by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

The Gilded Age was the era when modern America was born. Roughly spanning the quarter-century between the end of Reconstruction around 1876 (when Mark Twain's book, The Gilded Age was published) and the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, this period saw nearly every aspect of life in the United States transformed in important ways; economically, politically, culturally and spiritually, Americans made a distinct, if not always clean, break from the past. At the same time, especially in the last decade of the century, many Americans became alarmed by the monster they believed they had unleashed, and they wrestled with fundamental questions regarding what the born-again union ought to become.

Economically, the United States during the Gilded Age went from being a largely agricultural nation to one that was increasingly fueled by industry. This shift occurred not because of a decline in agricultureAmerica was well on its way to becoming the world's breadbasket at this timebut because of a growth in manufacturing unparalleled in the history of the world. Several factors made this industrial revolution possible. First, there was the opening of the West after the Civil War and the discovery of massive amounts of natural resources, including iron ore, copper, coal and oil. Second, a madcap rush to build railroads connecting West to East accelerated the movement of critical raw materials into, and manufactured products out of, industrial centers such as Chicago and Cleveland. Third, technology developed at a feverish pace, with 1.6 million patents granted in the last two decades of the century, many for machines that speeded production and many others for new consumer products such as the phonograph. Fourth, advances in communications (the telegraph and telephone) and energy sources (oil and electricity) allowed businesses to run ever more efficiently. Finally, a plenitude of cheap immigrant and rural transplant labor allowed businesses to expand at lightning speed.

Hand-in-hand with this rapid industrialization was the development of enormous transnational corporations such as U. S. Steel and Standard Oil and an ultra-rich class of bankers and captains of industry, neither of which had previously existed in the United States. Business before the Civil War had been primarily a regional affair, but the same conditions that enabled industrialization to occur at such a rapid pace also allowed men such as Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie and Morgan to gain control of

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>