Politically, the Gilded Age is a strange candidate for paradise, burdened as it is with images of Robber Barons feasting at Delmonico’s in self-indulged splendor, the millionaires’ club of wholly bought-and-sold congressmen, and a reigning ideology called Social Darwinism that depicted entrenched poverty and permanent economic inequality as conditions sanctioned by some combination of God’s will and Nature’s laws.
