"...#Workers begin to say, 'If I, as a member of this #society lack the ability to pay my bills, and to feed my family, then I am not a free #citizen of a healthy #republic.'" (the next line is white #violence ignoring #slavery, a common theme in #PBS #documentaries).
#TheGildedAge #AmericanExperience
"#Gilded is not golden. Gilded has the sense of a patina covering something else...the rot underneath.
Nothing, fundamentally, has changed.
"It's not your own fault. It is the fault of the way we have organized our #economy, the way we've allowed certain things to develop unchecked and uncontrolled. There's no reason for anybody to be poor in #America." – #ProgressAndPoverty, 1879, by #HenryGeorge
We've long known yet nothing fundamentally has changed.
#TheGildedAgePBS #PBS #AmericanExperience
#link: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-vote-part-1-3kph5d/?continuousplayautoplay=true
"When someone has 5 homes, and someone else is starving, the first [person] has something that belongs to the second [person]. People shouldn't be starving while other people have so much more than they can possibly ever use or spend." – #MaryElizabethLease, cofounder of the People's (#Populist) Party
We still live in a society of deliberate #inequality, nothing has fundamentally changed.
#TheGildedAgePBS #AmericanExperience #PBS
Survival of the fittest is not a term created by #CharlesDarwin to explain successful biological adaptations, it was invented by #HerbertSpencer to add a gilded patina of #science to his notion of #SocialDarwinism, created solely to justify social and #EconomicInequality and oppression by the wealthy of the #worker.
Nothing anywhere, for anyone, has fundamentally changed.
#TheGildedAgePBS #AmericanExperience #PBS
"We need #government to do more, to play a role in protecting and advancing the interests of ordinary people who are facing forces much bigger and more powerful than they have in the past."
More than 100 years later, this idea remains as true and necessary as ever, and nothing has fundamentally changed that truth, or that still unmet need.
#TheGildedAgePBS #AmericanExperience #PBS
"There are those who believe that if you will only #legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The #Democratic idea, however, had been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." – #WilliamJenningsBryan
Will we ever fundamentally change?
#TheGildedAgePBS #AmericanExperience #PBS
Ricardo Harvin
