Gilded Generation

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U.S. Generations * = dates disputed, ^ = Strauss and Howe This box: view • talk • edit
Term	Period
^Puritan Generation	1588–1617
Puritan Awakening	1621–1649
^Cavalier Generation ^Glorious Generation ^Enlightenment Generation ^Awakening Generation	1618-1648 1648-1673 1674-1700 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 ^Gilded Generation ^Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 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	1918-1929
Beat Generation Silent Generation Baby Boomers Generation Jones	fl. 1950s-1960s 1925–1945 *1940s-1960s 1954–1965
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Generation X ^13th Generation MTV Generation Boomerang Generation	*1960s–1980s 1961-1981 1974–1985 1977–1986
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Generation Y ^Millennial Generation Echo Boom Generation Internet Generation ^New Silent Generation	1970s–1990s 1982-2000 1982–1995 1994–2001 1990s or 2000s-?

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.