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 entire industries from the mines to the marketplace. As a gaping disparity opened between the wealthiest class and the poorest, ideologies to rationalize the new state of affairs gained currency among elites, including the principle of laissez-faire, the Gospel of Wealth, and Social Darwinism.
One result of the rise of large trusts in many industries was that many people who might have owned small businesses in the past ended up working for the large corporations. At the same time, many members of another class of people who had formerly been self-sufficientsmall farmersbegan leaving the farms for greater economic opportunities in the cities. Many of these farmers, too, went to work for the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie. This shift from an economy where many, if not most Americans, were independent agents to one where most people were employed for a wage gave rise to yet another phenomenon that had been seen rarely if ever in the United States up to that time: labor organization and labor violence. Resistance to the excesses of capitalism took many forms during the Gilded Age, from trade unions in many industries to the formation of a Socialist Party. Physical violence instigated by both employers and labor rattled cities large and small, with labor taking most of the lumps. Chicago's bloody Haymarket Riot of 1886 spelled the end of the eight-hour day movement for decades to come.
Employers received steady assistance in their efforts to suppress hostile labor activity from the power of the state. Indeed, political power at every level of government tended to align with the interests of business wherever business could make its influence felt (which appears to have been just about everywhere). If it is an oversimplification to say that politics during the Gilded Age existed solely to further the cause of corporate expansion and line the pockets of the politicians themselves, such an assertion is not far from the truth. The federal government gave millions of acres to railroads with no oversight as to the quality of the track; looked the other way as would-be monopolists exploited their workers and their customers; stole land from Native American tribes on trivial pretenses; and raised tariffs on imports in key industries even as it took every opportunity to flood foreign markets with American goods. State and big city governments were largely controlled by party machines that bought votes for beer and chose their candidates in the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms. Cronyism and corruption ruled the day. A leading indicator of the state of politics during the Gilded Age is the roster of Presidents who came to power during these decadesGrant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison and McKinleyall of them (with the possible exception of McKinley) either inept, ineffective, or completely compromised.
All of these changesthe shift from a rural agriculture to urban industry, the rise of massive corporations and the average person's loss of self-sufficiency, the specter of labor violence and radical politics, and the widespread corruption of the governmentcombined to engender a sense of anxiety in many Americans. This anxiety was further heightened by several other factors: the staggering influx of immigrants from Eastern Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish Europe that threatened to undermine New York and other Eastern cities; the closure of the frontier as of the 1890 census; economic instability, including two depressions in the span of twenty years; the replacement of traditional Calvinism by a more secularized brand of Christianity; the advent of the "new woman," which undermined Victorian gender roles; the influx of freed slaves and their descendants into the Northern cities, and the violent repression of African-Americans in the South; America's fledgling efforts to establish itself as an imperial power in Latin America and East Asia; and the explosive development of new technologies that altered the cultural landscape on almost a yearly basis. As the Gilded Age entered its final years, Americans from all walks of life began making disparate but often incisive efforts to counteract many of the perceived ill effects of the new social and economic order. Agricultural reformers in the Western states formed the short-lived Populist movement, which sent tremors through the political establishment in the early 1890s and cleared a path for reform-minded activists and politicians to follow in the remainder of the decade. Urban reformers, who would later come to be labeled with the generic term of Progressives, assembled an array of new tools to bring to their various causes, including investigative "yellow" journalism and naturalist literature, new social sciences including sociology and economics, social laboratories such as Jane Addams's Hull House, and a host of reform-minded legislation.
As this analysis suggests, there have been few periods in United States history more wrenching on a personal level and more revolutionary on a social level than the Gilded Age. A measure of just how profoundly the nation changed during those years is the fact that despite a Great Depression, two World Wars, the Cold War, the Civil Rights and Vietnam struggles, and a century of breathless technological change, the America that existed at the turn of the Twentieth Century still bears more than a passing resemblance to our own. The Civil War may have sounded the death-knell of the America envisioned and experienced by the Founding Fathers; but the Gilded Age was the crucible that forged the nation we live in to this day, and for that reason it commands our close attention.