Gilded Generation

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Term	Period
Awakening Generation	1701–1723
First Great Awakening	1727–1746
Liberty Generation Republican Generation Compromise Generation	1724–1741 1742–1766 1767–1791
Second Great Awakening	1790–1844
Transcendentalist Generation Transcendental Generation Abolitionist Generation Gilded Generation Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 1819–1842 1822–1842 1843–1859
Third Great Awakening	1886–1908
Missionary Generation Lost Generation Interbellum Generation G.I. Generation Greatest Generation	1860–1882 1883–1900 1900–1910 1900–1924 1911–1924
Jazz Age	1929–1956
Silent Generation Baby Boomers Beat Generation Generation Jones	1925–1945 1946–1964 1948–1962 1954–1962
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Baby Busters Generation X MTV Generation	1958–1968 1963–1978 1975–1985
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Boomerang Generation Generation Y Internet Generation New Silent Generation	1977–1986 1979–1999 1988–1999 2000–2020

The Gilded Generation is the name coined by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations for the generation of Americans born from 1822 to 1842. This generation included the California Gold Rush Forty-niners who made circa-1850 San Francisco the most monogenerational city ever seen in the United States and the most anarchic, with no families or laws, just vigilante justice enforced by hangings. It includes most of the veterans of the American Civil War on both sides. It lent its name to the Gilded Age.

This generation lived a hardscrabble childhood around parents distracted by the Second Great Awakening's spiritual upheavals. They came of age amid rising national tempers, torrential immigration, commercialism, Know Nothing politics, and declining college enrollments. As young adults, many pursued fortunes in frontier boom towns or as fledgling "robber barons". Their Lincoln Shouters and Johnny Rebs rode eagerly into a Civil War that left them decimated, Confederates especially. Having learned to detest moral zealotry, their midlife Presidents and industrialists put their stock in Darwinian economics, Boss Tweed politics, Victorian prudery, and Carnegie's Law of Competition. As elders, they landed on the "industrial scrap heap" of an urbanizing economy that was harsh to most old people.

Altogether, there were about 17 million Americans born between 1822 and 1842. 28 percent were immigrants and 10 percent were slaves at some point in their lives.

The Gilded Generation's typical grandparents were of the Republican Generation. Their parents were of the Compromise Generation and Transcendental Generation. Their children were of the Progressive Generation and Missionary Generation and their typical grandchildren were of the Lost Generation.

This generation is fully ancestral; the last member of the Gilded Generation, the American Betsy Baker, died on October 24, 1955.

[edit] Members

Sample members of the Gilded Generation with birth and death dates include:

1823 Boss Tweed (1878)
1823 Dan Rice (1901)
1824 Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (1863)
1826 Matilda Joslyn Gage (1898)
1826 Stephen Foster (1864)
1829 Roscoe Conkling (1888)
1829 Levi Strauss (1902)
1830 James G. Blaine (1893)
1830 Emily Dickinson (1886)
1830 Mother Jones (1930) (immigrant)
c.1831 Sitting Bull (1890)
1832 Louisa May Alcott (1888)
1832 Horatio Alger (1899)
1834 John Wesley Powell (1902)
1835 Andrew Carnegie (1919) (immigrant)
1835 Mark Twain (1910)
1837 J. Pierpont Morgan (1913)
1837 Wild Bill Hickok (1876)
1838 John Wilkes Booth (1865)
1838 John Muir (1914)
1838 John Wanamaker (1922)
1839 Charles Peirce (1914)
1839 John D. Rockefeller (1937)
1839 George Armstrong Custer (1876)
1839 Josiah Willard Gibbs (1903)
1840 Thomas Nast (1902) (immigrant)
1841 Henry Morton Stanley (1904) African explorer ("Dr. Livingston, I presume?")
1841 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1935)
1842 William James (1910)

The Gilded Generation had six U.S. Presidents:

1822 Ulysses S. Grant, 1869-1877 (1885)
1822 Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877-1881 (1893)
1830 Chester A. Arthur, 1881-1885 (1886)
1831 James A. Garfield, 1881 (1881)
1833 Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1893 (1901)
1837 Grover Cleveland, 1885-1889; 1893-1897 (1908)

The Gilded Generation held a plurality in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1893, a plurality in the U.S. Senate from 1873 to 1903, and a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1890 to 1910.