Gilded Age

Named after an 1873 social satire by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the Gilded Age encompasses the years from the 1870s to 1900. Scholars tend to see the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction as important contributors to the transformations that took place in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Congressional laws helped lay the groundwork for change. Whereas the Homestead Act (1862) opened the West for settlement by individual farmers, other laws, such as the Railroad Enabling Act (1866), the Desert Land Grant Act (1877), and the Stone and Timber Land Act (1878), transferred millions of acres of land and the resources and raw materials below ground into the hands of cattlemen, railroads, and mining and land development companies. Railroad expansion in combination with government land policies and the breaking of Native American resistance on the Plains in the 1870s and 1880s opened up the trans-Mississippi West for settlement and economic usage.

Constitutional change, too, contributed to this process. Between 1875 and 1900 the Supreme Court removed many state laws restricting interstate commerce but also blocked federal attempts at regulation. The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887, but its limited powers were further circumscribed by Court decisions. Legal change helped to create a political environment in which forces of social change could unfold.

Innovations in manufacturing and communication joined by demographic changes led to a fusion of population growth, urbanization, and industrialization. Technological changes, such as the introduction of the Bessemer converter in steelmaking; the telegraph and the telephone, the latter invented in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell; the discovery of electricity as an energy source by Thomas A. Edison; and developments in transportation and mass transit made possible the concentration of manufacturing consumption in cities. After 1880, the socalled "new immigration" from southern and southeastern Europe along with rural-urban migration within the United States provided workers and consumers for burgeoning urban marketplaces. Mass marketing companies like I. M. Singer, mail-order houses like Sears, Roebuck, and department stores like Wanamaker's catered to American consumer needs. By 1900, participation in national and urban markets was no longer a matter of choice.

Rapidly advancing industrialization led to the emergence of economies of scale. In 1850, the average capital investment in a company amounted to $700,000. In 1900, average investment had risen to $1. 9 million. To remain competitive and to satisfy investors and shareholders, companies needed to increase the return on investments. Manufacturers began to replace craft techniques with routinized and segmented work processes aided by new production technologies. New technologies enabling manufacturers to produce goods and to provide services at an unprecedented scale accelerated the swings in the boom-and-bust cycle of the U. S. economy.

A cycle of global capitalist expansion begun in the 1820s came to a halt in the 1870s and crashed in the 1890s. In 1873, the Credit Mobilier scandal and the collapse of Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific Railroad resulted in a recession from which the country only recovered four years later in 1877. In May 1893, the collapse of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad and of the National Cordage Company led to a stock market crash and a prolonged recession. Before the year was over, five hundred banks and sixteen thousand businesses had failed. At the height of the depression four million workers lost their jobs.

What had happened? New technologies of mass production and mass distribution had consistently driven down prices. Between 1873 and the late 1890s, commodity prices had dropped by 80 percent. At the same time, "sound money" politics had kept the currency supply tight, putting the squeeze on workers and farmers especially.

Banking and monetary policies contributed to this problem. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 introduced order into banking through a federally chartered banking system but also kept the money supply tight. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which enabled the government to buy silver in proportion to gold, was designed to increase the money supply, but it was repealed at the most inappropriate moment, the onset of the depression in 1893. The economic policies of the presidencies from Ulysses S. Grant to William McKinley were grounded in fiscal conservatism, economic individualism, and market liberalism, which neither anticipated such problems nor adequately solved them.

Workers and farmers met such policies with some resistance. Mostly unsuccessfully, workingmen challenged railroads and manufacturers in the Great Strike of 1877, the 1886 railroad strike, the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the 1894 Pullman Strike. Workers organized in the Knights of Labor and after 1889 in the newly founded American Federation of Labor, which advocated a more cautious business unionism. Agrarian resistance gained momentum with the People's, or Populist, Party, founded in 1890. The Populists experienced a meteoric rise in political fortunes at the ballot boxes in several southern and western states. Although the Populists were successful in several state and gubernatorial elections, their attempt to take control of the presidency through a "fusion ticket" with the Democrats failed in 1896, and the party disappeared thereafter.

Economic changes may have helped undermine support for such a third party as they aided in the recovery. In the late 1890s, poor European harvests increased demand for grain and cereals, and new gold discoveries in Alaska, Colorado, South Africa, and Australia created enough inflation to raise prices out of the doldrums.

This era that experienced social and economic change on a massive scale was marked by many contradictions. Along with the beginning of the modern American labor movement and a resurgence of the movement for women's rights, the age saw the implementation of rigid race segregation in the South through so-called Jim Crow laws, sanctioned by the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Gilded Age also witnessed the emergence of the United States as an imperialist foreign power. Desire for greatness on the seas, partially spawned by Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), led the United States into war with Spain in 1898 and into a subsequent war in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. The Gilded Age saw the birth pangs of the United States as a global power, an urban, industrial society, and a modern, liberal corporatist state. Many problems remained unsolved, however, for the Progressive Era and New Deal reform policies to address.

Bibliography

Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. 3d ed. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

Cherny, Robert W. American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868– 1900. Wheeling, Ill. : Harlan Davidson, 1997.

Faulkner, Harold Underwood. Politics, Reform, and Expansion, 1890–1900. New York: Harper, 1959.

Garraty, John A. The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

Summers, Mark Wahlgren. The Gilded Age, or, the Hazard of New Functions. Upper Saddle River, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1997.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

—Thomas Winter

Wikipedia: Gilded Age

"The Breakers", a gilded-age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.

In American history, the "Gilded Age" refers to unprecedented wealth polarization in the U.S. and wasteful displays of wealth and excessive opulence of America's upper-class during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, from the 1870s to the 1890s. The wealth polarization derived from industrial and population expansion. Industrialization during this era saw unusually rapid growth of railroads, small factories, banks, stores, mines and other enterprises and dramatic expansion into highly fertile western farmlands. Ethnic diversity increased through immigration. Steamship and railroad companies promoted immigration by emphasizing the availability of jobs and farmland. The era overlaps with Reconstruction (which ended in 1877) and includes the Panic of 1873.

The entrepreneurs of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and contributed to the creation of an ethnically diverse industrial working class which produced the wealth owned by the rising super-rich industrialists and financiers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, and J.P. Morgan. Their critics called them "robber barons", referring to their use of overpowering and sometimes unethical financial manipulations. There was a small, growing labor union movement, led in part by Samuel Gompers, who created the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

It featured very close contests between the Republicans and Democrats, with occasional third parties. Nearly all the eligible men were political partisans, and voter turnout often exceeded 90% in some 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 came the Progressive Era. This period overlaps with the nadir of American race relations, during which African Americans lost many of the civil rights obtained during the Reconstruction period. Increased racist violence, as well as exile of African Americans from the Southern states to the Midwest, started as soon as 1879.

The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The term originates in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess." The Gilded Age, like gilding the lily (which is already beautiful and not in need of further adornment), was excessive and wasteful -- it was a period characterized by showy displays of wealth and excessive opulence.

Agriculture and the American west

During the era there was 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 160 acre (64 ha) tracts either free or at nominal cost to qualifying persons 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. 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.

Industrial and technological advances

Main article: Second Industrial Revolution

The Gilded Age was rooted in industrialization, especially heavy industry like factories, railroads and coal mining. 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 firms 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 made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. Machine shops grew rapidly, and they comprised highly skilled workers and engineers. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew. Engineering colleges were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Railroads invented complex bureaucratic systems, using middle managers, and set up explicit career tracks. They hired young men at age 18-21 and promoted them internally until a man reached the status of locomotive engineer, conductor or station agent at age 40 or so. Career tracks were 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 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 established the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Thomas A. Edison invented a remarkable number of electrical devices, as well as the integrated power plant capable of lighting multiple buildings simultaneously; he founded General Electric corporation. Oil became an important resource, beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil Company to consolidate the industry.

Politics

A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to "Blow Over"--"Let Us Prey." Cartoon of New York's Boss Tweed and other Tammany Hall figures, drawn in 1871 by Thomas Nast and published in Harper's Weekly.

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 political 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. 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; they also complained that high tariffs for instance on British steel benefited industrialists like Carnegie more than his employees who even at the time were regarded by many as being pitifully exploited.

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. The best known example of a political machine from this time period is Tammany Hall in New York City, led by Boss Tweed.

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.

Influential figures

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt were amongst the 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 gave away most of their wealth in large scale philanthropy. 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 of his life to giving away most of his money using systematic philanthropy, especially in the areas of education, medicine and race relations. "Commodore" C. Vanderbilt started out as a poor Staten Island farmer boy, then quickly through his sharp wit and lethal business policies built an enormous fortune in steamships and railroading to become the wealthiest man in the world in his day. His descendants and heirs would become famous for their ability to both increase and spend their wealth, building gigantic and lavish mansions and dominating Gilded Age high society.

Immigration

Main article: Immigration to the United States

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 commonplace for 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. After 1892, a short physical examination was given; those with contagious diseases were not admitted. Few immigrants went to the poverty-stricken South.

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 Chinese men and 4 women in the entire country; these numbers grew to 100,000 men and 40,000 women in the 1880 census. ^[2] Labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor strongly opposed the presence of Chinese labor, by reason of both economic competition and race. 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 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. Chinese people were unwelcome in many areas, so they resettled in the "Chinatown" districts of large cities.

Labor unions

The 1894 Pullman strike.

Modern labor unions emerged during the Civil War era. One of the earlier attempts at a national union was the National Labor Union, formed in Baltimore in 1866. The Knights of Labor had success in the late 1880s but then collapsed. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), a coalition of trades unions, became dominant in the 1890s, under Samuel Gompers.

The Pullman factory in Chicago, with a paternalistic policy of company housing, laid off employees during the Panic of 1893 but did not cut rents, angering workers. Eugene Debs moved onto the scene in 1894, ordering his American Railroad Union (ARU) members to stop handling Pullman rail cars, effectively halting the movement of passenger trains across the U.S. The established railway brotherhoods and the AFL rejected the ARU as dual unionism. President Grover Cleveland secured federal court orders to stop blocking the U.S. mail. Debs refused to obey, federal troops broke the illegal strike, and Debs went to prison for six months. Debs later founded the Socialist Party of America, which advocated a peaceful end to capitalism.

Notes

^ Historical Statistics (1975) p. 437 series K1-K16
^ See [1]

References

Peter H. Argersinger; Structure, Process, and Party: Essays in American Political History. (1992) online version
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 online edition
Faulkner, Harold U.; Politics, Reform, and Expansion, 1890-1900 (1959), scholarly survey, strong on economic and political history online edition
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 economic 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
Kleppner; Paul. The Third Electoral System 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures U of North Carolina Press, (1979) online version
Morgan, H. Wayne. From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (1969) online edition
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 online edition
Smythe, Ted Curtis; The Gilded Age Press, 1865-1900 Praeger. 2003. [online edition]

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
Jack Beatty, the author of a recent book about the Gilded Age called "Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865 - 1900" speaks with Jenny Attiyeh in this ThoughtCast interview.

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