gilded Age as a time that we should study. That's definitely. And you know, with the McKinley election with William Jennings Bryan, these big industrialists, I remember in the documentary, they said that they gave a lot of money to McKinley's campaign so that he could go, I think he went around the country in a train to get votes. I know Bryan did as well, but it was the big bucks that were able and to convince that it seems that the farmers were from Jennings Bryan, the more the more rule, but it was all the industrial cities with all the factories that they were able to convince the workers to go with McKinley because otherwise they were going to lose their jobs or whatever, you know, and they would have the benefits that they were getting. So very sly move to get the factory workers to vote for. That made a big difference because it was not in their interest at all. They would have been much better off had they voted for William Jennings Bryan and the popular party. So I think the other part of that is we're talking about an age in which industrialization was king and science and technology were king and the country became strong because it did follow that path and these steel mills that Andrew Carnegie built, they were high tech so much so that he spent most of his time in Europe knocking around, but while the steel mills made enormous amounts of steel for the whole world and that was built, those skyscrapers, it built the railroads, steel was the basic building block. In fact, Carnegie started off in railroads and he realized that steel was more important so he went to steel, self-made man, a very creative businessman. So I mean, you saw extraordinary industrial leverage development power in that period and what that told people, according to the documentary and I accept this, it told people that there was a tomorrow, that things were always growing, improving, getting better, stronger. The United States was the greatest country on earth because it was developing and growing so quickly and because it valued the science, the technology, and the industrialization of the whole Northeast corridor and that had an effect on the way people thought, even poor people, they came to the conclusions, they could somehow get in on that even though they weren't in on it yet and immigrants came from all over the world to get in on it and so there was a spirit, I don't know if you could call it patriotism, but it was an optimism that the country had watching this, watching those smokestacks, watching the smoke billowing out all over town. Yeah, I've studied Mumford's other books on urban planning which he even had a study of Honolulu, early study of Honolulu. So he was a very brilliant guy but yeah, that was that was and you know the results of that, I mean I've been to events you know at Newport, Rhode Island where you had all the breakers and all these mansions, I mean we're talking filthy rich, you know, we're talking unbelievable wealth, they're all beautiful mansions, I mean architecturally they're gorgeous, right, but how they got there is Jacob Reese did photos of the workers living in squalor, you know, in the New York tenement, so it's that big divide between the very wealthy and the workers and you know, as we've talked before there's more of a divide between the CEOs and the lower-rank employees, you know, the CEOs make 200 times salary a year than the workers, you know, some of the workers, so and hard to make ends meet, you know, so definitely that age, you know. Yeah, that was an age in which the idea of the American corporate executive, you know, which was the model later for the world, grew up, he was a or she, not many she's by the way, was a bureaucrat and all empowered and had a duty to make money, it was the capitalism, capitalism was refined in that period as in no other place in the world and part of capitalism was this rampant thing about making money hand over fist and to hell with your employees and to hell with everybody, you know, this sort of libertarian, leave me alone, don't regulate me, don't control me, I'm here to make as much money as I possibly can and if I have to dump on people, I will and so you bring in the Pinkerton's to beat up your employees, you resist all kinds of, you know, union-type organizations and you maintain control and as a member of Frick, you know, there's a museum in New York called the Frick Museum, Frick was Carnegie's number one guy and his job was to bring in goons, beat up the employees who were asking for higher wages, so I mean it was a hard time and you're right, I mean these people had so much money it was filthy, I mean the whole thing about filthy rich and they had a social society in New York where the movie opens with the discussion of a ball, a ball built around the whole notion of a gilded age where I think it was 400 families controlled, attended this ball and they controlled the country, 400 families and the disparity in wealth was even greater than it is today from the top to the bottom and they controlled the railroads which controlled the transportation, which controlled the price of goods, what a deal and you know they controlled steel which controlled all construction and it was the beginning of the movement in the Midwest which was very resentful of the railroads and the steel mills and for that matter the oil through Rockefeller that came later because they were taking advantage of the of the people in the rural areas and they were forcing them into agricultural squalor and it changed the nature of being a farmer, changed the nature of small towns and that resentment was you know expressed in the emergence of the populace and the people's party out in the Midwest and it's still with us today, it's what Trump capitalized on, the resentment of the hinterland against the Wall Street crowd and you know we have to know about this in order to understand where we are today, this phenomenon in the late 19th century hasn't really gone away and you know the series that I was alluding to the Gilded Age that it's a series that I'm going to be on TV I think it's going to be on Netflix or whatever that depicts that age in color even though this documentary was in black and white I think they did that for a reason you know to show that that age but that the Gilded Age series is going to show different vignettes you know of that age and I looked a little bit at the initial you know what they were talking about and you see all these women in a fancy ballroom you know and that 400 in New York City and then they talked about I think it was Mrs. Astor she was going against the grade she built this mansion that was not liked by the high society so they I think that high society was with the Vanderbilt the Vanderbilt people had had longer term money they were older money and they controlled you know the social pecking order yes yeah there was that they got into that too in this documentary so it's a very interesting document only about all over an hour I would suggest people to take a look it'll give them a perspective as you were discussing yeah yeah yeah I had to make a choice between you know this black and white movie with a lot of very very interesting photos very well handled you know the narration was very well handled the music was very well handled I was fascinated you know it's funny actually George you say that it was black and white but to me it wasn't black and white I watched that movie and it was so colorful that it was to me subjectively it was in color the whole thing and if you ask me whether I prefer to watch the you know the docudrama series or this documentary movie I would I would take the documentary any day it's a revelation to understand our history you have stated in those words exactly what one of the reviews stated that it's very colorful even though it's in black and white so you're reiterating out of your own head you know what the reviewer was saying is that it's colorful even though it's in black and white and and that's that's what it comes comes across a very colorful even though there's no color so yeah definitely um but I think you know this reminds me of conversations that you and I have had before I mean there was a movie for example I don't remember if we reviewed it I just talked about it called once upon a time in America oh yeah we saw it and this was the next period right starting in the teens the teens of the 20th century and you know you could connect the dots because that was a pretty accurate rendition of the of the history of the time and so this hard scrapple movie um this hard scrapple time by the way it reflected in a movie that won all kinds of awards called ragtime ragtime was set right after the beginning of the 20th century and early 1900s and it was the hard scrapple times and you don't you know we talk about large issues like you know industry and capital and agriculture but in fact people were suffering they were trying to trying to find their next meal and this was long before the depression it was like a permanent depression through the you know 1880s and into the 1890s so I guess my point is I find this fascinating in the sense that my parents who followed you know they came to this country in around 1905 my grandparents and my parents were born in the early 1910 1920 1910 1912 actually um and they talked all the time about royalty in Europe which was another way of saying they're like rich people we were not believe me rich and they talked about these fancy families who lived on Fifth Avenue and it was all an extension of the gilded age these people were the true successes and everyone looked up to them and thought maybe just maybe I can have some small piece of that later on every immigrant to the country was looking for a piece of that and it was you know it was the ideal to follow and that's what makes this movie interesting because my parents knew this firsthand everyone in that period talked about these very wealthy families and my parents were born in 1907 and 1911 it overseas but they my mom came here when she was just a little girl eight or nine years old and my dad went to Europe and lived in Germany and that's another story when and then France they ran out of 1923 they got the hell out of there when Hitler took over the the Bavaria they got the heck out of there but the bottom line is my mother same thing you know when she she went to work for the two Morgan sisters why of whom was married to a Vanderbilt and she always used to talk about how she did design work with with these two van the Vanderbilt you know Mrs Gloria Vanderbilt's mother and Lady Furness she was hung up on this thing too you know and they were from that era so they sort of had some residue as you're saying for those years you know for the early 1900 years so yeah we're getting caught yeah so I'll leave it at that well I believe in documentaries I believe that you could educate yourself aimlessly with documentaries like this and I I'll be looking for more documentaries like this one because I think it it gives you not only quote a colorful view of things it lets you connect the dots from then till now it lets you understand the trends especially in American history only history in general and finally it lets you make a comparison between the way things were at one point in time and the way things were at another point in time I know if you watch this movie you can understand the depression in the 30s much better if you watch this movie you can understand you know the issues that the country was facing in the 19th century and how those issues maybe didn't really go away into the 20th century into the 1920s into the depression and beyond so it's a it's a continuum and part of being patriotic part of understanding today and the ebb and flow of American history that the social historical mesh that holds us together is to understand the history I think one of the things that's come out about Ukraine we didn't really talk about that we should take a minute is that the people in Ukraine understand it's a very complex history and they do understand they study it it becomes part of a sort of patriotic a patriotic milieu that they live in if you want to be patriotic you need to understand what happened and if you don't understand what happened you can't be patriotic cannot be but let's let's go to the question I asked you before the show I I said you know George we have to connect this up to the Ukraine issue the invasion right now I don't know how we can do that and you found a way what's the connection ultimate power autocracy who power in the hands of one or just a few people and they've got the power Putin is an autocrat he gets what he wants he's a he he runs Russia you know and these industrialists they were running like marionette you know the the president and the congresses was was there they were running the marionettes so it's it has to do with ultimate power power in in the hands of one or just a few people concentrated power that's that's that's the connection here it teaches us about the tension which is forever between the power of government especially autocratic powerful corrupt government and the power of the people it's something that has been you know attention forever in the human race and we experienced it in the 19th century you could see but what was going on if it hadn't you know if it hadn't worked out the way it did it could have been really an awful country we could have lost our democracy entirely yeah that you ask oh you know what is the tipping point for democracy it's every day it's every citizen yeah and and this was a rough and ready a raw experience for everyone trying to find invent polish tune up and create a better world for everyone and there are so many many stories in this period that are hard on you that are hard on history that are hard on people and yet somehow we came out of it by dint of effort by dint of a few leaders by dint of a patriotism that emerged out of an optimism that life would be could be better that's why it's so important to study this period definitely definitely so what would you give the documentary george attend i like the documentary it was very comprehensive from a historical background because i have a background in history it was it really took the whole period and dealt with all the different issues with the you know the populists and the capitalist and and and the government and how everything played together and then the personalities involved you know mary elizabeth lease and and william jennings brian hennie george or all the different players really good good documentary excellent excellent document i give it ten i would too these these are true american heroes truly altruistic truly risking their lives indeed spending their lives working for the greater good uh and we need that now another reason to watch this movie and understand how people emerged from the work of day world uh and became leaders with such great sacrifices in that very period so go watch it everybody go watch it any ideas for the next one george uh i'll have to put my thinking cap on you're watching a lot more movies because you know i'm in school and i've got other community things i'm doing i'm pretty stretched right now so you know if you can find something i'll look at it i don't watch many movies you know except once in a while but if you find something that hits your eye you know you like i'm willing to go with it i'll tell you i'll tell you where my head is right now and you can think about it there's a number of movies both on the documentary side and on the docu drama side about the the eighth century in scandinavia with the vikings and i probably will suggest something along those lines to you okay next time a couple weeks george it's great to have these discussions with i really appreciate it it's very important in our time to extend our thinking uh beyond beyond our beyond our daily lives definitely definitely yep definitely take care aloha take care aloha jay thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at thinktec hawaii.com mahalo