ABSTRACT
You wouldn’t know it from the characteristically amnesiac way in which America mass media covered the Occupy Rebellion, but large-scale popular fear and anger directed at concentrated wealth have a long and rich history in the United States.2 That fear and anger have always been rooted in harsh class disparities that have defied the nation’s reigning “land of equality” mythology. The problem of socioeconomic inequity goes back to the beginning of the American historical experience but reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, following the notorious inequality of the Gilded Age, when most of the nation’s stupendous new “robber baron” fortunes grew out of heavy industry and railroads, wealth inequality had become as great in the United States as in France or Prussia, though still less drastic than in England.3 A contemporary analysis in 1890 argued that the nation’s top 1 percent owned more than half the nation’s wealth, up from 26 percent in 1860.4 A generation later, in 1922, more reliable data showed that the richest 1 percent controlled 37 percent of the nation’s net worth. That percentage rose to its twentieth-century peak of 44 percent in 1929,5 on the eve of the Great Depression and after a decade in which the top 5 percent garnered half the growth in US income and (thanks largely to a remarkable stock market boom) the number of US millionaires rose from 5,000 to 35,000.6 Poverty was nonetheless rampant in the Roaring Twenties, when two-thirds of US households lived on annual incomes below $2,000, understood to
be the minimum family budget for a decent and healthy standard of living. Hardship reached epic levels during the 1930s, of course, when food lines and mass hunger were widely visible and unemployment never fell below 14 percent, peaking at 25 percent in 1933.7 In his second inaugural address in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt spoke with reason of “one-third of a nation still in poverty.”8
