The New Gilded Age: Are We Repeating the Gold Rush? | Nathaniel Philbrick

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

I love narrative nonfiction. I love those books that have a crazy good story, but then as a result, they end up telling me about this wide swath of history. And almost nobody does that better than Nathaniel Philbrick. If you've read In the Heart of the Sea, probably his magnum opus, his incredible book about the whaling industry and Moby Dick and the real story it's based on, it's also got a great book on The Mayflower, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has a great book on George Washington, just one of our great narrative non-fiction writers.

This book is ostensibly about events 150 plus years ago, but you cannot read this new book and not feel it is about this exact moment.

Well, I love the book. I will say you made a liar out of me, which I'm a little upset about. I start every year by telling myself I'm not going to read another book about the Civil War this year. I've read too many and I don't need to read anymore. And I keep going down this rabbit hole. And so I saw your book. I actually heard about it before we were going to do this. And I was like, oh, I'm going to read that book when it comes out. I love The Gold Rush. It's fascinating. And then somehow I'm ended up reading another book about the Civil War.

Nathaniel Philbrick (1:15)

Yeah, you got sort of a left turn there, I guess. But that was kind of what I discovered, that you can't talk about The Gold Rush without tracing its tentacles into American history. And they lead so directly to the Civil War. It's kind of amazing.

Ryan Holiday (1:32)

California is an incredible place. I grew up actually in Sacramento. So I knew a bit about The Gold Rush. Obviously, I lived in Placer County. You know, it's right there in the name. But what's weird about California is for some reason, I think because of technology in Silicon Valley and then entertainment in Southern California, it kind of is presented to the American people as this kind of a historical place, like this modern place.

And what's so fascinating about The Gold Rush is obviously that's a long time ago. And The Gold Rush is like not even the beginning of California history.

Nathaniel Philbrick (2:08)

Right, right. I mean, it goes way back. And in fact, I began the book in 1510 with a Spanish romance novelist who invents the name California, in which he describes this fantastic island of jagged peaks, dominated, ruled by women, where the only metal is gold. And so there's a prophecy in the name California, and it reaches back, you know, all those centuries. The whole Spanish side of California is so essential to what it would become. The Native side of California is so essential to what it becomes. It had a huge, a hundred thousand Native people who spoke more than a hundred languages. You can't delve into the gold rush or anything about subsequent California history without exploring how it got to that point.

Ryan Holiday (3:01)

It's interesting, the narratives that a country tells itself can so often preclude other understandings of a place, right?

I think people, if they understand the history of California, if they understand the history of the gold rush, they think about it as this movement west, right? The manifest destiny, people coming from the East Coast to the West and then ending there. That's how I understood it, even someone who lived there growing up. Then it wasn't until last year I took my kids with me. We were visiting my relatives in Sacramento and we went to Sutter's Fort, a place I'd been many, many times. We'd go on field trips there as a kid.

Obviously, they've tried to do a better job in museums all over the country of retelling history, acknowledging the parts of history they left out before. Obviously, this sign wasn't there when I was a kid, but there was a sign explaining that Sutter's Fort had been built with Hawaiian labor. It just blows my mind that people came to California traveling East. You think about it as this Western destination, and the idea that it's built from, obviously, the missionaries are way out there in the Pacific, and then they're bringing people East to California. But just the idea, the internationalness of Sutter's Fort, is it Sutter's Swiss or something? I forget exactly.

Nathaniel Philbrick (4:23)

He was a German Swiss employing Hawaiians to help build a fort in which many of the workers were Native people.

Ryan Holiday (4:33)

Yes.

Nathaniel Philbrick (4:35)

It's international from the very beginning.