The Gilded Age was convicted by its name before its history was ever written. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined that appellation in their political satire by the same name. Their point was clear—the American era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the opposite of a golden age. Instead, it was a time when a thin layer of glitter concealed corruption, useless speculation, and harmful self-interest. The name stuck, permitting Twain’s summary judgment to masquerade as neutral historical judgment.

　　Political critics of our own era have extended these ideological appellations. “Tech oligarchs,” and especially the “Second Gilded Age,” all import a conclusion into their terminology. Prestige television created by cultural liberals tends to follow along. The HBO series Succession, for instance, views wealth as sterile, deforming, and largely useful for controlling others rather than redounding to the benefit of society as a whole.

　　It is a relief then to have Julian Fellowes’s series, The Gilded Age, also on HBO. The British television writer and former peer turns his attention to the much-maligned period of American history. He shows that the era produced many public benefits and that the rich were substantially responsible for the dynamism that led not only to economic prosperity but also to broader social inclusion, even if they were hardly always innocent or admirable. His drama is populated by characters, not caricatures. As Brian Domitrovic noted in these pages last year, it makes you wish we could live through another Gilded Age.

　　Fellowes immediately establishes a conflict through both dialogue and visuals. Two mansions face one another on East 61st Street in New York City. On one side is Agnes van Rhijn, a widowed guardian of Old New York, as indicated by a Dutch family name that goes back to the citys founding. She has inherited not only wealth but also conventions and authority that her family built over centuries. Across the street is the mansion of George and Bertha Russell, built from the proceeds of George’s railroad and steel empire. It dwarfs that of Mrs. Van Rhijn, and their household staff is several times as large.

　　Fellowes, as a British outsider, recognizes that the van Rhijns lack the staying power of the legally instituted aristocracy with which he is familiar. His series maps the ascendancy of new money over old—a process that is always occurring in America. As I discussed in my new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich, new fortunes unsettle the old and create new public goods as well as consumer products. They also revise societys rules not through revolution but through a more organic, Burkean process of change and renewal.

　　George’s railroad projects answer the complaint that Gilded Age fortunes were only glitter. His ambition is to knit mining and railroad lines into an increasingly integrated national transportation system, connecting Western resources through the growing hub of Chicago. His plans require not only his vision and wealth but also others financial capital, particularly J. P. Morgan. In the show, Morgan is portrayed as the indispensable man, assembling savings and judging competing products. Such innovations helped produce annual growth of 2.5 percent in real GDP per person during the Gilded Age, even as greater integration reduced consumer prices.

　　To be sure, George is no innocent. He schemes to divide the unions and backs the use of militia to break a strike at his Pittsburgh works. Yet when rifles are trained on workers and their families, he orders the troops to stand down and accepts negotiation. George can be ruthless without being indifferent to human life, and his enterprises still create infrastructure that lowers costs and expands opportunity.

　　As George illuminates the economic benefits of the Gilded Age, his wife Bertha highlights the philanthropic benefits through a storyline based on real events. In the 1870s, the New York Academy of Music was a small citadel of the old elite—an exclusive theater with only sixteen reserved boxes. In the series, Bertha is frustrated that she cannot get into the institution, as old money generally fences her out. In response, she helps found the Metropolitan Opera House. It was much grander and less exclusive, with 122 boxes and 3,000 seats. It staged higher-standard operas, with singers imported from Europe. The New York Academy of Music soon closed, while the Met remains one of the worlds premier opera houses. 

　　Bertha’s object is portrayed as purely personal—to make a place in society for herself equal to Mrs. Astor, doyenne of old-money New York. But Fellowes has a gimlet sociological eye. Status competition among the rich can create public goods of enduring value: more art, more seats, and a more acculturated city. Personal vanity can produce the sublime.

　　Julian Fellowes shows that, although wealth undeniably bestows glamour on those who possess it, its benefits often extend to those without enormous capital.

　　The same point appears when Bertha uses a large gift to Clara Barton’s fledgling Red Cross as a ladder into society. Compromised motives still finance humanitarian ends. And when the Met opens, she gives tickets to her housekeeper and chef, allowing its pleasures to travel below stairs.

　　Yet Fellowes does not make new wealth synonymous with progress. Bertha’s determination to marry her daughter Gladys to a duke in need of a dowry—an incident based on the real-life, unhappy marriage of a Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough—shows new money imitating the old aristocracy at its worst.

　　Fellowes also shows how social mobility works down the income scale. Jack Trotter, a footman in the van Rhijn household, possesses an exceptional mechanical gift. After months of work, he improves an existing clock so it functions reliably as an alarm clock. With help from the van Rhijn household, he applies successfully for a patent. Larry Russell, George’s son, supplies the commercial judgment and negotiating skill needed to bring the device to market. Jack realizes $300,000, a sum that makes him genuinely wealthy.

　　Fellowes makes some subtle points here. Jack could not succeed as a lone genius. He needs government institutions and financial backing from the rich to succeed. At one point, he encounters a guild barrier from other watchmakers that his connections help him overcome. Markets are open to talent only when entry remains open, and property rights permit outsiders to capture much of the value they create. Moreover, classes are not simply in conflict. Larry and Jack each contribute to creating something of enduring value for others.

　　The series makes the reversal visual. Oscar, Agnes’ son, loses nearly all the van Rhijn fortune in a fraudulent investment, while the family’s former footman moves into a house of his own on 61st Street and contemplates hiring servants. In Fellowes’s America, social position is not lastingly secured by pedigree.

　　Fellowes also shows how prosperity and independent institutions can widen legal and social equality. Agnes employs Peggy Scott as her secretary and supports her journalism. She is much less prejudiced than some of her servants. But Peggy is no mere beneficiary of white patronage. She comes from a prosperous Black professional family, writes for a Black newspaper, visits Tuskegee, and helps defeat a plan to close New York’s Black schools.

　　Agnes also supports women’s suffrage but chastises her niece, who is her ward, for working outside the home. At the same time, Larry discovers that Emily Roebling has effectively supervised completion of the Brooklyn Bridge—another real historical fact—and insists that she receive public credit. Productive competence changes society before convention catches up. Agnes may intellectually reconcile suffrage and free markets with a domestic sphere for women, but the social consequences of those commitments refuse to remain so confined.

　　Fellowes continually demonstrates how all classes profit from the era’s technological dynamism. One season concludes with Edison’s spectacular electric lights illuminating the night before an economically mixed crowd. Another episode brings together characters from different social spheres, wealthy society men and women and their servants, Blacks as well as whites, to watch with great joy the fireworks announcing the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. These scenes provide the visual answer to the charge that the age’s achievements were just the playthings of the rich. The capital needed to build railroads and electricity must be raised before the benefits can be spread. But even if the age’s marvels begin with that concentration, they do not remain upstairs.

　　Fellowes is creating a series about the past with our present in mind. Our age too has seen the creation of great fortunes from new technologies. We too see the replacement of the old money by the new guard. Since the Forbes 400 began, the number of members who inherited their fortunes has declined, while more than ever have made them through technological enterprise. And just as with the Gilded Age, the products from which these fortunes flow are widely enjoyed. Almost everyone has a library in their pocket and the middle class can summon a chauffeured car at the push of a button. We do not live in a classless society, but in one where so much of technologys bounty is shared across classes.

　　That is why The Gilded Age offers a message almost opposite to that of Succession. Succession portrays the wealthy fighting over inherited fortunes, a zero-sum struggle that benefits few beyond themselves. Fellowes shows instead that, although wealth undeniably bestows glamour on those who possess it, its benefits often extend to those without enormous capital. His great achievement is to create a drama of riveting personalities that also recovers neglected but essential truths about the wealthy and their indispensable role in a free and prosperous society. Twain taught Americans to distrust the gilding. Fellowes asks us to look past the glitter—to the railroads, operas, inventions, and widened opportunities—and see the gold.