Gilded Generation

Members of the reactive Gilded Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1822 and 1842; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1922.¹ Their parents were either the last wave of the adaptive Compromise Generation or the first wave of the idealist Transcendental Generation, who "nurtured" them in a particularly underprotective way.

The first wave of the Gilded Generation was notable; from 1822 to 1829 were born most of the Gold Rush 49ers, the most colorful and effective Civil War generals, the leading postwar "scalawag" southern governors, the most notorious machine bosses of the Gilded Age, and every American age 64 to 71 during the Crash of '93, the first recession that forced a categorical retirement of elder workers. The Gilded Generation (of the Nomad archtype in the Civil War Saeculum, or Cycle) lived a hardscrabble childhood around parents distracted by spiritual upheavals. They came of age amid rising national tempers, torrential immigration, commercialism, Know Nothing politics, and declining college enrollments. As young adults, many pursued fortunes in frontier boom towns or as fledgling "robber barons." Their Lincoln Shouters and Johnny Rebs rode eagerly into a Civil War that left them decimated, Confederates especially. Having learned to detest moral zealotry, their midlife Presidents and industrialists put their stock in Darwinian economics, Boss Tweed politics, Victorian prudery, and Carnegie's Law of Competition. As elders, they landed on the "industrial scrap heap" of an urbanizing economy that was harsh to most old people.²

From youth to elderhood, the Gilded were more likely to die or fall into destitution than their parents at like age. They were also more likely to make a fortune starting out from nothing. According to C. Wright Mills, a larger share of their business elite came from lower- or lower-middle-class backgrounds than was the case in any earlier or later generation--including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, James J. Hill, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker.³

Suffering worsening nutrition as children, the adult height of the Gilded declined from the first cohort (1822) to the last (1842). Later in life, the quest for protein became a generational obsession. The Gilded include America's best-known cannibals (Al Packer and the Donner Party survivors); the founder of the King Ranch; the first Texas-to-Abilene cattle drivers; the first large-scale meat packers (Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour); and, by the 1880s, the midlife beneficiaries of plunging beef prices. Shunning the lithe (Transcendental) physique, the aging Gilded celebrated the rotund body and the Delmonico steak dinner as a mark of success. In 1907, when the youngest Gilded had entered elderhood, U.S. life expectancy at age 65 declined to its shortest span ever measured (under 11.5 years).⁴

The Gilded lived perhaps the most luckless lifecycle in American history. First-wavers grew up too late to share the spiritual euphoria of the Transcendental Awakening (also called the "Second Great Awakening," or "Romantic Evangelism," or "Transcendental Idealism"), 1822-1837, but they were in time to feel its damage as children: too young to participate, left alone, urged to grow up quickly, and criticized as "bad." Throughout their lifecycle, and indeed ever since, the Gilded have been inundated by torrents of critical abuse. Trying to make the best of a dangerous world and then getting damned for it--that was their life story. One of the most famous of this generation, Mark Twain, later memoralized the Gilded childhood in his adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--pranks and pluck in a world of Aunt Beckyish elders. It didn't change much with age.⁵

"Children are commercial before they get out of their petticoats," remarked visitor David MacRae of America's Jacksonian-era children. "You will see a little girl of six show a toy to her companion, and say, gravely, "Will you trade?" William Dean Howells later recalled how he and his friends grew up fast at a time when "the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master if he was bold and strong enough." The young Gilded had little choice. Some were the casual offspring of experimental communities; others were hungry arrivals by boat. Nearly all of them, looking up at uncertain Compromiser midlifers and self-absorbed Transcendental rising adults, understood at an early age that they had better take care of themselves--if necessary, by scavenging in the cities or moving away to the frontier.⁶

Parents complained of their toughness, lawmakers decried the new flood of "street orphans" who mixed huckstering with crime, and in 1849 the New York police chief condemned "the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares."⁷

With traditional apprenticeships dwindling in an era of rapid industrialization and cheap immigrant labor, many poor, unsupervised Gilded youths in the Eastern cities shocked their elders by roaming wild in the streets and organizing the first generation of urban criminal gangs, with names such as Roach Guards or Little Dead Rabbits. The violence of these children in the Age of Jackson--commonly regarded as self-seeking and savage, as dumb, greedy, and soulless--prompted elders to organize the first big-city police forces and establish the first "reform" schools. "If the reform school differed at all from adult prisons," observes historian Joseph Kett, "it was because children could be shipped off to the former not just for crimes but for general vagrancy and stubbornness."⁸

One writer described the Gilded youth as The Dangerous Classes of New York, "friendless and homeless. . . . No one cares for them, and they care for no one."⁹

Hearing elders moralize, Gilded youths steered clear of adults and practiced what many referred to (favorably) as "self-dependence." Louisa May Alcott, likening her impractical father (a utopian Transcendental reformer in Emerson's circle) to "a man up on a balloon," secretly resolved as a girl "to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her." Alcott was aware that her own generation was ill-timed, that she and her peers had to grow up fast in a world of parental self-immersion or even neglect.¹⁰

The Gilded youth were not looking for testimonials and did not seek any grand collective mission. Far from it. They were tired of the idealists always whining about problems but too busy to solve them. Gilded students showed little of their next-elders' interest in the cerebral. In the 1830s, farmers' sons were grabbing get-rich manuals and bolting from their homes and schools at ever-earlier ages. By the 1840s and 1850s, college attendance sank--and those who did arrive on campus made sure to keep the fortyish reformers at bay. When Garrison and Longfellow came to speak, these collegians jeered and hissed. When teachers ordered them to pray, writes historian Frederick Randolph, they responded with "deliberate absenteeism, indifference, disrespect, by ogling female visitors, the writing of obscene doggerel on the flyleaves of hymnals, by expectorating in the chapel aisle." Boasted one student at Brown: "We live in a perfectly independent way." College kids (whom Van Wyck Brooks later called la jeuness dorée of the 1840s) threw books through college windows and struck cynical poses in fashionable clothing.¹¹

All the Gilded came of age in an era of economic swings, floodtide immigration, and a darkening national mood. In rising adulthood, they bore the human burden of Transcendental conscience, becoming what Henry Adams described as a "generation . . . stirred up from its lowest layers."¹²

"Of all the multitude of young men engaged in various employments in this city," reported a Cincinnati newspaper in 1860, "there is not one who does not desire, and even confidently expect to become rich." In the 1840s and 1850s, the Gilded came of age pursuing what aging Compromiser Washington Irving sarcastically called "the almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land." These were frenetic years for 20-year-olds. Many stayed in the East, where they mingled with crowds of new immigrants, found jobs in new factories, and rode a roller-coaster economy. Others, alienated by rising land prices and intolerant Transcendental next-elders, followed the "Go West, Young Man" maxim of Horace Greeley--perhaps the only Transcendental advice they considered sensible.¹³

The Gilded include a larger share of immigrants (28 percent) than any other American generation since colonial times. To the East Coast came the first large influx of Irish Catholics, triggered by the Irish potato famine of the late 1840s; to the West Coast came the Chinese, hired on as laborers for the Union Pacific Railroad.¹⁴

During the Mexican War, they proved eager to fight for new territory (and to learn how to handle the new Colt "six-shooter"). While Transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson chastised "young men" who "think that the manly character requires that they should go to California, or to India, or into the army" twentyish Gilded adventurers were crying "Eureka!" and chasing the newfound mother lodes. The lucky got rich panning for metal, the cunning (like 21-year-old Levi Strauss) by feeding and outfitting their desperado peers.¹⁵

"The only population of the kind that the world has ever seen," Mark Twain wrote of the Gold Rush 49ers, "two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy," all having caught what Twain called the "California sudden-riches disease." Eight in ten were between ages 10 and 30, making circa-1850 San Francisco the most monogenerational city ever seen in America--and among the most anarchic, with no families or laws, just vigilante justice enforced by hangings.¹⁶

The wildness of the Western territories prompted the fortyish Transcendental Horace Mann to ask disparagingly, "Why were they not colonized by men like the pilgrim fathers?" Throughout their lifecycle, the Gilded defined today's image of the Western adventurer: from the youthful 49er and Pony Express rider before the Civil War, to the midlife rancher, cowboy, "bad man," and Indian fighter of the 1870s, to the grizzled old mountaineer of 1900. Most Gilded members, such as Ulysses S. Grant, did not mind striking others as "bad"; they played the low expectations of them to their advantage.¹⁷

Midlife Transcendentals such as Horace Mann charged that "more than eleven-twelfths" of them could not read, and George Templeton Strong saw in them "so much gross dissipation redeemed by so little culture." Transcendental Generation member Walt Whitman complained of the Gilded's "highly deceptive superficial intellectuality," and Longfellow, another Transcendental, accused the Gilded Generation of taking America "back to the common level, with a hoarse death-rattle in its throat."¹⁸

Hit by pain and hard luck that seemed to justify all the critics, the Gilded suffered from low collective self-esteem.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--too?

Gilded blacks include the first large population of American mulattoes (many, presumably, the children of white Compromiser fathers); the slave generation that suffered most at the hands of white owners increasingly fearful of rebellion; the most celebrated 1850s-era slave fugitives; and, during the Civil War, the soldiers and officers of the first black regiments in North America.²⁰

The Gilded added leather lungs to the polarizing debate over union--first as the core of the nativist "Young America" movement, next as "Know-Nothings" shouting their defiantly anti-Transcendental slogan "Deeds Not Words," and finally as unpropertied "Lincoln shouters" and "hurrah boy" Republicans. In the North, they agreed with Lincoln's argument that slavery posed a threat to free men everywhere--and were coaxed by the new party's promises to enact a homestead law and build railroads. In the South, cries for battle rose from those whom Sherman darkly referred to as "young bloods" and "sons of planters"--"brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense" who "must be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace."²¹

The Gilded were a pragmatic bunch, regarding history as bunk. "As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use," wrote William James, who popularized "pragmatism" as a philosophy based on "truth's cash value." They reduced schooling, career choice--and courtship, too--to practical matter-of-fact essentials. Children of the Gilded Generation were either members of the adaptive Progressive Generation or the idealist Missionary Generation, who--as a reaction to the Gilded's own upbringing--were nurtured in an overprotective way.²²

The Gilded Generation produced some of the toughest leaders, the most effective warriors, scathingly perceptive artists, and some extremely successful entrepreneurs. They were also the cannon fodder for the Civil War; last-wave Gilded youths "grew up" just in time to maximize their risk of death and maiming in the Civil War. Ranging in age from 19 to 39 in 1861, the Gilded were ready, in Twain's words, "to make choice of a life-course & move with a rush." Many of these alienated and risk-prone Gilded rising adults volunteered for war, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our power for the joy of it."²³

For the young Gilded, the first years of the Civil War were more dashing than bloody. Thirtyish commanders George McClellan and Stonewall Jackson enjoyed great popularity with their "Billy Yank" and "Johnny Reb" troops. Many were stylish; devilish raiders like Jeb Stuart delighted in cavalier foppery (black plumes and gold-threaded boots). Following the deadly battles of 1862-1863 and the first draft calls, however, the Gilded began to think twice about the mission imposed upon them by their prophetic next-elders. War hit the Gilded harder than any other American generation. They were the first American youths to be subject to conscription--and led the bloodiest antidraft riots in American history. Of the 7 million Gilded men who reached combat age, roughly 10 percent died in the Civil War; one in fifteen from the Union states, nearly one in four from the Confederate states. Another 5 percent ended the war in disease-ridden prisoner-of-war camps. Altogether, the number killed in more than 6,000 Civil War battles exceeded the cumulative total for all other American wars--a per-capita casualty rate equal to eight World War IIs combined. Nearly half the Gilded war dead were buried in unmarked graves.²⁴

The Gilded were pragmatic leaders, forced to be heroic doers in the Civil War crisis. They understood how the real world functioned, and they led accordingly and doggedly. They played for keeps and asked for no favors. Their motto, as General Grant put it, was to strike "as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on." This bulldog Gilded general toughed out his reputation for slow wits and hard liquor by throttling Transcendental "Gentleman Lee"--who surrendered just days before a self-loathing Gilded assassin (John Wilkes Booth) put an end to Transcendental "Father Abraham."²⁵

The Gilded who survived the Civil War became what historian Daniel Boorstin calls "the Go-Getters" of the late 1860s, thirtyish buccaneers who had seen Union armies camp on Brook Farm and cannons annihilate the most decent of their peers. After Appomattox, writes Van Wyck Brooks, "the young men were scattering in all directions. Their imagination was caught by the West, and scores who might have been writers in the days of The Dial were seeking their fortunes in railroads, mines, and oil wells." While 55-year-old Transcendentals declaimed over principle, 35-year-old Gilded saw mostly ruined farms, starving widows, diseased prisoners, dead bodies, and amputated limbs (carried away from Gettysburg by the wagonload). In the South, Gilded poet Henry Timrod described the postwar landscape as "beggary, starvation, death, bitter grief, utter want of hope." No white Southerner of Timrod's generation would later emerge to prominence in any sphere of national life--business, science, letters, or politics.²⁶

In the Reconstruction years, fifteen Gilded blacks were elected to Congress, a greater number than from any later generation until the Silent. At the same time, the Gilded included most of the postwar carpetbaggers and scalawags. In the generational landslide of 1868, the median age of governors in the nine core Confederate states fell from 62 to 37. The Gilded whites of the North, meanwhile, went to work disarming the Transcendental leadership. After a 42-year-old senator, Edmund Ross, blocked the Radicals' plot to impeach President Johnson, Gilded leaders dismantled Reconstruction and left their Southern black peers to fend for themselves. The feisty women of this male-short generation focused their postwar energy on family solidarity and matured into the durable Scarlett O'Hara matrons of the Victorian era. The men found it harder to adjust. Some became rootless "bums" and "hobos," wandering along newly built railways and evading postwar "tramp laws." Others burst forth with bingelike rapacity--notorious "bad guys" (Wild Bill Hickok, William Quantrill), Indian fighters (Phil Sheridan, George Custer), and "robber barons" (Jim Fisk, Jay Gould).²⁷

After the war, the Gilded purged their memory of elder zealots by turning their regional focus away from New England and by looking instead toward the busier, less talkative Midwest--especially Ohio, home to four of the six Gilded Presidents. Rutherford Hayes wrote from Cincinnati: "Push, labor, shove--these words are of great power in a city like this." Inheriting the physical and emotional wreckage left behind by their elders, the Gilded entered midlife and reassembled the pieces--their own way. They muscled into political power, repudiated their elders' high-flown dreams, rolled up their sleeves, and launched a dynamo of no-holds-barred economic progress to match their pragmatic mood.²⁸

Twenty years after the young 49ers first reached San Francisco, Twain asked: "And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot and stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all--victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its incense heavenward. It is pitiful to think upon." Yet Twain's "golden calf" peers dug the first oil, laid the golden spike, built the first business trusts, designed the first "skyscrapers"--and, most important, targeted most of their throat-cutting competition against their own peers. In so doing, the men and women of this self-demeaning generation gave chestiness to a modernizing nation and a much better life to their children.²⁹

In 1876, the Gilded celebrated their midlife dominion with the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Hall of Machines stood for bigness, strength, and worldliness--and not a hint of the Transcendental inner life that most Gilded still associated with meanness and tragedy. Midlife apostles of Darwin's "survival of the fittest," the Gilded did not mind becoming a generation of spectacular winners and losers. Their ranks included those who struck gold and those who died trying; fugitive slaves and the posses chasing them; war profiteers and war widows; Pullman millionaires and sweating "coolies"; Irish immigrants and nativist mobs; General Custer and Sitting Bull.³⁰

During the 1870s, Gilded survivalism turned conservative. Seeking an ethos suitable for a generation of scoundrels, they found it first in Charles Darwin's "law of natural selection," next in Herbert Spencer's "social statics," and most fully in the "pragmatism" of Charles Peirce and William James. Amid what was known as the "Victorian crisis of faith," the Gilded played the game of life according to worldly measures of success. The first Wall Street financiers, such as John Pierpont Morgan and Anthony Drexel, counted dollars; the first trust builders, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie counted sales; the first rail tycoons, such as Leland Stanford and James J. Hill, counted miles of steel and tons of freight. Principle seemed pointless next to the confession of the "Plumed Knight," James Blaine: "When I want something, I want it dreadfully." Blaine's remark, notes historian Richard Hofstadter, "might have been the motto of a whole generation of Americans who wanted things dreadfully, and took them." "Robber barons" such as Andrew Carnegie unabashedly proclaimed "the Law of Competition" as "the soil in which society so far has produced its best fruit."³¹

The new wealth fortified a fiftyish up-from-nowhere elite that came to dominate both culture and politics, to the despair of their "Mugwump" critics. Progressive Generation member Henry James accosted "that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong." Samuel Eliot Morison has written: "When the gilt wore off, one found only base brass." The Gilded seldom answered such charges; in fact, their leading writers mostly agreed. In 1873, with rumpled heroes like Ulysses Grant and John D. Rockefeller riding high, Twain and his 35-year-old coauthor Charles Dudley ("Deadly Warning") Warner published a popular satirical book, The Gilded Age, whose title perfectly described this generation of metal and muscle. These new philistines eclipsed a succession of weak Presidents and tilted political power toward state and local governments. They crushed most dissenters in their own ranks, from genteel cosmopolitans such as Henry Adams to rural populists such as "Sockless Socrates" Simpson.³²

By the 1880s, the Gilded were tiring of earlier binging and were slowing down. They reconciled themselves to a prudish morality promulgated by Frances Willard's "Temperance" and "Social Purity" movements. The new standard stressed modesty, self-control, and a reputation free from shame--requiring many of these fiftyish parents to hide (or at least to leave unmentioned) their checkered personal histories.³³

The Gilded midlife era ended in 1893 as it began--with a world's fair, this time in Chicago. But a few months before it opened, the worst panic in living memory plunged the nation into sudden depression. When the fair's opulence drew angry fire from the young, Charles Eliot Norton found a "decline of manners" and Mark Twain a "soul full of meanness" in an America now gripped by the Missionary Awakening (or "Third Great Awakening"), 1886-1903, perpetrated by the young Missionary Generation. The Gilded retreated into a reclusive elderhood during this spiritual upheaval of fanatic social criticism and gung-ho fervor.³⁴

"A new America," complained Norton on the eve of the Spanish-American War, "is entering on the false course which has so often led to calamity." In 1898, as young zealots pressed for an invasion of Cuba, virtually all of America's aging Gilded luminaries (Twain, Cleveland, Carnegie, Sumner, James, Howells) urged peace and caution. But by now a new crop of Progressive leaders were listening to the zeal of youth, not the exhaustion of old-timers--and chose to "Remember the Maine," not Gettysburg.³⁵

As the century ticked to a close, Gilded conservatism gave way to the attacks of the righteous reformers of the young Missionary Generation. Old Sumner lamented that the bonds of close family loyalty, a source of strength and comfort to his peers after the Civil War, now attracted ridicule from fashionable social critics. College students romanticized a bucolic preindustrial past--a past the old Gilded knew had been wild and dangerous. The young zealots rediscovered the old Transcendental theme of Gilded soullessness. Historians Charles Beard despised their "cash nexus," Ralph Adams Cram their "mammonism," Vernon Parrington their "triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its like in our history."³⁶

As "Victorian" stewards of the late-Nineteenth-Century American economy, the Gilded had set an unmatched record for prudence and thrift. From the late 1850s to the late 1890s, gross capital formation had more than doubled as a share of gross national product and the wholesale price index had declined by one-third. From 1866 to 1893, Gilded leaders and taxpayers had sustained twenty-eight consecutive federal surpluses--reducing the national debt by one-third and making theirs the only generation in American history to leave behind a smaller federal debt than it inherited.³⁷

Nonetheless, according to historian Andrew Achenbaum, the new century unleashed an "unprecedented devaluation" of the elderly: "Instead of extolling the aged's moral wisdom"--as they had in the twilight years of Transcendentalists Emerson and Longfellow--"commentators increasingly concluded that old people had nothing to contribute to society." The Gilded reached the cusp of old age during the 1890s, again an unlucky moment for their phase of life, when a rapidly growing share of all elderly landed in what Americans began calling an "industrial scrap heap." With few means of public or private support, that is where many of them eked out their twilight years. "Let the chips fall where they may," Roscoe Conkling had said. By most indicators--wealth, higher education, lifespan--the Gilded fared worse at each phase of life than their next-elders or next-juniors, a sacrificial one-generation backstep in the chain of progress. No wonder they behaved, all their lives, like survivalists. Taking a cue from their laissez-faire guru William Graham Sumner, they learned to "root, hog, or die."³⁸

In a widely reprinted 1905 lecture, the Progressive William Osler wrote of "the uselessness of men above sixty years of age" and stressed "the incalculable benefits" of "a peaceful departure by chloroform." Old Henry Adams complained that "young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile." Many Gilded elders heard themselves reviled as "old geezers" and "old fogies"--their elite as "old guard" senators, "standpatter" House members, and reform-blocking Supreme Court justices. While prior generations of elders had typically worked until death (or were cared for by younger relatives on farms), many now faced an involuntary, pensionless "retirement" in a rapidly urbanizing economy that substantially favored young adults. As inept "soldiering" became a new insult in the workplace, inflation began eroding the real value of federal pensions to "Grand Army" veterans. "There is now no place in our working order for old men," observed Edward Everett Hale in his seventies. Never asking for special favors, the old Gilded kept to themselves and rarely complained about their treatment. "I am seventy," confessed the otherwise acid-penned Mark Twain in 1905, "seventy and would nestle in the chimney corner . . . wishing you well in all affection."³⁹

The enduring images of this generation conjure up rapacity, nihilism, and ugliness: Know-Nothings and Ku Klux Klanners; Union "bummers" and Quantrill's raiders; Crédit Mobilier and the Salary Grab Act; gold spittoons and penny novels; carpetbaggers and scalawags; Boss Tweed's machine and Morgan's trust; "Half-Breed" James Blaine and "His Fraudulency" President Hayes. But low expectations and a negative self-image were all part of the Gilded game plan: to live according to their own pragmatic rules--and if that meant making massive lifecycle sacrifices, so be it. After all, their merciless competition favored fast-paced innovation; their city machines fed poor children; their business trusts and government surpluses favored huge investment in infrastructure and long-lived capital goods; their elder industrialists became fabled philanthropists; and their chromo culture protected the family--all benefits that would accrue not to themselves (aside from a handful of flashy winners), but to their children.⁴⁰

Neglected and brutalized early in life, this "bad" generation reached midlife power with every opportunity to indulge itself and let its children waste among the postwar ruins. Instead, the Gilded rebuilt America while mainly wasting each other. They became loud proponents of Social Darwinism just as they reached the threshold of elderhood--precisely the phase of life when "survival of the fittest" would plainly work to their own disadvantage. Few ever sought credit for lofty motives. Late in life, Justice Holmes admitted that he was a "Philistine" and "egotist." Likewise, at age 64, even William James excoriated his peers for their "exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS."⁴¹

Rather than be judged for how they felt, the Gilded preferred to be judged for what they built. Arriving in New York City in 1907, the elder James looked around at the commercial bustle and marveled: "in the center of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and . . . found it simply magnificent." By refusing to look beyond the material world, the Gilded sacrificed themselves bodily for their "machines"--mechanical, commercial, and political. This self-deprecation resulted in a very real kindness: to ensure that younger Progressives and Missionaries would enjoy far more affluence than the Gilded had themselves ever known.⁴²

Their greatest failure late in life was not to realize that the high tide of laissez-faire growth would hurt all of society's dependents, not only themselves as elders, but also a still younger group, the Lost Generation of children. The tots of the 1890s were about to embark on a lifecycle much like their own--a fact that would have pained the old Twains and Carnegies had they known it. The Gilded lifecycle thus deserves the same warning that Twain's "Notice to the Reader" offered for Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished."⁴³

Birthyears for the Gilded Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)

• 1822:
  Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Edmond de Concourt, César Franck, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Heinrich Schliemann
• 1823:
  Alexander Ostrovski, Alexander Petöfi, Charlotte M. Yonge, Ernest Renan, "Boss" Tweed
• 1824:
  Alexandre Dumas fils, Joseph Israels, Anton Bruckner, Peter von Cornelius, Bedrich Smetana, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), "Stonewall" Jackson, Arthur Noah Bean (G7), Caroline Elizabeth Stickney (G7)
• 1825:
  Paul Kruger, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Johann Strauss, Jean Martin Charcot, Ferdinand Lasalle, Ephraim Sylvester Mansfield (G7), Hannah Elizabeth Hinchcliff (G7)
• 1826:
  Josef Viktor von Scheffel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Gustave Moreau
• 1827:
  Charles de Coster, Arnold Böcklin, William Holman Hunt, Joseph Lister
• 1828:
  Edmond About, Henrik Ibsen, George Meredith, Margaret Oliphant, Francisque Sarcey, Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, Jules Verne, Friedrich Albert Lange, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Alfred Stevens, Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, Ferdinand Julius Cohn, Theodore De Vinne, Balfour Stewart, Sir Joseph Swan, Jean Henri Dunant
• 1829:
  Carl Schurz, Joseph Jefferson, Tommaso Salvini, Henry Timrod, Charles Dudley Warner, Edward White Benson, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Anselm Feuerbach, John Everett Millais, Louis Gottschalk, Anton Rubinstein, Silas Weir Mitchell, William Booth, Roscoe Conkling, Levi Strauss
• 1830:
  James G. Blaine, Franz Josef I, Porfirio Diaz, Chester A. Arthur, Emily Dickinson, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Christina Rossetti, Alexander Smith, Albert Bierstadt, Camille Pissarro, John Quincy Adams Ward, Alfred Waterhouse, Hans von Bülow, Belva Lockwood, James G. Blaine, "Mother" Jones
• 1831:
  James A. Garfield, Helen Hunt Jackson, Nikolai Semenovich, Victorien Sardou, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Reinhold Begas, Constantin Meunier, James Clark Maxwell, Joseph Cowan, E. L. Godkin, John Bell Hood, George M. Pullman
• 1832:
  Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Sir Edwin Arnold, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), Edouard Manet, Moncure D. Conway, Emperor Maximilian
• 1833:
  Charles G. Gordon, Benjamin Harrison, Edwin Booth, Charles Bradlaugh, Henry Fawcett, Johannes Brahms, Alfred Nobel
• 1834:
  William Morris, J. H. Shorthouse, Frank R. Stockton, Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), Lord Acton, Charles W. Eliot, Charles H. Spurgeon, Heinrich von Treitschke, F. A. Bartholdi, Edgar Dégas, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Aleksandr Porfyrevich Borodin, Samuel P. Langley, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, Chauncey M. Depew
• 1835:
  Richard Olney, Fitzhugh Lee, Sir George S. White, Alfred Austin, Samuel Butler, Emile Gaboriau, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Lyman Abbott, Giovanni Schiaperelli, John La Farge, Camille Saint-Saëns, Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, Hetty Green
• 1836:
  Joseph G. Cannon, Joseph Chamberlain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, T. B. Aldrich, Bret Harte, Winslow Homer, Jay Gould
• 1837:
  Grover Cleveland, Friedrich von Holstein, Georges Boulanger, Sadi Carnot, Sitting Bull, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Eggleston, William Dean Howells, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Sir Charles Wyndham, Dwight L. Moody, Cosima, John Burroughs, Alonzo Mark Hanna, J. Pierpont Morgan, "Wild Bill" Hickok, Artemas Seymour Edmands (G6)
• 1838:
  Henry Irving, E. P. Roe, Henry Adams, Thomas R. Lounsbury, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Anton Mauve, Georges Bizet, John Muir, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, John Wanamaker, Victoria Woodhull, John Wilkes Booth
• 1839:
  Eugen Richter, Charles S. Pierce, Thomas B. Reed, Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky, John D. Rockefeller, George Custer
• 1840:
  August Bebel, Empress Carlotta, William T. Sampson, Wilfred S. Blunt, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Claude Monet, Thomas Nast, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky
• 1841:
  Georges Clemenceau, Edward VII, Edward Rowland Hill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anton Dvorák
• 1842:
  Ambrose Bierce, Sidney Lanier, Stéphane Mallarmé, Karl May, William James, Prince Peter Kropotkin, Albert Sorel, Charity Davis

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