Gilded Age
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In American history the "Gilded Age" refers to the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1901, which saw unprecedented economic, territorial, industrial, and population expansion. The era overlaps with Reconstruction (which ended in 1877) and includes two major depressions, the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893. The era was characterized by an unusually rapid growth of railroads, small factories, banks, stores, mines and other family-owned enterprises, together with dramatic expansion into highly fertile western farmlands. Only the South lagged in prosperity, as it fell further and further behind. There was a great increase in ethnic diversity from immigrants drawn by the easy availability of jobs and farmland.
The entrepreneurs of the Second Industrial Revolution created to rich industrial cities in the Northeast brimming with new factories, and to the rise of super-rich industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Their critics called them " robber barons" to delegitimize their prestige. There was a small, growing labor union movement, led by Terrence Powderly and Samuel Gompers.
The politics of the era, known as the Third Party System, featured very close contests between the Republicans and Democrats, with occasional third parties. Nearly all the eligible men were political partisans, and turnout often exceeded 90% in entire states.
The wealth of the period is highlighted by the American upper class's opulent self-indulgence, but also the rise of the American philanthropy (Andrew Carnegie called it the "Gospel of Wealth") that endowed thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphony orchestras, and charities. The Beaux-Arts architectural idiom of the era clothed public buildings in Neo-Renaissance architecture.
The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that historians see the new Progressive Era.
The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), employing the ironic difference between a "gilded" and a Golden Age.
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[edit] Agriculture and the American west
The Gilded Age was rooted in heavy American industrialization, the construction of railroads and the expansion of the American West.
The era saw a dramatic expansion in agriculture, especially in the Plains states, which attracted large numbers of immigrants from Europe, especially German Americans and Scandinavian Americans. The government issued free 160 acre (64 hectare) farms to families moving to the west under the Homestead Act. Even larger numbers purchased lands at very low interest from the new railroads, which were trying to create markets. This expansion into the west created a need for workers in the area to build railroads and facilitate trade. The number of farms tripled from 2.0 million in 1860 to 6.0 million in 1905. The number of people living on farms grew from about 10 million in 1860 to 22 million in 1880 to 31 million in 1905 (then leveled off, and started declining after 1940). The value of farms soared from $8.0 billion in 1860 to $30 billion in 1906.[1] A few thousand of the Native Americans resisted, notably the Sioux, who were reluctant to settle on reservations.
[edit] Industrial and technological advances
During the Gilded Age, American manufacturing production surpassed the combined total of Great Britain, Germany, and France. Railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening new areas to commercial farming, creating a truly national marketplace and inspiring a boom in coal mining and steel production. The voracious appetite for capital of the great trunk railroads facilitated the consolidation of the nation's financial market in Wall Street. By 1900 the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few large corporations, called "trusts", dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meatpacking, and the manufacture of agriculture machinery. Other major components of this infrastructure were the new methods for fabricating steel: the Bessemer and the Siemens steel making processes. The first billion-dollar corporation was United States Steel, formed by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901, who purchased and consolidated steel forms built by Andrew Carnegie and many other entrepreneurs.
Increased mechanization of industry is a major mark of the Gilded Age's search for cheaper ways to create more product. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that worker efficiency in steel could be improved through the use of machines to make fewer motions in less time. His redesign increased the speed of factory machines and the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor. This mechanization transformed the factory floor from a collaboration of tradesmen to an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew. Engineering colleges are established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Railroads invented complex bureaucratic systems, using middle managers. Career tracks are invented for skilled blue collar jobs and for white collar managers, starting in railroads and expanding into finance, manufacturing and trade. Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities. (The South had very few cities.)
The United States became a world leader in applied technology. From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued for new inventions—over ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years. George Westinghouse invented air brakes for trains (making them both safer and faster). Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary telephone came into use, and Theodore Vail establishes the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Thomas A. Edison invented the integrated power plant capable of lighting multiple buildings simultaneously, and founded General Electric corporation. Oil became important, beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil Company to consolidate the processing and sale of oil products.
[edit] Politics of the Gilded Age
Americans' sense of civic virtue was shocked by the scandals associated with the Reconstruction era, including corrupt state governments, massive fraud in cities controlled by machines, political payoffs to secure government contracts (especially the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal regarding the financing of the transcontinental railroad), and widespread evidence of government corruption during the Ulysses S. Grant administration (see Whiskey Ring). Led by the Bourbon Democrats, especially Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, there was a call for reform, such as Civil Service Reform. More generally there was a sense that government intervention in the economy resulted in favoritism, bribery, kickbacks, inefficiency, waste and corruption. The Bourbon Democrats led the call for a free market, low tariffs, low taxes, less spending and, in general, a Laissez-Faire (hands-off) government. They also denounced imperialism and overseas expansion. Many business and professional people supported this approach, although most Republicans continued to argue for a high protective tariff to encourage rapid growth of industry and protect America's high wages against the low wage system in Europe. Labor activists and agrarians expressed the same spirit but focused their attacks on monopolies and railroads as unfair to the little man.
In politics the two parties engaged in very elaborate get-out-the vote campaigns that succeeded in pushing turnout to 80%, 90% and even higher. It was financed by the "spoils system" whereby the winning party distributed most local, state and national government jobs, and many government contracts, to its loyal supporters. Large cities were dominated by political machines, in which constituents supported a candidate in exchange for anticipated patronage—favors back from the government, once that candidate was elected—and candidates were selected based on their willingness to play along. Presidential elections between the two major parties (the Republicans and Democrats), were closely contested, and Congress was marked by political stalemate. Mudslinging became an increasingly popular way of gaining advantage at the polls, and Republicans employed an election tactic known as "waving the bloody shirt". Candidates, especially when combating corruption charges, would remind voters that the Republican Party had saved the nation in the Civil War. During the 1870s voters were repeatedly reminded that the Democrats had been responsible for the bloody upheaval, an appeal that attracted many Union veterans to the Republican camp. The Republicans consistently carried the North in presidential elections. The South, on the other hand, became the Solid South, nearly always voting Democratic. The political humiliations of Reconstruction were still fresh in many minds. Conversely, the Democrats invoked images of the "lost cause" and the glorious "stars and bars" in much the same way Republicans "waved the bloody shirt". Overall, Republican and Democratic political platforms remained remarkably constant during the years before 1900. The negativity and ambiguity of politics began a shift in the press to yellow journalism, in which sensationalism and sentimental stories took as prominent a role as factual news.
[edit] Influential figures
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were the two most influential industrialists during the Gilded Age. Carnegie was born into a poor Scottish family; at age 14 he became secretary to railroad manager Thomas A. Scott in Pittsburgh. In 1870 Carnegie erected his first blast furnace. Both Carnegie and Rockefeller went on to found philanthropic institutions. Carnegie created the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now part of Carnegie-Mellon University) to upgrade craftsmen into trained engineers and scientists. Carnegie built hundreds of public libraries, and several major research centers and foundations. Rockefeller retired from the oil business in 1897 and devoted the next 40 years to giving away most of his money using systematic philanthropy, especially in the areas of education, medicine and race relations.
[edit] Immigration
During the Gilded Age, approximately 10 million immigrants came to the United States, many in search of religious freedom and greater prosperity. The population surge in major U.S. cities as a result of immigration gave cities an even stronger impact on government, attracting power-hungry politicians and entrepreneurs. Pressuring voters or falsifying ballots was par for the course for many politicians, who often sought power only to exploit their constituents. To accommodate the influx of people into the U.S., the federal government built Ellis Island in 1892 near the Statue of Liberty. To alleviate health concerns, the government mandated in 1892 that all immigrants were to undergo physical exams. Acceptance into the U.S. therefore depended on your clean bill of health; those with diseases were either quarantined or deported.
Human nature compels people to associate with those who share common traits, and immigrants were no exception. This prompted the establishment of concentrated ethnic groups throughout the nation. Groups of Poles and Italians settled in places such as Buffalo and Cleveland. Not surprisingly, few immigrants went to the South, which offered very few jobs to newcomers. Similar attitudes were found in other areas that had restrictive covenants. These were discriminatory, but legal, agreements among homeowners not to sell real estate to certain groups of people. The limited availability of decent housing and employment often locked immigrants into the lower class.
[edit] Chinese immigrants
The construction of the Central Pacific railroad in California and Nevada was handled largely by Chinese laborers. In the 1870 census there were 58,000 Chinese men and 4,000 women in the entire country; these numbers grew to 100,000 men and 4,000 women in the 1880 census. [2] Labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor strongly opposed the presence of Chinese labor. Immigrants from China were not allowed to become citizens until 1950; however, their children born in the U.S. were full citizens. Congress banned further Chinese immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, The Chinese Exclusion Act act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States, but some students and businessmen were allowed in.
Subsequent to the Act, the Chinese population declined to only 37,000 in 1940. Many returned to China (a greater proportion than most other immigrant groups) yet most of them stayed in the United States. They were highly unwelcome in many areas, and resettled in the "Chinatown" districts of large cities.
[edit] Labor unions
Modern labor unions were born when wage labor prevailed in the labor market. The unions aimed to maintain the dignity of American laborers. Strong localized unions appeared after the Civil War to help workers through economic strife, but later became conduits to voice worker's demands such as shorter workdays and higher wages. One of the earlier attempts at a national union was the National Labor Union, formed in Baltimore in 1866—Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) followed.
Pullman, a maker of luxury rail cars, created a factory with a town surrounding it to bring workers closer to the factories. Workers soon became dissatisfied with working conditions however, and revolted. Pullman brought in the Pinkerton Detective Agency to defend the factory and subdue the riots. In response, Eugene Debs told railroad workers (all members of the American Railroad Union) to stop handling Pullman rail cars, effectively halting the movement of passenger trains across the U.S.
Pullman's staff pored over federal laws and regulations, eventually discovering that if they attached a federally owned post-car to Pullman trains, it would be a federal offense to stop them. A lawsuit followed wherever workers and union members halted federal cars. A significant court decision was issued in 1895 In re Debs. The decision stated that the unions were companies, and that under the Sherman Antitrust Act companies could not conspire to constrain or control trade. It was concluded that Debs's attempt to stop the movement of Pullman's trains was a conspiracy to constrain trade. Debs was put in jail and received no support from other Union supporters, including Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL. Debs spent six months in jail, leaving the American Railway Union, of which he was the chair, in shambles. Employees of Pullman were forced to sign anti-union, low-paying contracts and their labour conditions worsened. Debs went on to found the Socialist Party of America, an offshoot of his earlier Social Democratic Party, which advocated socialist ideals.
[edit] References
- Alan Brinkley; "The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume II: From 1865" McGraw Hill Higher Education 2004. textbook
- Buenker, John D. and Joseph Buenker, eds. Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Sharpe Reference, 2005. 1256 pp. in three volumes. ISBN 0-7656-8051-3; 900 essays by 200 scholars
- Cohen, Nancy; The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 University of North Carolina Press, 2002; history of ideas
- Faulkner, Harold U.; Politics, Reform, and Expansion, 1890-1900 (1959), scholarly survey, strong on economic and political history
- Fine, Sidney. Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901. University of Michigan Press, 1956. History of ideas
- Garraty, John A. The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890, 1968)scholarly survey, strong on ecomic and political history
- Jensen, Richard. "Democracy, Republicanism and Efficiency: The Values of American Politics, 1885-1930," in Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger, eds, Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (U of Kansas Press, 2001) pp 149-180; online version
- Josephson, Matthew; The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861- 1901 (1934), business history from the Left
- Morgan, H. Wayne ed. The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal Syracuse University Press 1970. interpretive essays
- Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878 (1933)(ISBN 0-403-01127-2), social history
- Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Rise of the City: 1877-1898 (1933), social history
- Shannon, Fred A. The Farmer's Last Frontier: 1860-1897 (1945) survey of economic history
- Smythe, Ted Curtis; The Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900 Praeger. 2003.
[edit] See also
- History of the United States (1865-1918)
- Andrew Carnegie
- Horace E. Dodge
- John F. Dodge
- Henry Ford
- J. P. Morgan
- Henry Huttleston Rogers
- John D. Rockefeller
- Vanderbilt family
[edit] External links
- History of Carnegie-Mellon University
- More general information to the Gilded Age on the Library of Congress site, "America's Library".
- New Spirits: A Web Site on Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 by Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College
- WWW-VL: History: United States: The Gilded Age, 1876-1900 by Robert Spencer, University of Southern Maine. An extensive collection of materials.
- America's Wealth in the Gilded Age accessed March 29, 2006
