AP Photo/Nati Harnik Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, right, and Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, sit together during an interview with the Fox Business Network. The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age by David Callahan Knopf This article appears in the Summer 2017 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . D uring the first Gilded Age, the public response to the birth of modern philanthropy was intense ambivalence. The nation had long celebrated individual acts of generosity. Many appreciated that the new, enormous industrial fortunes, some of which were channeled into private foundations, could be applied to the pressing social needs brought on by urbanization and mass immigration. But the belief that those piles of wealth threatened the nation’s egalitarian traditions was equally strong. For some of the most astute observers of American society, philanthropy simultaneously represented a social good and a social menace. The...