WASHINGTON — In President Donald Trump’s idealized framing, the United States was at its zenith in the 1890s, when top hats and shirtwaists were fashionable and typhoid fever often killed more soldiers than combat.
It was the Gilded Age, a time of rapid population growth and transformation from an agricultural economy toward a sprawling industrial system, when poverty was widespread while barons of phenomenal wealth, like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, held tremendous sway over politicians who often helped boost their financial empires.
“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept,” Trump said days after taking office. “It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better.”
The desire to recreate that era is fueled by Trump’s fondness for tariffs and his admiration for the nation’s 25th president, William McKinley, a Republican who was in office from 1897 until being assassinated in 1901.
Though Trump’s early implementation of tariffs has been inconsistent — with him imposing them, then pulling many back — he has been steadfast in endorsing the idea of 21st century protectionism. There have even been suggestions that higher import tariffs on the country’s foreign trading partners could eventually replace the federal income tax.
Experts on the era say Trump is idealizing a time rife with government and business corruption, social turmoil and inequality. They argue he’s also dramatically overestimating the role tariffs played in stimulating an economy that grew mostly due to factors other than the U.S. raising taxes on imported goods.
And Gilded Age policies, they maintain, have virtually nothing to do with how trade works in a globalized, modern economy.
“The most astonishing thing for historians is that nobody in the Gilded Age economy — except for the very rich — wanted to live in the Gilded Age economy,” said Richard White, a history professor emeritus at Stanford University.
Trump says high tariffs and low interest rates, like those the U.S. had after the Civil War, can hastily pay down today’s federal debt and fatten government coffers while boosting domestic manufacturers and enticing foreign producers to move to the U.S.
It’s not a new theme for him.
“I am a Tariff Man,” Trump declared in a 2018 online post. Campaigning for a second term last fall, Trump said of the McKinley era, “We were a very wealthy country, and we’re going to be doing that now.” Today, he says “tariff” is his favorite word and represents “a very powerful weapon that politicians haven’t used because they were either dishonest, stupid or paid off in some other form.”
The White House has rushed to raise tariffs on imports from China and on aluminum and steel made abroad while promising that import levies will soon increase on the European Union, as well as new, foreign-made cars, microchips and pharmaceuticals. Trump also increased tariffs on Canada and Mexico, though he later delayed most of them.
He has similar plans for potentially every country the U.S. does business with, saying broad “reciprocal” import taxes are coming April 2nd and will be consistent with levies other countries charge U.S. manufacturers to export their goods.
Dartmouth College economics professor Douglas Irwin said Trump advocating for modern tariffs by pointing to the 1890s is flawed.
“We did grow rapidly in the late 19th century,” he said. “But it’s a stretch to attribute it to tariffs.”
“The president is more accurate when he paints with a broader brush and says, ’Look, this entire period with fiscal surpluses we grew rapidly.’ That’s true of this 40-year period,” added Irwin, author of “Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy.”
“But, when you dig down to the details and say, ‘We raised tariffs in this instance,’ that’s where things go awry. Or the story doesn’t quite hold together as well,” Irwin said.
