Speaker 1: President Trump's inauguration this week, attended by some of the richest men in the world. Their wealth in stark contrast to those who've protested in recent strikes, fighting for a living wage. Some historians say this construct resembles another famous time in our nation's history, the Gilded Age, a time marked by extreme wealth on one end and people struggling to pay their bills on the other. Tonight, we explore how the lessons of the past could help to inform our present and our future. The grandeur.

Speaker 2: It's called the Great Hall, and it is a perfect 50 by 50 box.

Speaker 1: The opulence.

Speaker 2: 70 rooms, but that includes servants' quarters.

Speaker 1: Of course. Gold everywhere, vaulted and intricate ceilings, wealth built from a railroad empire.

Speaker 2: When railroads came into existence here, it changed the country completely.

Speaker 1: An emergence then just as revolutionary as social media, e-commerce, and space exploration is now.

Speaker 2: Look at those figures that are up there. Those are life-size. Those are life-size.

Speaker 1: A home so big, it has a name. The Breakers, vacation home to the powerful and famous Vanderbilt family. ABC News getting a tour from Leslie Jones and Trudy Cokes, historians for the Newport, Rhode Island estate, one of several historic mansions here.

Speaker 3: There aren't that many guest rooms. The way that this house is designed and the society it was designed, you're in Newport, you should already know everybody else who's here.

Speaker 1: This massive summer home, now a museum, a relic from the Gilded Age, a time in this country from the late 1870s to the turn of the century, during which a small group of powerful families like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, and Carnegies amassed extreme wealth. And behind the luxury of the Breakers, a staff of 40 servants, all of this for the family to spend just two months of the year here.

Speaker 4: It's an age of unprecedented wealth creation, of amazing technological innovation, like the advent of electricity, electric lights. We don't think of railroads as high-tech, but they were high-tech in those days. That changed everything. Yeah, the population is booming. America's rolling westward, so it's a great age of expansion, growth, optimism, dynamism.

Speaker 1: From HBO's series, The Gilded Age. This is the age of achievement, Mr. Russell. To the 2022 Met Gala Red Carpet's Gilded Age dress code, the era and its excess still carries influence. Historian Edward O'Donnell says as much as the Gilded Age is defined by its extravagance, it's also defined by feelings of uncertainty, driven by the working class.

Speaker 4: It's a time of unprecedented social turmoil. From 1880 to 1900, there are 37,000 strikes. And there's also great turmoil about immigration, about political corruption. If you don't like a particular politician, you can vote them out of office. But how do you vote Vanderbilt or Carnegie or Rockefeller out of their position? You can't. They can shape politics, get tariff policy in their favor, get labor laws stymied. The Gilded Age is very much a time of, sort of a tale of two kinds of America. One where things are going great, and at the same time, there's a lot that people are saying, we seem to be heading in a really dark direction.

Speaker 1: Some historians believe we could be experiencing a second Gilded Age.

Speaker 4: We did many things policy and law-wise in the 1980s, 90s that changed the game, that changed our tax structure, changed, almost eradicated regulation of Wall Street, and so that the rules have changed in the favor of the super wealthy.

Speaker 5: The Golden Age of America begins right now.

Speaker 1: The nation's wealthiest donating to and attending President Trump's inauguration.

Speaker 5: We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.

Speaker 1: And some securing positions of political influence.

Speaker 6: This is an order creating and implementing the Department of Governmental Efficiency, known as DOGE.

Speaker 1: Okay, that's a big one. Unions battling big corporations.

Speaker 7: At some point, you have to say no, we're not going to take this anymore.

Speaker 1: Concerns about wealth inequality.

Speaker 8: An oligarchy is taking shape in America, of extreme wealth, power, and influence. That literally threatens our entire democracy. Our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

Speaker 9: Do you want to put out some Cheez-Its? We have probably seen a 30% increase in our grocery bill in the last two years. My wages in a full-time capacity should be able to support a basic level of life that I don't feel like we're able to do right now.

Speaker 1: Anxiety over immigration.

Speaker 5: I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted.

Speaker 6: And concern over public discourse. We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S. The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created.

Speaker 1: Looking at wealth distribution here in the U.S., the top 10% of households hold 67.3% of the country's wealth, compared to the 2.4% held by the bottom 50% of households. The combined net worths of just the top five richest Americans on the Forbes list, reaching well over $1 trillion. Three of those men present for Trump's inauguration.

Speaker 10: This is a level of inequality that is unsustainable, that's bad for our economy, and that's bad for everyone.

Speaker 1: Janelle Jones is vice president of policy and advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and was the first black woman to serve as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. She believes the way to level the playing field is through empowering unions.

Speaker 10: Over the past 45 years, CEOs have made over 1,000 times more than a typical worker. For the typical worker, the pay has only increased 24%. Last year, CEOs made more than 300 times the typical worker. In occupations and industries where unions are strong, workers are earning more money, they have more access to benefits. We also see that inequality is less in these occupations and industries. It's less between men and women, and it's less between races.

Speaker 1: Depending on who you ask on the political spectrum,

Speaker 4: labor is a bad word. Yeah, I mean, labor unions have been demonized for a long, long time. 15 years. By the 1980s, certainly a lot of Americans, without knowing why, were just like, yeah, unions are bad. Right. I can't say why they're bad, but I just know they're bad or they're not good.

Speaker 1: O'Donnell says many of those thoughts were spread by big business in an effort to stop new unions from forming. But now, opinions are shifting. However, there are still deep criticisms about unions and their effectiveness, as some negotiations fail to lead to big gains or workplace changes.

Speaker 7: Corporate greed has got to go.

Speaker 1: And newly formed unions struggle to even get corporations to the bargaining table.

Speaker 11: The wages, the hours that we get working for Amazon just simply aren't enough to get by in today's economy.

Speaker 1: How did we get out of the Gilded Age

Speaker 4: and what came after? The reforms really start coming in the early 20th century, where there's a growing consensus that we need to somehow put up some guardrails, some rules about how Wall Street operates, about how trusts and corporations operate, about how workers are treated. So in the early 20th century, you see the first forms of labor law, which is establishing shorter hours, eventually the eight-hour day, establishing workers' compensation.

Speaker 10: The economy is not some force that rises above us. It's not something that dictates what we can do. The economy is for us. We make the rules, we set the parameters, and we know that we can change those rules if we needed to.

Speaker 1: With President Trump just getting back into office, it's yet to be seen how exactly he will work with the world's wealthiest or its most in need. But he is promising a stronger economy.

Speaker 5: With oil prices going down, I'll demand that interest rates drop immediately, and likewise, they should be dropping all over the world.

Speaker 1: Today, the Breaker Stands is a very real representation of not just remarkable design and spectacular wealth, but could also be a cautionary tale for the future. No longer owned by those once-powerful families, the Breakers and 10 other properties were all sold or gifted to a preservation society.

Speaker 2: They were trying to establish themselves as part of the nobility class in this country.

Speaker 1: With the Gilded Age, the influence they were having over the people in this country because of their wealth was remarkable. And this was just like a big flex.

Speaker 3: Exactly, to use a contemporary term, a huge flex.

Speaker 1: Historians say history doesn't repeat itself, but it can certainly rhyme.