Question

Why the late 1800's were called the "Gilded Age". Do you think this period had a large impact on the United States? If so, why?

Answer 1

The “Gilded Age” refers to the period following Reconstruction, when the American economy grew at its fastest rate in history. The period after Reconstruction, the last few decades of the nineteenth century, was known as the ” Gilded Age,” a term coined by Mark Twain in 1873. The Gilded Age was a period of transformation in the economy, technology, government, and social customs of America. This transformation forged a modern, national industrial society out of what had been small regional communities. The wealth of the period is highlighted by the American upper class’s opulence, along with the rise of American philanthropy, which Andrew Carnegie referred to as the “Gospel of Wealth.” Many new corporations and businesses gave rise to ultra-rich individuals. The period also was marked by social movements for reform, the creation of machine politics, and continued mass immigration. During the Gilded Age, the wealthy provided private money to endow thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphony orchestras, and charities. This period also is referred to as the “nadir of American race relations,” a time when racism in the country is deemed to have been worse than in any other period after the American Civil War.

Historians view the Gilded Age as a period of rapid economic, technological, political, and social transformation. This transformation forged a modern, national industrial society out of what had been small regional communities. By the end of the Gilded Age, the United States was at the top end of the world’s leading industrial nations. In the Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age, the United States became a world power. In the process, there was much dislocation, including the destruction of the Plains Indians, hardening discrimination against African Americans, and environmental degradation. Two extended nationwide economic depressions followed the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893.

During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double those of Germany or France, and 50 percent higher than those of Britain. The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations.

Gilded Age politics, called the “Third Party System,” featured very close contests between the Republicans and Democrats (with occasional third-party political campaigns by farmers and labor unions), civil service reform, organized movements that enlisted many women working for prohibition and women’s suffrage, the strengthening of big city machines, and the transition from party to modern interest-group politics. Nearly all of the eligible men were political partisans, and voter turnout often exceeded 90 percent in some states. The dominant issues were cultural (especially regarding prohibition, education, and ethnic or racial groups), and economic (tariffs and money supply). With the rapid growth of cities, political machines increasingly took control of urban politics. Unions crusaded for the eight-hour working day and the abolition of child labor; middle class reformers demanded civil service reform, prohibition, and women’s suffrage.

Socially, the period was marked by large-scale immigration from Germany and Scandinavia to the industrial centers and to western farmlands, the deepening of religious organizations, the rapid growth of high schools, and the emergence of a managerial and professional middle class. In terms of immigration, after 1880, the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened. The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came individuals from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as from French Canada.