A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

Zeynep Tufekci writes:

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder [that of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson] in this country has been so openly celebrated.

The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time.

But the currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We’ve been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.

The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.

The era survives in the public imagination through still-resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awe-struck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.

Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on.

As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports:

Consumers’ frustrations with the company spilled out in protests long before Thompson’s killing.

When Witty, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO, testified in Congress in May, he was swarmed by protesters from People’s Action. The progressive advocacy group blamed the company for wrongly denying care.

“Stop using prior authorization to kill people,” Jennifer Coffey, a woman from Manchester, New Hampshire, said to Witty.

In a subsequent interview, Coffey and fellow protesters shared their stories of having their care requests rejected by UnitedHealthcare.

“Regulators shouldn’t have to be looking over insurers’ shoulders every time a senior citizen falls or suffers a stroke,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said in a video accompanying a Senate report released in October that faulted UnitedHealthcare and other insurers for repeatedly turning down Medicare Advantage patients’ requests. Blumenthal oversaw the investigation. [Continue reading…]

Print this post
Comments are closed.