Though James never uses the term “plutocrat,” plutocratic America is what he was examining. To what extent were his plutocrats like ours? The Gilded Age plutocrats made their money in steel (Carnegie), oil (Rockefeller), mining (Frick), and railroads (Vanderbilt), but in the main their business models were not so different from those of their counterparts today. Musk makes most of his money in hard industrial goods, mainly cars and satellites, while losing money on the digital-media front—just as that other carmaker, Henry Ford, futilely poured money into his antisemitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Bezos, meanwhile, made much of his money by finding new ways for consumers to shop for more goods more efficiently while forcing smaller retailers out of business, exactly like Wanamaker and Woolworth in their day.
Yet real differences persist. The typical plutocrat who built the America, and particularly the New York, that James visited was a businessman with almost absolute freedom to act, and his political power was enormous. (It is worth recalling that Hitler’s constant insult to the democratic governments of Britain and America was that they were simply screens for predatory plutocrats.) Yet these men’s behavior was tightly circumscribed, at least in appearance. The plutocrats of the first Gilded Age were mostly content to influence from a distance, through intermediaries. For one thing, they were busy and living far away from Washington, at a time when that still mattered. For another, discretion had political advantages. When J. P. Morgan met with President Grover Cleveland in 1895, to discuss a deal to supply the government with gold while enriching Morgan’s syndicate with government-issued bonds, it was a scandal that contributed to Cleveland’s ouster the following year. Bezos and Musk have made a bet that increasing their economic power requires increasing their political power, in a fairly direct way.
There is another difference between their plutocrats then and ours today. Our plutocrats despise the arts as an emblem of the cautious, encumbering ancien régime they reject. But James’s plutocrats respected art, even if their motive was just to buy their way into the upper classes, and they did this by collecting the Old Masters or by opening libraries or building concert halls. The history of Gilded Age philanthropy is genuinely remarkable, and although it is easy to dismiss Rockefeller’s motivation for starting the University of Chicago or Frick’s reason for collecting Bellini as the empty acts of aging villains—arthritis producing altruism—they did ennoble the public realm. It is no accident that our great concert hall is called Carnegie, nor that, stuck in traffic round one of our greatest public spaces, Grand Central Terminal, we halt in front of a statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt.