Richard Hofstadter’s “The Age of Reform” has been criticized for overly-generalizing popular opinions in this period, but I think his take on this issue is still helpful. He describes that Americans have a constant sort of double-consciousness directed toward the super-rich: a mixture between resentment/jealousy/anger/feelings of injustice on the one hand, and respect, awe, and admiration on the other. The super rich lived in gaudy 5th Avenue mansions and hosted parties where they mimicked the style and behaviors of the French ancien regime, but they also developed meaningful business innovations, took on huge risk, and won-out over industrial competitors. So you can see how it’s easy to pick and choose examples when defining your perspective on the rich.

There’s also a big recent movement away from using the term “the gilded age” to describe the period after the civil war and before around 1900. This has to do with a debate in economic history that was big in the 60s and 70s, which centered on whether to describe the wealthy elite as “robber barons,” or as “industrial statesmen.” If you use the former term (in contemporary sources as well as in later historical writing), it shows a hostility to the rich and emphasizes the improper/immoral/illegal means by which someone amassed their fortune, while the latter label focuses more on the genuine skill of business leaders. I don’t think it’s proper to say that there was any sort of unified or organized “movement” during this period to defend the wealthy elite, but there certainly existed wide admiration and respect toward the elite in the popular press.

Just as one more point, I think it’s also important to take into account contemporary government corruption and the role of philanthropy on shaping public opinion of the rich. Sure, many blamed the wealthy elite for corruption in both local machine politics and in congress, but this corruption certainly existed over and beyond that backed by the “gilded age” elite (also this corruption is largely revealed by muckraking journalists from 1901/2-1910, so after what tends to be described as the gilded age, so the public isn’t strictly aware of the elite’s participation in it). Meanwhile, the gilded age elite in many ways invented modern philanthropy (see Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” for some examples), and especially when this philanthropy was directed towards causes that were seen as “apolitical” (basic research, medical care, secular education, libraries, etc.) it was seen as highly redemptive of the men who had built their fortunes. If the super rich are doing genuinely pro-social philanthropic work and government is seen as dominated by corrupt urban machine politics, it’s easy to imagine how people could imagine the rich positively, while being highly skeptical of government taking on more economic responsibility.

I think it’s important to keep in mind how it was very possible to make good and logical arguments in defense of these “robber barons,” which helps to explain feelings of admiration for them among those who we might say were hurt by the existence of their large fortunes. But again, nothing of a super organized movement by the “poor” in defense of the “rich.”