Capitalism as enemy of democracy?

Well, that is the idea behind Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 by Jack Beatty as reviewed in The Boston Globe. Sorry, but another that has been hanging around here to be written about.

Most history classes overlook the constitutional and commercial issues late Nineteen Century. Most never mention Mark Twain's The Gilded Age. Constitutional law courses deal with the Commerce Clause but outside history's context. My own reading says that if the following paragraph written by the reviewer truly does represent the book, then the book will go far in supplanting myth with facts.

"Engine" does indeed seem the proper metaphor. The central relationship of America's betrayal, in Beatty's view, was the alliance between government and business: an alliance that makes a mockery of the notion that the 19th century was an age of laissez-faire, and one that established the foundation of an emerging state capitalism. The central institutions were the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, which whittled away the promises of freedom, citizenship, and independence for ordinary Americans and instead handed them over to the corporations. And the central vehicle of this truly revolutionary transformation was the great engine itself, the railroad.

Remember this folks, the New Deal happened because government would not act to protect the people. Child labor? No federal protection and the federal courts struck down state laws trying to protect its citizens. Government served Big Business until FDR brought it back to the people