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I’m reading a book on the Pinkertons, right now. It’s a good story: remarkable and complex characters, adventure, and also a good deal of contextual information about the world in which Allan Pinkerton and his sons found an enormous niche for private detective services.

In a chapter about the Homestead Strike, the author spends a good deal of time setting the stage by describing the circumstances facing labor and capital in late 19th-century America. And, while acknowledging that most of us do enjoy relatively pampered lives when compared with 90-hour weeks performing backbreaking labor in a coal mine for wages almost sufficient to keep up with one’s growing debt to the company store… I was still struck by the relevancy of many of these observations, written more than half a century ago about a time period just as long before that.

The key issues in this momentous decade were reform and expansion. Businessmen, workingmen, and farmers had seen only hard times in the late eighties. They were disillusioned with the old leaders and their orthodox politics. Somewhere, somehow, the American dream had become a nightmare. It was now apparent that the distribution of the nation’s wealth was shockingly unequal. Thomas G. Sherman, in his Owners of America, which stirred the country at the time of its publication in 1889, estimated that 200,000 people controlled 70% of the nation’s wealth. Other economists concluded that 80 percent of Americans made a bare living, while the remaining 20 percent controlled the power and wealth of the land.

…

Rather than the Carnegies and Fricks, the inflamed workers and the Pinkertons, the evil present that morning [at Homestead] was the law itself, which protected the advocates of social Darwinism, the tooth-and-claw philosophy of ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics. During the 1870s and 1880s, the American middle class accepted the dream of personal conquest, the legend of the self-made man through pluck and hard work. [...] In time the American middle class shrank from the principle it had gloried in, and as Richard Hofstadter writes, “turned in flight from the hideous image of rampant, competitive brutality, and repudiated the once heroic entrepreneur as a despoiler of the nation’s wealth and morals and a monopolist of its opportunities.”

— James Horan, The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty that Made History

Not a complete parallel, at any rate not so far, but it does, as I observed, all seem depressingly relevant at least. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.