The Gilded Age
By the 1870s cotton production had rebounded. By the time Reconstruction ended in 1877 cotton production had resumed ante-Bellum levels, and by the end of the 19th Century, Southern cotton production was more than twice ante-Bellum levels. The insatiable demand for field labor that had fueled the growth of the slave power in the decades before the War returned with a vengence.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, "Jim Crow" laws effectively disenfranchised Negroes in the South. They were usually poor and uneducated and to many people their color was a natural barrier. "Jim Crow" laws effectively disenfranchised Negroes and made them politically impotent in the South. In the big cities of the North as well as the South they had to take the least attractive and menial jobs and live in segregated areas — and discrimination seemed inescapable.
The growth of industry and a wave of immigrants marked this period in American history. The production of iron and steel rose dramatically and western resources like lumber, gold, and silver increased the demand for improved transportation. Railroad development boomed as trains moved goods from the resource-rich West to the East. Steel and oil were in great demand. All this industry produced a lot of wealth for a number of businessmen like John D. Rockefeller (in oil) and Andrew Carnegie (in steel), known as robber barons (people who got rich through ruthless business deals). The Gilded Age gets its name from the many great fortunes created during this period and the way of life this wealth supported.
Mark Twain called the late 19th century the "Gilded Age" - synonymous with get rich quick, graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. Gilding entails coating a base surface with a thin gold leaf, to give a bright, pleasing, or specious aspect.
Mark Twain and his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, collaborated on a novel that became The Gilded Age, the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator. The central plot involves a that family lives in constant expectation of riches. The title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. As satire and a prescient observation of the cult of overnight fame, and social and political mores in Washington, The Gilded Age has aged very well in the years since its publication in 1873. Historians have adopted "the gilded age" as a descriptive title for the era.
Between two great wars — the Civil War and the Great War — the United States of America came of age. In a period of less than 50 years it was transformed from a rural republic to an urban nation. The frontier vanished. Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities, and vast agricultural holdings marked the land.
In the years between 1870 and 1915 the value of goods produced in American factories increased more than 700 per cent, to more than $24,000,000,000 in 1915. During that same period the number of employees engaged in manufacturing increased from 2,000,000 to 7,000,000 and their wages rose from about $620,000,000 to more than $4,000,000,000. More important to the average American, however, was the fact that the new industrialism produced more commodities and more kinds of commodities and could produce these at lower prices.
With this economic growth and affluence came corresponding problems. Nationwide, a few businesses came to dominate whole industries, either independently or in combination with others. Working conditions were often poor. Cities grew so quickly they could not properly house or govern their growing populations.
“The Civil War,” says one writer, “cut a wide gash through the history of the country; it dramatized in a stroke the changes that had begun to take place during the preceding 20 or 30 years. ...” War needs had enormously stimulated manufacturing, speeding an economic process based on the exploitation of iron, steam, and electric power, as well as the forward march of science and invention. In the years before 1860, 36,000 patents were granted; in the next 30 years, 440,000 patents were issued, and in the first quarter of the 20th century, the number reached nearly a million.
As early as 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse had perfected electrical telegraphy; soon afterward distant parts of the continent were linked by a network of poles and wires. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell exhibited a telephone instrument; within half a century, 16 million telephones would quicken the social and economic life of the nation. The growth of business was speeded by the invention of the typewriter in 1867, the adding machine in 1888, and the cash register in 1897. The linotype composing machine, invented in 1886, and rotary press and paper-folding machinery made it possible to print 240,000 eight-page newspapers in an hour. Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp eventually lit millions of homes. The talking machine, or phonograph, was perfected by Edison, who, in conjunction with George Eastman, also helped develop the motion picture. These and many other applications of science and ingenuity resulted in a new level of productivity in almost every field.
Concurrently, the nation’s basic industry — iron and steel — forged ahead, protected by a high tariff. The iron industry moved westward as geologists discovered new ore deposits, notably the great Mesabi range at the head of Lake Superior, which became one of the largest producers in the world. Easy and cheap to mine, remarkably free of chemical impurities, Mesabi ore could be processed into steel of superior quality at about one-tenth the previously prevailing cost.
By the late nineteenth century the wage-labor relationship between employers and workers expanded and the United States can be said to have become a fully industrialized nation. From the 1870s until the beginning of the Second World War, a shift occurred in the organization of work and the structure of labor markets with more jobs reduced to common, semi-skilled labor and control of the labor process concentrated among foreman and their employers (Gordon et al. 1982:3). The Gilded Age, representing the beginning of this period, also saw the growth of middle-class professions like engineers and managers. At the same time, capital and production became increasingly concentrated.
The years between 1884 and 1900 were years of rising protest and demands for reform. While this period itself produced few substantial changes it did lay the foundation for the reforms of the Progressive Era. The laws passed during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, while often ineffective, did at least attempt to prevent further economic and political abuses.
It was during this period that the divergent protests of various groups found a degree of political success in the Populist party. Although the conservative influence predominated, by the end of the century the issue of the free coinage of silver and demands for changes in the government's economic policies had been effectively presented and had received strong political support.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
