America’s Second Gilded Age

In the third episode of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole, the historian Jean Strouse discusses the parallels between our current American moment and the Gilded Age. She and O’Toole talk about the roots of our modern American institutions in the Gilded Age, when the country’s business leaders imported cultural as well as financial capital, and relied greatly on migration. Looking at the origins of figures like J. Pierpont Morgan and Levi Strauss, Strouse examines how a kind of enlightened self-interest motivated the robber barons and industrial capitalists who set the course for much of the American twentieth century.Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform.Jean Strouse is the author, most recently, of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers—about the painter’s relationship to the family of Asher Wertheimer, a London art dealer who commissioned portraits of himself, his wife, and all ten of their children—as well as biographies of Alice James and J. Pierpont Morgan. She has written for the Review on subjects that range from Henry James to Sargent portraits to a late-in-life romance between Morgan and Lady Vi...