>Come on. The 1800s „recessions“ were minuscule at worst compared to today‘s global meltdowns happening every decade. Think about the Asian crisis of the 1990s, the New Economy bubble burst at the beginning of the 2000s, the sub prime crisis 12 years ago and now a post Covid recession.

This is completely wrong. The crash of 1873 began what historians call a 20-year depression. The Panic of 1893 was so serious that when Grover Cleveland needed oral surgery for cancer it was done in secret to avoid further panicking the country. J. P. Morgan basically bailed out the entire US economy in the Panic of 1907.

In all of these cases, labor unrest from the unemployed far exceeded anything seen in any post-WW2 economic crisis in the US. At multiple times the US treasury faced the prospect of being unable to fully redeem demands for gold in exchange for paper money. For the entirety of the Gilded Age, the two main political issues in the US were protectionism and free silver, both fundamentally tied into how the US economy functioned and how the US government paid for itself.