Reading about the late 1800s-labor unions, robber barons, etc... [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

...and it's kind of remarkable, to me, that many of the issues and controversies back then were eerily similar to the contemporary ones.

The emerging industrial/financial robber barons' enormous power and influence, the economic and social stratification of workers along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, the further divide within the labor force between native-born Americans and immigrants, the way that business owners exploited those differences with "divide and conquer" tactics, the unbelievably self-serving ideology of Social Darwinism among the rich, and the struggle to organize the laboring classes even as the gap between rich and poor grew with each passing year, and that many of the poorest and most marginalized people were utterly ignored or worse, condemned by the political system of the time..


The more things change, the more they remain the same.