Vox Populi:

Count on one thing: if Mark Twain were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a nineteenth-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.

“They want me to go in with them on the sly,” says Colonel Sellers, the anti-hero of that novel. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the colonel explains to his wide-eyed dinner guest how they would “buy a hundred and thirteen wild cat banks in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri… and then all of sudden… Whiz! the stock of every one of those wildcats would spin… profit on the speculation not a dollar less than forty millions!” 

With Twain’s uncanny insight into the American character, his novel presaged the quarter-century to follow so accurately that, in the end, it lent its name to “the Gilded Age,” that era of rapid industrialization and rising robber-baron fortunes. Ripped from two centuries of Puritan moral moorings by an “inflamed desire for sudden wealth,” the novel’s archetypal American families are caught in a “fever of speculation” that sends them scrambling across the continent in a frenzied search for jackpot profits.

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