research papers on gilded age

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A guide to american history.

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• HIST 3091 - Poverty and Social Reform in American History
• HIST 48IB - New York, New York: The Empire City from Stuyvesant to Trump
• HIST 2561 - Urban America
• HIST 367 - America in the Age of Inequality: The Gilded Age & the Progressive Era, 1877-1919

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Library of congress subject headings, u.s. newspaper databases, popular periodicals of the era, bound primary source collections & primary source subheadings, primary source databases.

• HIST 4918 Sexuality in the US/ HIST 301U US Sexuality
• HIST 49DM - Advanced Seminar: Meet Me in St. Louis
• HIST 487 - Race and Drugs in American History
• HIS 385 - American Immigration
• HIST 4884 - The Roots of the American Working Classes
• HIST 301U - Historical Methods: US History: Researching & Writing Difficult Local Histories
• American History Collection Development Policy
• Digital Collections Online
• Other Local Libraries
• Online Resources

Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2005) - these three print volumes include list of contributors, thematic essays, illustrations, documents, chronology, bibliography, general index, bibliographical index, etc. 

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A student companion (2006) - eBook; an alphabetical encyclopedia including articles on overall trends (immigration, education, music, sports), social movements (anarchism, child labor movement, consumer movement, conservation movement), terms (armistice, chain store, chautauqua), organizations (American Expeditionary Force, Knights of Labor, Republican party), issues (gender relations, race relations), events (Haymarket Square massacre, Palmer raids, Pullman strike), legal cases (Lochner v. New York), laws (Chinese Exclusion Act, Meat Inspection Act, Selective Service Act), ethnic groups (Mexicans, Chinese), economic issues (trusts, scientific management), and biographies. The articles are cross-referenced and have sources for specific further reading. 

Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History (2010) - (7 print volumes) - Volume 4,  From the Gilded Age through Age of Reform, 1878 to 1920 )

United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918

United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918

United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-  

United States -- Intellectual life -- 1865-1918  

United States -- Economic Conditions -- 1865-1918

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - published quarterly by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, this journal provides original essays, including online projects, and reviews scholarly books on all aspects of U.S. history for the time period from 1865 through 1920. WashU has access to all issues from the first (Jan. 2002) to the most recent indexed in...

America: History & Life (1964-)  contains only journals related history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. 

JSTOR  - multidisciplinary, a lot of full text articles, but subject headings are too broad

Historical American Newspapers (ProQuest)  includes The Atlanta Constitution , Boston Globe , Chicago Tribune , Hartford Courant , Los Angeles Times , The New York Times , San Francisco Chronicle , St. Louis Post-Dispatch , The Wall Street Journal , and The Washington Post

African American Newspapers (ProQuest)  includes Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), Chicago Defender (1909-1975), Cleveland Call & Post (1934-1991), Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), Norfolk Journal & Guide (1916-2003), Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), and Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002).

Chronicling America  - begun in 2005, this website provides access to historic newspapers and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LoC). Its coverage period ranges from 1789 to 1963 and includes over 1000 newspaper titles available from 46 states & Puerto Rico.

Atlantic Monthly - 1862  to  01/31/1905  in  Literature Online (LION)

The Crisis (NAACP, NYC) 11/01/1910 to 12/31/1922 in  Modernist Journals Project

Harper's Weekly - 01/03/1857 to 1912 available through multiple sources  

The Masses - 01/01/1911  to  09/30/1915  in  Modernist Journals Project ; 1913-1917 in Special Collections  

The Nation - 07/06/1865 to 12/27/1877 available electronically through  AAS Historical Periodicals Collection ; all issues in print at West Campus library

School & Society - 1915 to 1972 available in print

The Survey - (WUSTL has Apr. 1909-Dec. 1937) "the primary publication vehicle by which settlement-house residents, professional social workers, amateur reformers, and academic social scientists communicated with one another and exchanged ideas and programs during the Progressive Era." - John D. Buenker

Primary Source Subheadings sources     biographies     maps      periodicals     newspapers     diaries     speeches     pictorial works

personal narratives     directories     interviews     sermons     anecdotes     caricatures and cartoons    fiction 

General (under  United States -- History -- 1865-1921 -- sources ):

America's Gilded Age: An eyewitness history (1992)

The Gilded Age and After; Selected readings in American history (1972)

The American Studies Anthology

Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt through Coolidge, 1901-1929: Debating the issues in pro and con primary documents

Reading the Twentieth Century: Documents in American history

Robber Barons and Radicals  

The American Nation: Primary sources 

The Diplomacy of World Power: The United States, 1889-1920

American Economic Development since 1860

Lifetimes: The Great War to the Stock Market Crash: American history through biography and primary documents

African Americans

Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865-1900

T he Booker T. Washington papers , 1860-1915

The papers of A. Philip Randolph - there are a few items in this collection for the years 1909-1919

Reconstruction, the Negro, and the New South - primary source documents from 1866-1896 

Papers of the NAACP. Part 5, Campaign against residential segregation, 1914-1955  

Anarchist Voices: An oral history of anarchism in America  

The Debates of Liberty: An overview of individualist anarchism, 1881-1908

Emma Goldman: A documentary history of the American years (2003-2012) - print and eBook

Mother Earth - Vol. 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1906) - vol. 12, no. 6 (Aug. 1917); Mother Earth Bulletin - Vol. 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1917) - v. 1, no. 7 (Apr. 1918)

Anti-Asian Sentiment & Movements

China through American Eyes: Early depictions of the Chinese people and culture in the U.S. print media - caricature and cartoons

Racism, Dissent, and Asian Americans from 1850 to the Present: A documentary history

Yellow Peril!: An archive of anti-Asian fear

Anti-Catholicism -- United States -- Sources .

Anti-Imperialist League

The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A documentary history of anti-imperialism in the United States

Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-imperialist writings on the Philippine-American War

Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, 1899

Edmunds, George F. (George Franklin), 1828-1919.   The Insular Cases: The Supreme Court and the Dependencies (Boston: New England Anti-imperialist League, 1901)

López, Sixto.   The "wild tribes" and other Filipinos (Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1911)

Black Nationalism

Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey

Turner, Henry McNeal, 1834-1915.  Respect Black; the writings and speeches of Henry McNeal Turner

Native Americans

Indians of North America -- History -- Sources

From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West that was 

Wounded Knee Massacre, S.D., 1890 -- Personal narratives

A Whirlwind Passed through our Country: Lakota voices of the ghost dance 

Encyclopedia of American Indian removal

Organized Labor

Labor History Documents - two volumes 

United States' Department of Justice  Documents Relating to the IWW, 1910-1916  

Industrial Workers of the World,  The One Big Union Monthly   Vol. 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1, 1919)-v. 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1921)

National Woman's Trade Union League of America, Life and Labor - 1911-1921

The Samuel Gompers Papers  1850-1918

Populism and the election of 1896 (1994)

Populism, its rise and fall (1992)

The Populist Mind (1967)

Pragmatism (sort by "Year")

Progressivism

Hofstadter, Richard. ed.  The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915

Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A reader  

The Reform Spirit in America: A documentation of the pattern of reform in the American republic

The 1912 Election and the Power of Progressivism: A brief history with documents

Progressivism and Postwar Disillusionment, 1898-1928 

Prohibition

Anti-Saloon League of America

Radicalism (broadly conceived)

The Radical Reader: A documentary history of the American radical tradition  - includes utopian visions, suffrage and feminism, land and labor, anarchism, socialism, communism, environmentalism, and the "New Negro"

The Haymarket Affair and the trial of the Chicago anarchists, 1886 : original manuscripts, letters, articles, and printed material of the anarchists and of the State prosecutor, Julius S. Grinnell

Department of Justice Investigative Files, Part I : The Industrial Workers of the World  

State Department Collection of Intelligence, 1915-1927

The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World's Parliament of Religions, 1893

Socialism & Socialist Party (U.S.) 

American Socialist party newspaper - Vol. 1, no. 1 (July 18, 1914)-v. 4, no. 8 (Sept. 8, 1917)

SPUSA Pamphlet collection  

Simons, A. M. (Algie Martin), 1870-1950. Pamphlets on Social Conditions , v.1/2 (1906-1912)

Women - Equal Rights, Feminism, and Suffrage

International Council of Women  

The papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony - microfilm

The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Public Women, Public Words: A documentary history of American feminism   - volume 1, beginnings to 1900

Modern American Women: A documentary history - Pt. 1 Modern Women in the Making, 1890-1920

World War I

World War I (1914-1919) 

The Gilded Age - Spanning from 1865 to 1902, The Gilded Age provides insight into the key issues that shaped America in the late nineteenth century, including race and ethnicity, immigration, labor, women's rights, American Indians, political corruption, and monetary policy. These materials are frequently rare and hard-to-find, and include songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. In addition, the collection features numerous critical documentary essays that provide scholarly commentary and annotations to selected primary sources.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000  - this collection currently includes 124 projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. 

Jewish Life in America, 1654-1954 - primary sources addressing key topics such as the immigration process and evolution of early Jewish Settlements, differing strands of Judaism in America, Jewish schools and charitable institutions, and civil rights and minority rights issues.

Indigenous Peoples of North America - includes manuscript collections, rare books and monographs, newspapers, periodicals, census records, legal documents, maps, drawings and sketches, oral histories, and photos 

Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 -  historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that concentrate heavily on the 19th century immigration to the US. By incorporating books, pamphlets, serials, diaries, biographies, and other writings capturing diverse experiences, the collected material provides a window into the lives of ordinary immigrants.

Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League (records from 1901-1928) - Booker T. Washington established the League with the support of Andrew Carnegie n 1900 "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro," and headed it until his death. It eventually included 320 chapters across the United States. The League included small African American business owners, doctors, farmers, craftsmen, and other professionals. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in America. Affiliated professional organizations included the National Negro Bankers Association, the National Negro Press Association, the National Association of Negro Funeral Directors, the National Negro Bar Association, the National Association of Negro Insurance Men, the National Negro Retail Merchants’ Association, the National Association of Negro Real Estate Dealers, and the National Negro Finance Corporation. 

Electing the President: Proceedings of the Democratic National Conventions, 1832-1988 - This collection includes the proceedings of the 1832-1988 Democratic National Conventions, providing gavel to gavel coverage, including speeches, debates, votes, and party platforms. Also included are lists of names of convention delegates and alternates. Records of the earliest proceedings are based in part on contemporary newspaper accounts. A similar database is also available for the Republican National Conventions, 1856-1988 . 

Revolution in Honduras and American Business: The Quintessential “Banana Republic” (1910-1930) -  In 1899, the first boatload of bananas was shipped from Honduras to the United States. The fruit found a ready market, and the trade grew rapidly. The American-based banana companies constructed railroad lines and roads to serve the expanding banana production. Perhaps even more significant, Honduras began to attract the attention of the U.S. government. This collection contains the largest single group of records relates to Honduran political affairs; pertaining chiefly to the turbulent political situation and almost continuous revolutionary activity in Honduras. It details both the political and financial machinations of the fruit companies, but also the graft and corruption of the national government, the American banking community’s loans, the U.S. government’s response and the various aborted popular/revolutionary uprisings. 

Trade Literature and the Merchandizing of Industry (1820-1926) (a within Smithsonian Collections Online) is comprised of items selected from the National Museum of American History, and contains about one million pages of primary source content. This digital collection allows researchers to: determine the history of companies/industries; discern styles from furniture to machinery; analyze marketing and management techniques, and examine illustrations of the items Americans used at home and in business. Key research areas covered include: railroads and railway equipment; agricultural machinery; transportation equipment; power generation; building and construction; iron and steel; mines and mining equipment, and motorized vehicles.

Sunday School Movement and Its Curriculum (1884-1920) - Early in the 19th century various denominations and non-denominational organizations began to create Sunday schools in an effort to educate the illiterate, particularly children. By mid-century, the Sunday school movement had become extremely popular and Sunday school attendance was a near universal aspect of childhood. Working-class families were grateful for this opportunity to receive an education. Religious education was, of course, always also a core component.

Union Label and the Needle Trades: Records of the United Garment Workers of America (1899-1994) - This collection consists of two full series and one partial series from the Records of the United Garment Workers of America—Series I: Time and Motion Studies; Series III: Office Files, 1899-1994—Meeting Minutes of the General Executive Board subseries; and, Series VIII: Index Card Files for plants and/or locals in. The Time and Motion Studies are made up of time study/ time and motion research files for the garment industry, as well as files relating to industry research and information from the first half of the twentieth century. The minutes from the early period cover issues such as immigration, sick benefits, and nine-hour work days. The overwhelming majority of the Series VIII index card files comprise information on various plants and union locals. These are in alphabetical order by city (with a few exceptions) and contain information about the locals, manufacturers, wages, garments, and efforts to organize locals in those cities.

First World War  - drawn from archival collections around the world, this collection provides an intimate glimpse into daily life in the army and auxiliary services, battles, trench warfare, weapons and equipment, and thoughts on the enemy, as seen through the eyes of the men and women who served in the First World War.  Rather than official publications or newspaper accounts, this collection includes diaries, letters, scrapbooks, sketches, and photographs.  Key features include interactive maps, 360° views of personal items and objects, and a virtual trench experience. 

Women, War, and Society, 1914-1918 women's essential contribution to the war in Europe is fully documented in this definitive collection of primary source materials brought together in the Imperial War Museum, London. These unique documents - charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, press cuttings, magazines, posters, correspondence, minutes, records, diaries, memoranda, statistics, circulars, regulations and invitations - are published here for the first time in fully-searchable form.

Digital Public Library of America offers a single point of access to millions of items including photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Their featured collections include subjects such as aviation, baseball, food, immigration since 1840, photography, and women in science.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries (colonial - 1950) includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters carefully chosen using leading bibliographies plus 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials

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• Last Updated: Jun 10, 2024 3:05 PM
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The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era: A Digital Primary Source Guide

by Serena Covkin

Far too often, United States history curricula race through the fifty years between the Civil War and Reconstruction on the one end, and the Great Depression and World War II on the other—but the tumultuous, crisis-filled, frequently violent, and wholly transformative Gilded Age (1870s-1890s) and Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) deserve our focused consideration. As the country closed out the nineteenth century and moved into the twentieth, its economy, governance, polity, culture, and position on the international stage were forever altered. Explore this digital primary source guide to learn more—and begin making your own contribution to this developing historical literature.

The Gilded Age entered the lexicon and the annals of American history through Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s satirical 1873 novel of the same name, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today . The tale’s “moral was the danger of privileging speculation over honest labor”; the plot’s machinations “exposed the rot beneath the gilded surface.” 1  To contemporary observers and historians alike, there was no better metaphor for the corruption and inequality that then suffused American politics and industry.

Beginning in the 1870s, thanks to a “modern corporate form of ownership,” a new “merger movement,” and a dominant form of “competitive, proprietary capitalism,” industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, James Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—known as “captains of industry” or, more derogatively, as “robber barons”—rose to unprecedented heights of prosperity and power. 2 More and more, wealth was concentrated in the hands of the few—but many ordinary citizens flourished, too, and per capita wealth generally increased throughout the age. 3 Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse began bringing electricity to the public, while innumerable less famous, perhaps even more diligent “tinkerers” invented new devices and procedures that drastically reordered American society and culture. 4 The Gilded Age was a period of mass immigration and urbanization, and new city-dwellers—anxiously but rapidly—integrated “streetcars and elevators…packaged processed foods and machine-made clothing” into their daily lives. 5

Not all of the changes were positive. During the Gilded Age, America—and the world—experienced a series of periodic economic crises, including a devastating Wall Street crash that inaugurated the Panic of 1873. “Recurrent cycles of boom and collapse” wrought dramatically different consequences for those at the top and bottom rungs of the economy. 6  As industrial workers faced wage cuts and untenable living conditions, labor unrest spread across the nation, including the 1886 Haymarket Affair and the 1894 Pullman Strike. These persistent conflicts gave strength to myriad labor unions, an insurgent Populist Party, and even radical revolutionaries and anarchists, “dedicated not to the reform of capitalism but to its abolition,” who wielded bombs and sticks of dynamite alongside their “fierce editorials…and soapbox oratory.” 7  At the turn of the century, political violence was unsettlingly common. President James A. Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and President William McKinley in 1901; eleven years later, former President Theodore Roosevelt survived a shot to the chest.

Less gruesome, if no less contentious, the social reforms and protective legislation that typified the Progressive Era also constituted concerted attempts to “limit the social costs of aggressive, market capitalism.” 8  Increasingly, crusaders of all stripes lobbied local, state, and federal government officials to step in and address their concerns, from temperance, to agricultural subsidies, to monetary policy. 9  In concert with their counterparts across the North Atlantic world, American civil servants and policymakers worked to ameliorate “the problems and miseries of ‘great city’ life, the insecurities of wage work, the social backwardness of the countryside, [and] the instabilities of the market itself.” 10  Though they could not yet vote in most of the country, middle-class women directed settlement houses, women’s clubs, and social movements “for compulsory public education, regulation of sweatshop labor, public sanitation, and the arbitration of strikes.” 11  Throughout this “veritable ‘golden age’ of women’s politics,” maternal social reformers helped “recas[t] the welfare of mothers and children as an issue for public policy” while also creating new, viable spaces for women to operate outside the home. 12 That women could effect positive social change was a guiding premise of the movement for women’s suffrage—and in 1920, the states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. 13

Scholars continue to debate whether the mantle of progressivism can and should apply to the American South. Beginning in the 1890s, southern legislatures passed “Jim Crow” laws that mandated racial segregation, creating whites-only restaurants, schools, bathrooms, and other public spaces. Across the South, states instituted poll taxes, literacy tests, and discriminatory grandfather clauses that systematically stripped black men of their right to vote. It was precisely at this moment, historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore explains, that middle-class black women “became the black community’s diplomats to the white community” and “built social service and civic structures that wrested some recognition and meager services from the expanding welfare state,” enacting their own version of progressive politics. 14  If not as voters then as “clients” of the welfare state, black women led various successful education and public health and safety campaigns. 15

These fifty years witnessed a dramatic expansion of American empire. After four hundred years of strife, the United States devastated its Native American population and in 1887, the Dawes Act bestowed the president with the power to break up Indian reservations among individuals. 16  In 1898, the nation annexed Hawaii; that same year, it waged the Spanish-American War, bringing Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines under American control; and between 1903 and 1914, it constructed the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In 1917, after three years of bloody war in Europe, the U.S. military entered the Great War, helping to ensure Allied victory over the Central Powers and rocketing the United States to a new status as a global superpower.

As Americans encountered the Roaring Twenties and—unbeknownst to them—stood on the precipice of the Great Depression, they inhabited an utterly transformed nation. How they got there—the stuff of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era—demands deep, critical analysis. Find more resources below:

Everyday Life and Leisure in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era

• via Library of Congress, America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894 to 1915
• via Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection , including 25,000+ images, mostly from the 1890s-1920s
• via Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection , including 41,000+ images, mostly from the 1900s-1920s
• via Library of Congress’ Flickr, News in the 1910s
• via Harvard University, Women Working, 1800-1930
• via Library of Congress’ Flickr, Women Striving Forward, 1910-1940
• the digitized cookbooks , arranged by date
• via Library of Congress, The Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889 to 1939
• via Library of Congress, Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870 to 1885
• via Public Domain Music, Music from 1866-1899
• via Public Domain Music, Music from 1900-1923
• via Northwestern University, digitized publications at Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930
• via Library of Congress, California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California, 1849 to 1900
• via Library of Congress, Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897 to 1916
• via Library of Congress, The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898 to 1906
• via University of Sydney faculty, Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930
• via New York Public Library, mapping historical New York City photographs at OldNYC
• via New York Public Library, help correct and classify historical New York City maps at Building Inspector
• via University of Southern California, interactive maps and timelines at The Roaring Twenties

National Politics

• via Library of Congress, Presidential Elections, 1789 to 1920: Resource Guides
• via Our Documents, Pendleton Act (1883)
• via Library of Congress, Last Days of a President: Films of McKinley and the Pan-American Exposition, 1901
• via Library of Congress, Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film
• via The American Presidency Project, Papers of Woodrow Wilson
• via Library of Congress, American Leaders Speak: Recordings From World War I and the 1920 Election
• via Missouri State professor Worth Robert Miller, Documents on the Populist Party
• via Digital Public Library of America, Patronage and Populism: The Politics of the Gilded Age
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for The Populist Movement

American Inventors and Technological Change

• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for Electrifying America
• via Our Documents, Thomas Edison’s Patent Application for the Light Bulb (1880)
• via Library of Congress, Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies
• via Library of Congress, Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904
• via Library of Congress, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers

Industrialists and Industry

• via Our Documents, Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)
• via Furman University, Andrew Carnegie’s “Wealth”
• via archive.org, digitized publications of Andrew Carnegie
• via archive.org, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s “Electricity as a Motive Power on Trunk Lines”
• The Online Collections and Catalog of Rockefeller Archive Center
• Online Collection Catalog of the Morgan Library & Museum, including the Morgan Archives

Labor History

• via New York University, interactive New York City Labor History Map
• via Georgia State University, 19 th and 20 th Century Labor Prints
• via Cornell University, digitized documents from The 1911 Triangle Factory Fire
• via archive.org, digitized publications of the Knights of Labor
• Industrial Workers of the World Documents Library
• via University of California, Berkeley, The Emma Goldman Papers
• via Industrial Workers of the World, Documents by Eugene V. Debs
• via Indiana State University, Eugene V. Debs Correspondence Collection
• via Indiana State University, Debs Collection: Pamphlets , including many digitized pamphlets
• via University of Maryland, The Samuel Gompers Papers
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for When Miners Strike: West Virginia Coal Mining and Labor History
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for The Homestead Strike
• via Northern Illinois University, digitized sources at The Pullman Strike
• via Chicago Historical Society, Haymarket Affair Digital Collection
• via Library of Congress’ Chronicling America, a selection of newspaper articles on The Haymarket Affair

Social Reform

• via Library of Congress, an online exhibition on Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives”
• via International Center of Photography, digitized photographs of Jacob Riis
• via Columbia University, interviews with
• via University System of Georgia, digitized organizational records at For Our Mutual Benefit: The Athens [Georgia] Woman’s Club and Social Reform, 1899-1920
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for Settlement Houses in the Progressive Era
• via University of Illinois at Chicago, Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963
• via University of Illinois at Chicago, Seven Settlement Houses-Database of Photos
• via Digital Public Library of America, an online exhibition on Children in Progressive-Era America
• via Library of Congress’ Flickr, Child Labor & Lewis Hine
• via Our Documents, Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916
• via University of Iowa, digitized proceedings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
• via HistoryIT, Frances Willard Digital Journals
• via Westerville Public Library, Anti-Saloon League Museum Collection
• via Westerville Public Library, Anti-Saloon League Museum Cartoons and Fliers
• via Brown University, Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition Collection
• via Digital Public Library of America, an online exhibition on Indomitable Spirits: Prohibition in the United States

The American West, the Frontier, and Native American History

• via Our Documents, Dawes Act (1887)
• via Massachusetts Historical Society, Photographing the American Indian, 1860-1913
• via Northwestern University, Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian
• via Montana State University, Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains Digital Collection
• via Library of Congress’ Flickr, Framing the West
• via University of Washington, Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918

Immigration

• via University of Richmond, interactive maps and timelines at Foreign-Born Population, 1850-2010
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for Immigration and Americanization, 1880-1930
• via Online Archive of California, The Chinese in California, 1850-1925
• via Our Documents, Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
• via University of Minnesota, Digitizing Immigrant Letters (1850-1970)

Jim Crow, Segregation, and Black History

• via Our Documents, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• via Library of Congress, primary sources for Jim Crow and Segregation
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism
• via University of North Carolina, First-Person Narratives of the American South
• via Duke University, oral histories at Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for The Great Migration
• via UMass Amherst, E. B. Du Bois Collection , including links to online content
• via Library of Congress, E. B. Du Bois: Online Resources
• via archive.org, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
• via Library of Congress, Booker T. Washington: Online Resources
• via archive.org, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery

American Imperialism and Foreign Relations

• via Mount Holyoke College, Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy, 1898-1914
• via Digital Public Library of America, an online exhibition on American Empire
• via Our Documents, Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States (1898)
• via Our Documents, Platt Amendment (1903)
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for American Imperialism: The Spanish-American War
• via Library of Congress, primary sources for The Spanish-American War: The United States Becomes a World Power
• via Library of Congress’ Chronicling America, a selection of newspaper articles on the Major Events of the Spanish American War
• via Library of Congress’ Chronicling America, a selection of newspaper articles on The Sinking of The Maine
• via Library of Congress, The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for The Panama Canal
• via Linda Hall Library, Explore the Map of the Panama Canal

World War I

• via Our Documents, Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917)
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for World War I: America Heads to War
• via Library of Congress, primary sources for World War I
• via University of North Carolina, North Carolinians and the Great War
• via New York Public Library, an online exhibition, Over Here: WWI and the Fight for the American Mind
• via Library of Congress, World War I Posters
• via University of Washington, digitized War Posters
• via University of Iowa DIY History, help review transcribed World War I Diaries and Letters
• via Library of Congress, Stars and Stripes: The American Soldiers’ Newspaper of World War I, 1918 to 1919
• via Library of Congress, Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919
• via Library of Congress’ Flickr, World War I Panoramas

Women’s Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment

• via Our Documents, 19 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920)
• via Digital Public Library of America, primary sources for Women’s Suffrage: Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment
• via Library of Congress, primary sources for Women’s Suffrage
• via Library of Congress, Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
• via Library of Congress, Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
• via Bryn Mawr College, Catt Collection Suffrage Photographs
• via Kansas Historical Society, The Suffrage Song Book

Works Cited

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The Gilded Age 1870-1900

The Gilded Age, which covered the last three decades of the nineteenth century, was one of the most dynamic, controversial, and interesting periods in contemporary American history. America's industrial economy exploded and the United States started on the path to a world power.

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Historians of the United States have for many decades termed the late nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” No consensus exists as to when this period began and ended, or how it might best be characterized. Most textbook authors place the origins of the Gilded Age around 1877 and its demise around 1900. Few would deny that this period witnessed a host of epochal innovations that included the rise of the modern industrial corporation, the building of large-scale technical systems, including the electric power grid, and the creation of governmental institutions that were conducive to rapid industrialization. Yet the significance of these innovations remained a matter of dispute.

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The Gilded Age 2.0 of the US Economy

24 Pages Posted: 1 Feb 2023 Last revised: 22 Jan 2024

Murat Bayraktar

Çukurova University - Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences

Date Written: January 31, 2023

Between 1877 and 1900, America experienced the Gilded Age. The period takes its name from the earliest of these, The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was anything but it was a period of American history marked by fury and ambition, in which wealth was concentrated via the use of new technology, inventive enterprises, and creative financial arrangements. The huge burst of industrial activity and corporate expansion that marked the Gilded Age was presided over by a group of colorful and dynamic entrepreneurs who were known as "captains of industry" someone who owns or runs a large, profitable firm or corporation. But when the Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase "captains of industry" the term was first used in his 1843 book “Past and Present” and its meanings were entirely different. The powerful American steel industry, US Steel was built by Andrew Carnegie. Standard Oil Company founder, John D. Rockefeller had 90% of the American oil market by 1880. The railroad business was dominated by George Pullman and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The creation of new transportation infrastructure reduced the cost of travel and diminished the significance of geographic location and economy. Generally speaking, the Second Industrial Revolution took place between 1870 and 1914. After 1870, there was an unprecedented amount of mobility of people as well as ideas thanks to the massive growth of rail but also telegraph connections, which ultimately led to a new era of globalization. New technical systems were introduced at the same time, most notably electricity and telephones. Many people were left without work as a result of the oversupply of labor. During the Gilded Age, economic uncertainty and outright poverty were widespread, particularly in metropolitan areas. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (started in 2011) might increase global income levels and enhance living standards for people all around the world. Due to the revolution's potential to transform labor markets, inequality may increase. Across the board, automation has replaced labor. The captains of industry of this Gilded Age 2.0 are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. With the top 1% taking roughly two-thirds of almost $42 trillion in new wealth produced since 2020, there has been an increase in global inequality. Starting with new industrial revolutions both Gilded Ages have many socio-economic similarities, especially the inequality levels in the Gilded Age and Gilded Age 2.0 may be directly compared by highlighting that both eras are characterized by enormous wealth disparities and consumerism. Therefore, I am defining the era after 2011 as Gilded Age 2.0 due to the similarities of the first Gilded Age.

Keywords: Gilded Age, captains of industry, 4th industrial revolution, inequality, consumerism

JEL Classification: D11, D31, D42, D63, E23

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Murat Bayraktar (Contact Author)

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Andrew carnegie.

Representing the two sides of Andrew Carnegie. His side during his rise in business and his other side of philanthropic work. 1892

Andrew Carnegie giving to colleges. 1901

           Andrew Carnegie a name infamous with big business.  He is seen as one of the great business moguls of America. He came from rags to riches, and eventually dominated the steel industry. Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 in Scotland, where he spent much of his childhood tell his early teens.  He then immigrated to America and began working for $1.20 a week.[1]  He rose up in business fairly quickly after meeting Thomas Scott a leading member of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  With Scott he ventured into different aspects of business instead of just working as a hired hand.  He invested a good sum of money into the steel industry.  Which eventually would pay off greatly. 

             Once he did make it into the steel industry he adapted the style of vertical integration.  This this business style can be seen as a monopoly due to its control of the complete process of a product.  This meant that he controlled every aspect from the barges, steel mills, the mines, and the transportation of the product.[2]  This created a vast network for Carnegie’s industry as well as a guarantee for his product. 

             With his company being a monopoly there are many negative aspects that people see about.  One can begin treatment of the workers, this due to the time when the mass amounts of people who immigrated to the United States. At the height of his business Carnegie employed 40,000 men.  These men worked in all aspects of the business process.  Not all of them were happy about the conditions that they worked in, which can be seen in the Homestead strike of 1892.  This strike put the workers of one of his steel mill against the steel mill’s foreman.  The workers wanted to unionize while Andrew Carnegie and the foreman or against the unionization of their workers.  This led to a large-scale conflict between the workers and those who the foreman, Henry Clay Frick, called in such as the Pinkerton Detective Agency.[3]  However the strike did not end well for the workers nor for their trade union ally the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.   Although this paints Carnegie and his company with distrust there was still a light at the end of the tunnel for Carnegie.

             This light at the end of the tunnel was his philanthropy work.  Carnegie created the Gospel of Wealth.  This was a book that documented how the rich should not die rich and that they should give back to those that help them.  Over the course of his business he gained a vast amount of money that he eventually gave back to those who helped him.  He reportedly gave away 90% of his wealth towards the end of his life.  He gave back to those who helped him throughout the years specifically workers.  He also gave back to those who served in war with his Hero Fund.  Lastly he gave generously to public libraries.  Which he believed that you must be educated, in total he gave 2,811 libraries to communities.[4]  As well as countless other donations he gave during the end of his life. 

             Andrew Carnegie can be seen as a peculiar figure in business history.  The first came from nothing to be one of the biggest businessman of the time.  One that revolutionized business industry as well as caused many changes to business.  In this he can be seen as almost a villain for his treatment of workers as well as the lower class.  Yet towards the end of his life he is seen as a generous man gave away almost all his wealth. This two different people from all walks of life.  He also repaid those that he wrong so much, the workers.  Carnegie can be seen as a giant contradiction due to his early life being so drastically different to that of the later course of his life.  

[1]Krass, Peter. Carnegie . New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. 22-23

[2]Andrew Carnegie: The Gospel of Wealth. Learning Corp. of America, 1974.

[3]Wolff.  Lockout : The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892 : A Study of Violence, Unionism and the Carnegie Steel Empire . 135

[4]Wall, Joseph Frazier.  Andrew Carnegie.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. 829

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What Was the Gilded Age?

Economic and industrial developments, social stratification and inequality, economic impact and legacy, the bottom line.

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The Gilded Age Explained: An Era of Wealth and Inequality

Katie Miller is a consumer financial services expert. She worked for almost two decades as an executive, leading multi-billion dollar mortgage, credit card, and savings portfolios with operations worldwide and a unique focus on the consumer. Her mortgage expertise was honed post-2008 crisis as she implemented the significant changes resulting from Dodd-Frank required regulations.

Investopedia / Mira Norian

The Gilded Age, which roughly spanned the late 1870s to the early 1900s, was a time of rapid industrialization , economic growth, and prosperity for the wealthy. It was also a time of exploitation and extreme poverty for the working class.

Reconstruction preceded the Gilded Age, when factories built as part of the North’s Civil War effort were converted to domestic manufacturing . Agriculture, which had once dominated the economy, was replaced by industry. Ultimately, the Gilded Age was supplanted by early 20th-century progressivism after populism failed.

The term “gilded age” was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in a book titled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today . Published in 1873, the book satirized the thin “gilding” of economic well-being that overlaid the widespread poverty, corruption, and labor exploitation that characterized the period.

Key Takeaways

• The Gilded Age lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s and was characterized by economic growth for the wealthy and extreme poverty for the working classes.
• A societal shift from agriculture to industry resulted in a movement to the cities for some and westward migration for others.
• The beginning of organized labor, investigative journalism, and progressive ideologies began to spell the end of the Gilded Age and its rigid class structure.
• The Gilded Age marked the beginning of industrialization in America—a time of innovation, transportation growth, and full employment. It was also a time of economic devastation and dangerous working conditions for labor.

As the United States began to shift from agriculture to industry as a means of economic growth, people began to move from farms to urban areas. Railroads expanded, industry began to mechanize, communication improved, and corruption became widespread.

Railroad Expansion

Railroads expanded dramatically in the U.S. in the 1870s. From 1871 to 1900, 170,000 miles of track were laid in the United States, most of it for constructing the transcontinental railway system. It began with the passage of the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 , which authorized the first of five transcontinental railroads.

Mechanization of Industries

The late 19th century saw an unprecedented expansion of industry and production, much of it by machines. Machines replaced skilled workers, reducing labor costs and the ultimate selling price of goods and services. Instead of skilled workers seeing a product through from start to finish, jobs were often limited to one task repeated endlessly. The pace of work increased, with many laborers forced to work longer hours.

Communications Networks

Technological advancements, including the phonograph and the telephone, came into existence during the Gilded Age. So did the advent of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. Professional entertainers quickly adopted these new forms of communication, making listening and reading news new leisure activities.

Monopolies and Robber Barons

During the Gilded Age, many businessmen became wealthy by gaining control of entire industries. Controlling an entire sector of the economy is known as having a monopoly . The most prominent figures with monopolies were J.P. Morgan (banking), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), and Andrew Carnegie (steel).

Because of the way they exploited workers with low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions, these wealthy tycoons were often referred to as robber barons , a pejorative term used to describe the accumulation of wealth through that exploitation.

Rural Life and Urban Life—Gilded Age Homes

Homes during the Gilded Age reflected the lifestyle and wealth of the homeowner. While the wealthy built magnificent mansions with stately names like Vanderbilt Mansion, Peacock Point, and Castle Rock, many of the less fortunate lived in tenement buildings in cities, where they flocked for jobs, or in the West, in claim shanties—small shacks built to fulfill Homestead Act regulations.

The Gilded Age saw rapid growth in the economic disparities between workers and business owners. The wealthy lived lavishly, while the working class endured low wages and horrid conditions.

Real Wage Increases

The technological changes brought about by industrialization are thought to be largely responsible for the fact that real wages of unskilled labor grew 1.43% per year during the Gilded Age vs. 0.56% per year during the Progressive Era and just 0.44% per year from 1990 to 2005.

By those measures and comparisons, the Gilded Age would seem to be a success. In 1880, for example, the average earnings of an American worker were $347 per year. That grew to $445 in 1890, an increase of more than 28%.

Abject Poverty

“While the rich wore diamonds, many wore rags.” This summarizes the income and lifestyle disparity that characterized the Gilded Age. In 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families (92%) lived below the poverty line. Tenements teemed with an unlikely combination of rural families and immigrants who came into urban areas, took low-paying jobs, and lived in abject poverty.

Though wages rose during the Gilded Age, they were deficient initially. As noted above, in 1880, the average wages of an American worker were $347 per year ($10,399 today, as of this writing) but had risen to $445 by 1890 ($14,949 in today’s dollars). Given today’s federal poverty level (FPL) , which is $30,000 for a family of four, most Gilded Age Americans were excessively poor despite the impressive wage growth of the time.

The annual inncome of an American worker in 1890, at the height of the Gilded Age. Adjusted for inflation, that's just under $1,500 in today's dollars.

Labor Unions

The rise of labor unions was neither sudden nor without struggle. Business owners used intimidation and violence to suppress workers, even though they had a right to organize. By 1866, there were nearly 200,000 workers in local unions across the United States. William Sylvis took advantage of these numbers to establish the first nationwide labor organization, named the National Labor Union (NLU).

Unfortunately, Sylvis and the NLU tried to represent too many constituencies, causing the group to disband following the Panic of 1873 when it couldn’t serve all those competing groups. The NLU was replaced by the Knights of Labor, started by Uriah Stephens in 1869. Stephens admitted all wage earners, including women and Black people.

The Knights of Labor lost members and eventually dissolved for two reasons. First, Stephens, an old-style industrial capitalist, refused to adjust to the changing needs of workers. Second, a bomb thrown into a crowd at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, was blamed on the union, driving even more members away.

By December 1886, labor leader Samuel Gompers took advantage of the vacuum left by the demise of the Knights and created a new union based on the simple premise that American workers wanted just two things: higher wages and better working conditions. Thus was born the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Corruption and Scandals—Muckrakers

Another product of the Gilded Age was investigative journalism. Reporters who exposed corruption among politicians in the wealthy class were known as muckrakers for their ability to dig through the “muck” of the Gilded Age to uncover scandal and thievery.

Notable muckrakers included Jacob Rils, who in 1890 exposed the horrors of New York City slum life. In 1902, Lincoln Steffens brought city corruption to light with a magazine article titled “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” Ida Tarbell put her energy into exposing the antics of John D. Rockefeller; her reporting led to the breakup of Standard Oil Co. In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose conditions in the meatpacking industry. This led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Immigration

Many immigrants came to North America during the Gilded Age, with 11.7 million of them landing in the United States. Of those, 10.6 million came from Europe, making up 90% of the immigrant population. Immigrants made it possible for the U.S. economy to grow since they were willing to take jobs that native-born Americans wouldn’t .

While factory owners welcomed these newcomers, who were willing to accept low wages and dangerous working conditions, not all Americans did. So-called nativists lobbied to restrict certain immigrant populations, and in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act passed Congress. But millions came despite the obstacles. The Statue of Liberty beckoned, and the “huddled masses” responded. The children of immigrants began to assimilate, despite their parents’ objections. Another hallmark of the Gilded Age was born, as America became a true melting pot.

Women in the Workforce

Industrialization created jobs outside the home for women. By 1900, one in seven women were employed. The typical female worker was young, urban, single, and either an immigrant or the daughter of immigrants. Her work was temporary—just until she married. The job she was most likely to hold was that of a domestic servant.

The Gilded Age also saw an increase in college-educated women. Colleges, including Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Mount Holyoke, opened their doors to women in the post-bellum years. This did not happen without some incredible chauvinism. Scientists of the era warned that women’s brains were too small to handle college work without compromising their reproductive systems. Many, it turned out, took that risk. The predominant fields held by female college graduates were nursing and teaching.

The Black Experience

As reconstruction ended on a state-by-state basis, Black people could migrate away from plantations and into cities in search of economic opportunity, or to move west or south in search of land that they could work for themselves. From 1870 to 1900, the South’s Black population went from 4.4 million to 7.9 million. People found jobs in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, working on railroads and in mines, lumber, factories, and farms. For some, however, sharecropping replaced slavery, keeping Black workers tied to the land without ownership.

For a small set of others, this period led to the foundation of what’s known as the Black elite or “the colored aristocracy,” as was noted by Willard B. Gatewood in Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 . Among this group were members such as Blanche Bruce, a Republican senator from Mississippi; Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, a women’s rights activist in Washington, D.C., and the wife of Blanche Bruce; and Timothy Thomas Fortune, economist and editor of The New York Age , the nation’s leading Black newspaper at the time.

The Gilded Age saw the transformation of the American economy from agrarian to industrial. It saw the development of a national transportation and communication network. Women began to enter the workforce as never before. Millions of immigrants took root in a new land. Enterprising industrialists became titans and wealthy beyond measure.

Production and per capita income rose sharply, albeit with great disparity among wealth classes. Earlier legislation, like the Homestead Act, motivated the movement westward of millions of people to lay claim to land that would give them a new start and a chance at the American dream. As America became more prosperous, some of its citizens fell victim to greed, corruption, and political vice. This combination of extraordinary wealth and unimaginable poverty was the ultimate juxtaposition of capitalism and government intervention. The debate continues today.

Are There Gilded Age Mansions Left?

You can still see and even visit some of the most opulent examples of Gilded Age domicile excess today. In New York City, for example, you can drive past the Vanderbilts’ Plant House, the Carnegie Mansion, the Morgan House, and others, if you know where to look.

What Was the Worst Scandal of the Gilded Age?

The Gilded Age gave birth to enough scandals to create competition for the worst of the lot, but many historians agree that the transcontinental railroad scandal was the cream of the crop, so to speak.

The federal government, in deciding to underwrite a transcontinental railroad, created an opportunity for corruption that it did not anticipate. As builder of the railroad, the Union Pacific company engaged in price fixing and bribery that affected members of the Ulysses S. Grant presidential administration. The corruption was uncovered by investigators, bringing the scheme to an end.

When Did the Gilded Age Start and End?

The Gilded Age in America refers to the period from the end of Reconstruction to the turn of the century (1870 to 1901). Some extend the period into the early 1900s, but most agree that the beginning of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s is the ultimate ending point.

The Gilded Age was critical to the growth of the United States by introducing industrialization and technological advances. It was also a time of political turmoil, greed, and extreme income inequality. The U.S. became the most economically powerful country in the world due to the era. It was a time of unprecedented progress and unimaginable poverty.

The wealth gap between the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, and Vanderbilts and the rest of the country was palpable. With wealth came greed. With innovation came corruption. Muckrakers, the first investigative journalists, helped uncover the graft, and unions helped labor even the playing field. Ultimately, this “best and worst” of times became another important chapter in the American saga.

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ The Growth of Populism .”

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ Progressivism Sweeps the Nation .”

History. “ Gilded Age .”

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, via Google Books. “ The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today .” Penguin Publishing Group, 2001 (originally published in 1873).

Library of Congress. “ Railroads in the Late 19th Century .”

Library of Congress. “ Work in the Late 19th Century .”

Digital History, University of Houston. “ An Age of Innovation .”

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ The Gilded Age .”

Dupont Castle. “ Castle Rock .”

Preservation Long Island, via ArcGIS StoryMaps. “ Peacock Point .”

South Dakota State University. “ South Dakota Claim Shanty .”

Rockoff, Hugh. “ Great Fortunes of the Gilded Age .” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 14555, December 2008, Page 32.

Long, Clarence, via National Bureau of Economic Research. “ Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890: Chapter 3, Annual Earnings .” Princeton University Press, 1960, Page 41 (Page 4 of PDF).

PBS. “ American Experience: The Gilded Age .”

CPI Inflation Calculator. “ $347 in 1880 Is Worth $10,399.49 Today .”

CPI Inflation Calculator. “ $445 in 1890 Is Worth $14,948.63 Today .”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. “ Federal Poverty Guidelines .”

Khan Academy. “ Labor Battles in the Gilded Age .”

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ Early National Organizations .”

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ American Federation of Labor .”

Washington State University Libraries, Digital Exhibits. “ Immigrant Factory Workers .”

American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium. “ The Rush of Immigrants .”

Stacy A. Cordery, via Google Books. “ The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America ,” Pages 119–121. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Leslie H. Fishel Jr. “ The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America ,” Page 144. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Willard B. Gatewood, via Google Books. “ Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite 1880–1920 (p) .” Page 203. University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Town and Country. “ 10 Gilded Age Landmarks in New York City Still Standing Today .”

History. “ Crédit Mobilier .”

The History Junkie. “ The Gilded Age Facts and History .”

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Race and Ethnicity in Gilded-Age Illinois

by Drew E. VandeCreek

The conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of both the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction civil rights acts obliged the state of Illinois to lift its laws prohibiting African-Americans from voting and serving on juries. In this period the city of Chicago began to educate black children alongside whites, and African-Americans gained access to state-funded colleges as well. But blacks made up less than 2% of the population in the North, and many whites remained ambivalent or outright hostile to their struggle for full social equality. Thus African-Americans made slow progress in Illinois and across the North.

Many white workers in Illinois feared competition from African-Americans trying to improve their lot, and sought to restrict blacks to unskilled labor. Many labor unions, with some notable exceptions, refused to let African-Americans become members. Tradesmen maneuvered to keep African-Americans out of apprenticeship programs. Black artisans migrating from the South often found themselves restricted to a black-only clientele by white consumers anxious about African-Americans' social rise.

Many African-Americans came to central and southern Illinois to work as coal miners. Often mine owners recruited southern blacks to come north and work in mines in order to replace striking white workers. Nevertheless, the United Mine Workers organized integrated, "mixed" locals, and by the end of the nineteenth century over 20,000 African Americans belonged to the UMW.

Many African-Americans, and especially women, worked as servants. Like blacks working as unskilled laborers, they found that they were paid far less than whites for comparable service. This low pay often prevented African-Americans from marrying and starting families until later in life, when they had attained some financial stability. African-Americans in the North also faced a rigid pattern of residential segregation that confined them to specific neighborhoods. Frustrated by the slow pace of social change, African-American leaders like Benjamin Singleton and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner advocated colonization, or blacks' removal to Africa to begin a new society there.

The American legal system did little to help African Americans in this period. In 1883 the United States Supreme Court upheld laws denying African-Americans access to private facilities like trains, theaters and hotels, terming their exclusion a "private wrong" outside the scope of the law. After black activists organized to challenge this ruling, the court upheld the doctrine in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, which articulated a doctrine of "separate but equal." 1

As it grew, Chicago became a center of black political and intellectual life. Lucy Parsons (pictured at right) was a renowned orator, and helped to organize the Chicago Working Women's Union. In 1891 she began publishing her own newspaper – Freedom . Ferdinand Barnett graduated from the City of Chicago law school and became the first black assistant state's attorney in Illinois. He also founded and edited the Chicago Conservator , a newspaper devoted to the fight for black equality. In 1895 he married the noted southern political activist, journalist and lecturer Ida B. Wells (pictured at left), who joined him in Chicago.

Born a child of Mississippi slaves in 1862, Wells found education and began teaching school as a teenager. Working as an educator in Memphis, Wells challenged the southern practice of segregated facilities by suing a railroad, and became a journalist devoted to exposing blacks' unfair lot in society. In 1892 three of her friends were lynched by white mobs, and Wells wrote scathing exposes of the practice which received wide national attention. Facing intimidation and violence in Memphis, she became a traveling lecturer before marrying Barnett.

Wells confronted the northern reform establishment as well as southern racism. In the 1890s she criticized Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union for their support of southern reformers who accepted the practice of lynching. In 1894 she published The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition , which detailed blacks' exclusion from the fair by white organizers. After 1895 Wells largely confined herself to local political causes and raising her family.

While African-Americans were largely discouraged or barred from taking part in the World's Columbian Exposition, black women did succeed in speaking before the Women's Congress at the fair. One speech by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper demanded justice for her race and defined the work of middle-class black women in the coming era.

Other new ethnic groups came to Chicago in this period as well. European immigration began again at the conclusion of the Civil War, and Chicago, situated at the western end of the Great Lakes, became a major destination. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 only accelerated immigration to the city by opening up many new positions in the construction trades and other industries devoted to rebuilding the area. Many of the new immigrants came to America from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Ireland.

Immigrants often arrived in cities where friends or family members had already set down roots. This strategy identified favorable locations for immigration, and helped to build new communities. Like African-Americans, many new immigrants faced housing segregation and limited opportunities in business, the trades and unions. Often immigrants responded by asserting themselves in economic sectors largely overlooked by native-born whites.

In the 1870s and 1880s Chicago became a city of newcomers, with a new population that dwarfed the native-born elites who had arrived before the Civil War. This often-unstable mix clashed over issues like the regulation or outright prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Many Yankee reformers such as Frances Willard identified alcohol abuse as a leading cause of poverty, family disintegration, and violence against women. All too often, they believed, men squandered their paychecks on strong drink, leaving their families to starve. But many of the new immigrants came to America from societies in which beer and wine played central roles. Many German-Americans, outraged at the Republican Party's tilt toward the reformers' position, switched their allegiance to the Democrats in this period.

Many Irish had come to Illinois in the decades before the Civil War to help build the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In the years after the conflict they formed increasingly strong community organizations, many times around the Catholic Church. The cause of Irish independence from England also informed many groups, including an unfortunate armed sortie into British Canada at the Civil War's close. In the Gilded Age, Irish-Americans played significant roles in the formation of labor unions, especially the Knights of Labor. The Irish technique of the boycott gave the Knights and other unions a powerful new tool in their struggle to match the economic, political and legal power of employers.

Other immigrants brought radical intellectual and political traditions to America. German and Eastern European immigrants played large roles in the organization of Chicago's socialist and anarchist movements. When these movements emerged in the spotlight caused by the Great Strike of 1877 and, especially, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, many middle-class, native-born whites quickly associated radicalism and labor violence with immigrants. Louis Lingg (pictured at right) was a German-born American anarchist who was convicted of taking part in a criminal conspiracy that planned the Haymarket Sqaure bombing.

By 1892 Illinois had elected its first foreign-born governor, John Peter Altgeld. The Governor successfully passed new child labor and workplace safety laws. Altgeld’s ethnicity often became a subject of criticism among native-born opponents, especially in the context of his decision to pardon three men convicted of the Haymarket bombing of 1886. Despite his critics, Altgeld became a major figure in the Democratic Party, and opposed Democratic President Grover Cleveland’s use of federal troops to put down the strike. Although he was defeated in his campaign for re-election in 1896 and never held public office again, Altgeld’s electoral success and policies in Illinois provided a brief glimpse of a new politics, uniting many Americans descended from recent immigrants behind active government efforts to regulate economic life, which would emerge in the twentieth century.

• 1. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) http://landmarkcases.org/en/landmark/cases/plessy_v_ferguson (accessed March 17, 2017)

Handout A: Background Essay: Women in the Gilded Age

Background Essay: Women in the Gilded Age

Directions: Read the background essay and answer the review questions.

The vast social changes caused by industrialization, immigration, and urbanization fundamentally altered life in the United States. In turn, those changes provoked responses in which women increased their political, economic, and civic participation in American public life. Moreover, women led various reform movements to ameliorate the harsh conditions that resulted from rapid social and economic change.

The expectations of the Victorian Era of the mid-to-late nineteenth century held that men and women functioned in equally important but “separate spheres.” Men entered public life in business and politics, which had many temptations for corruption and vice. Women cultivated virtuous homes for their husbands as homemakers and educators of their children. However, in the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women began to enter the workforce especially as marriage rates and fertility rates began a long-term decline. In addition, women took advantage of increasing educational opportunities in colleges.

By 1900, more than five million women (and approximately eight million a decade later) worked outside the home due to both the problems and opportunities caused by an industrializing economy. Many young, single women – especially of the working-class – worked in dangerous factories earning low wages and working between ten and twelve hours every day of the week before they married and left the workforce. The rampant low wages and frequent unemployment experienced by immigrant men meant that many of their wives also had to work in factories or as domestic servants in homes. Alternatively, they took on piecemeal work on garments and other products inside the home. However, African-American women usually were restricted to working as servants or in agriculture. Single, middle-class women increasingly worked as secretaries, store clerks, teachers, and nurses. A very small percentage of married, middle-class women worked outside the home. Even fewer women worked in the professions of law and medicine.

A socially acceptable means of women entering public life was to engage in social reform. Most of these reformers were white, middle-class, educated Protestants who wanted to promote an improved moral climate in society and politics. For example, in 1879 Frances Willard assumed the presidency of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The WCTU’s primary mission was closing saloons and ending the consumption of alcohol because of the ill-effects of drunkenness on families, including wasted wages and domestic violence. The WCTU supported women’s suffrage as a means of achieving the prohibition of alcohol and other reforms.

In 1889, Jane Addams founded the Hull House in Chicago to provide immigrants with desperately-needed services in poor, ethnic neighborhoods of the city. Other women took the lead in establishing similar successful settlement houses in dozens of other cities. These community centers helped immigrants adapt to American society by teaching them English and civics, with the goal of “Americanizing” them.

Florence Kelley formed the National Consumers’ League in 1898 to pressure stores to pay female clerks better. The League also worked for protective legislation regulating the hours and conditions for women and children. Women were shut out of male-dominated unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), partially because AFL leadership accepted the traditional belief that employed women were taking the jobs of men who were the main source of income for families. Lilian Wald and other women created the Women’s Trade Union League to help women organize their own labor unions to bargain for better working conditions and increased wages.

In 1909, women who worked in the garment industry formed a movement called the “uprising of the twenty thousand” and went on strike to protest poor wages, grueling hours, and dangerous working conditions. Met with violence and arrest, the striking women, led by Rose Schneiderman, formed their own union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to support the strike. By early 1910, the ILGWU won the strike with higher wages and a limit of 52 hours of work per week. However, the next year tragedy stuck when 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, were killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a garment manufacturer in New York City. Within half an hour, just before quitting time on March 25, 1911, a fire that started on the eighth floor had engulfed the building’s top three floors. The fire exits and stairwells were inadequate, the doors were kept locked, and the safety procedures were virtually nonexistent. Dozens of employees jumped out of windows to their deaths as the flames advanced, and many others were killed by the blaze. The Triangle Waist Company tragedy was one of the most shocking of the events that focused national attention on unsafe working conditions. New York and other states passed laws to improve public safety for workers.

The various reforming civic groups and unions established by powerful women during the Gilded Age reflected the organizational strength of women fighting for social and economic reform. While they struggled for those reforms, they developed a keen sense of the political inequality faced by women excluded from the ballot box. Women re-invigorated the women’s suffrage movement through the same organizational strategies they had implemented in the reform movements of the late nineteenth century.

In 1848, a group of reformers had met at Seneca Falls, New York, and issued a Declaration of Sentiments modeled after the Declaration of Independence. The Seneca Falls document, signed by 100 delegates including thirty-two men, listed the ways women had been deprived of equal rights, including “the inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The women’s suffrage movement split, however, in 1869 when the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony sought to win women’s suffrage through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The rival American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, pursued a strategy of achieving women’s suffrage at the state level. Thus, the principled debate was between those who wanted to amend the Constitution and those who desired most closely to follow the principle of federalism.

In 1890, the movement united and formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The suffragettes argued for the right to vote on the grounds that women were the intellectual equal to men and capable of exercising an independent vote. Second, women argued that they were more virtuous and would help improve the moral character of politics through reform. Third, they made Social Darwinist arguments, asserting that if “inferior” black and immigrant men could vote, so should white, middle-class women. The NAWSA achieved notable successes in the more individualistic western states of Washington, California, Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona as they joined Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho in approving women’s suffrage in state and local elections.

Despite the successes, in 1913, radical suffragette Alice Paul broke with the NAWSA to form the Congressional Union (which later became the National Women’s Party). Paul disagreed with the state-by-state strategy and wanted a constitutional amendment. On March 3, 1913, the day before president-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, five thousand women bravely marched down Pennsylvania Avenue while being jeered and pelted with objects by a hostile crowd. The demonstration was aimed at pressuring incoming President Woodrow Wilson to support women’s suffrage. After suffering the indignity of insults for marching for equality, hundreds were arrested and imprisoned. Alice Paul and others went on a hunger strike and were force-fed in prison.

In 1916, both Republicans and Democrats had a plan supporting women’s suffrage due to the efforts of thousands of women who showed up at the respective party conventions. Women’s patriotic contribution to the war effort at home, in factories, and near the front lines during World War I furthered the cause of suffrage. Still, President Wilson was lukewarm. Although a president’s signature is not necessary for a constitutional amendment, Wilson’s support would add the prestige of the office to the cause and help secure passage. Beginning in January 1917, suffragettes marched before the White House for six months to lobby the president. All of these efforts bore fruit when the House and Senate passed the amendment by the required two-thirds vote, and thirty-six states ratified it by August, 1920.

The women reformers of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era spearheaded a number of movements that profoundly reshaped women’s participation in American society and civic life. As a result, they would pave the way for other women to engage in politics, social reform, and the struggle for women’s equality during the course of the twentieth century.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What social and economic changes were occurring in the lives of women during the Gilded Age?
• What were the different experiences of women in the workforce?
• Compare and contrast the goals of the different social movements women joined.
• How did the goals and strategies of the women’s suffrage movement change over time?
• Why were women successful in achieving a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage?

Additional Activities

Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Gilded Age

Essays on Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was a time of rapid industrialization, economic growth, and social change in the United States. It was a period marked by great wealth and inequality, as well as significant political and social reforms. As a result, there are countless interesting and thought-provoking essay topics to explore from this era.

What Makes a Good Gilded Age Essay Topics

When choosing a Gilded Age essay topic, it's important to consider several factors. First, think about your own interests and passions. What aspects of the Gilded Age do you find most fascinating? Whether it's the rise of big business, the impact of immigration, or the role of women in society, choose a topic that resonates with you.

Next, consider the availability of primary and secondary sources. A good Gilded Age essay topic should be supported by a wealth of historical evidence. Think about whether there are enough sources available to support your chosen topic.

Finally, consider the relevance and significance of the topic. Does your chosen topic shed light on important social, political, or economic issues of the Gilded Age? Is it a topic that will engage and captivate your readers?

A good Gilded Age essay topic is one that is both interesting and significant, supported by ample historical evidence, and resonates with your own interests and passions.

Best Gilded Age Essay Topics

• The role of women in the Gilded Age
• The impact of immigration on American society
• The rise of big business and the Robber Barons
• The labor movement and the fight for workers' rights
• The influence of the Gilded Age on modern American society
• The impact of technological advancements on the Gilded Age
• The political corruption and reform movements of the Gilded Age
• The role of race and ethnicity during the Gilded Age
• The impact of urbanization on American cities
• The role of the media in shaping public opinion during the Gilded Age
• The impact of the Gilded Age on American culture and the arts
• The rise of consumer culture and the emergence of the middle class
• The impact of the Gilded Age on American foreign policy
• The role of religion in shaping American society during the Gilded Age
• The impact of the Gilded Age on Native American communities
• The role of education in the Gilded Age
• The impact of the Gilded Age on environmental conservation and preservation
• The role of social reformers and activists during the Gilded Age
• The impact of the Gilded Age on American literature and journalism
• The legacy of the Gilded Age in modern American society

Gilded Age essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a female immigrant arriving in the United States during the Gilded Age. Describe your experiences and the challenges you face as you navigate this new world.
• Create a newspaper article that highlights the rise of a prominent Robber Baron during the Gilded Age. Include details about their business practices, wealth, and impact on American society.
• Write a letter from the perspective of a child laborer working in a factory during the Gilded Age. Describe the conditions in which you work and the impact it has on your life.
• Design a political cartoon that critiques the corruption and political scandals of the Gilded Age. Use symbolism and satire to convey your message.
• Write a short story that explores the impact of urbanization on a small town during the Gilded Age. Consider the changes in society, economy, and culture as the town grows and evolves.

The Gilded Age offers a wealth of fascinating and significant essay topics to explore. By carefully considering your interests, the availability of sources, and the relevance of the topic, you can choose an essay topic that is both engaging and impactful. With the right topic, you can delve into the complexities of this transformative era and shed light on important historical issues.

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c. 1871 - c. 1880

United States

The Gilded Age in the United States refers to the period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, characterized by rapid industrialization, economic growth, and social transformation. Several key prerequisites set the stage for the emergence of this era: Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 18th century, laid the groundwork for the Gilded Age. Advances in technology, such as the steam engine and mechanized production, fueled industrialization and transformed the American economy. Westward Expansion: The settlement of the American West played a crucial role in the Gilded Age. The discovery of gold and other natural resources attracted migrants, leading to the development of industries like mining, agriculture, and railroads. Immigration and Urbanization: The Gilded Age witnessed a massive influx of immigrants from Europe and Asia seeking economic opportunities. This wave of immigration fueled population growth and contributed to the rapid urbanization of cities. Rise of Big Business: The Gilded Age saw the emergence of powerful industrialists and business tycoons who accumulated immense wealth and influence. Entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan built vast business empires, monopolizing industries and shaping the economy. Social Inequalities: The era was characterized by stark social disparities. While the upper class enjoyed extravagant wealth and opulence, the working class faced poor working conditions, low wages, and limited rights.

Industrialization and Technological Advances: The Gilded Age witnessed a rapid expansion of industrialization, with the rise of industries such as steel, oil, and railroads. Technological advancements, such as the telegraph and electric power, transformed the nation's infrastructure and communication systems. Labor Movements and Strikes: The Gilded Age was marked by labor unrest, as workers protested poor working conditions, low wages, and long hours. Strikes such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Pullman Strike of 1894 demonstrated the growing power of organized labor. Immigration and Urbanization: The Gilded Age saw a significant influx of immigrants, primarily from Europe. This led to rapid urbanization, as cities grew and faced challenges related to overcrowding, poor living conditions, and social tensions. Political Corruption: The era was marred by political corruption and the influence of money in politics. The infamous Tammany Hall political machine in New York City and scandals like the Credit Mobilier exposed the corrupt practices of politicians. Progressive Reforms: As a response to the inequalities and social issues of the Gilded Age, the Progressive movement emerged. Reformers sought to address issues such as political corruption, child labor, and worker rights through legislation and social advocacy.

Andrew Carnegie: A Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist, Carnegie built a vast steel empire and became one of the richest individuals in history. He advocated for the concept of the "Gospel of Wealth" and donated his wealth to support education and libraries. John D. Rockefeller: An American business magnate, Rockefeller co-founded the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry. He amassed immense wealth and became known as one of the wealthiest individuals in history. Rockefeller also engaged in philanthropy and established the Rockefeller Foundation. J.P. Morgan: An influential financier and banker, Morgan played a significant role in shaping the American economy during the Gilded Age. He was involved in numerous business ventures, including the formation of U.S. Steel, and played a pivotal role in stabilizing the financial system during economic crises. Mark Twain: A celebrated writer and humorist, Mark Twain captured the essence of the Gilded Age through his works. His novels, such as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," provided social commentary and satire on the era's excesses and social inequalities. Jane Addams: A social reformer and activist, Addams co-founded Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago that provided services to immigrants and the poor. She worked tirelessly for social justice, women's rights, and the improvement of living conditions for the urban poor.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Although set in the 1920s, "The Great Gatsby" reflects the excesses and social stratification of the Gilded Age. The novel explores themes of wealth, materialism, and the pursuit of the American Dream against the backdrop of the Jazz Age. "The Octopus" by Frank Norris: This novel delves into the conflicts between farmers and railroad monopolies during the late 19th century. It portrays the ruthless nature of corporate power and its impact on ordinary people, highlighting the economic struggles and corruption of the Gilded Age. "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis: Riis's work is a pioneering example of photojournalism that exposes the living conditions of impoverished immigrants in New York City during the Gilded Age. His photographs and accompanying text shed light on the social inequality and housing crisis faced by the urban poor. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair: Although set in the early 20th century, Sinclair's novel offers a grim depiction of the working and living conditions in the Chicago stockyards. It exposes the exploitation of workers and the unsanitary practices in the meatpacking industry, shedding light on the darker side of industrialization during the Gilded Age.

1. The population of the United States nearly doubled during the Gilded Age, fueled by immigration and internal migration from rural to urban areas. 2. The Gilded Age witnessed the rise of powerful industrialists, often referred to as "captains of industry" or "robber barons," such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, who amassed enormous wealth and power. 3. Income inequality was prevalent during the Gilded Age. By 1890, the richest 10% of Americans controlled over 80% of the nation's wealth.

The topic of the Gilded Age holds significant importance for studying and understanding a crucial period in American history. Exploring the Gilded Age through an essay provides valuable insights into the economic, social, and political dynamics that shaped the nation during this time. First and foremost, the Gilded Age was marked by tremendous economic growth, industrialization, and the rise of powerful industrialists. It offers an opportunity to examine the impact of rapid industrialization, the consolidation of wealth, and the unequal distribution of resources. This era also witnessed the struggles of the working class, the formation of labor unions, and the fight for workers' rights, shedding light on the evolving dynamics of the labor movement. Moreover, the Gilded Age provides an understanding of the political landscape, including the influence of money and corruption on governance, the role of government in regulating business practices, and the push for progressive reforms. It was a time of significant social change, with advancements in technology, urbanization, and shifting gender roles. By studying the Gilded Age, we gain insights into the consequences of rapid industrialization, wealth inequality, labor unrest, and political corruption. It helps us reflect on the challenges and reforms of that era and draw parallels to contemporary issues, making it a crucial topic to explore in an essay.

1. Brands, H. W. (2017). The age of gold: The California Gold Rush and the new American dream. Anchor Books. 2. Carnegie, A. (2019). The gospel of wealth: Essays and other writings. Penguin Classics. 3. Cherny, R. W. (1996). American politics in the Gilded Age, 1868-1900. Bedford Books. 4. Folsom, B. W., & Meehan, K. D. (2019). The robber barons and the Sherman Antitrust Act: Reshaping American business. Palgrave Macmillan. 5. Hofstadter, R. (2012). The age of reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. Vintage. 6. Krause, S. D., & Hart, C. R. (Eds.). (2019). The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the origins of modern America (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. 7. Summers, M. A. (1995). The Gilded Age: The origins of modern America. Ivan R. Dee. 8. Trachtenberg, A. (2007). The incorporation of America: Culture and society in the Gilded Age (25th anniversary ed.). Hill and Wang. 9. White, R. (2017). The republic for which it stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. Oxford University Press. 10. Zinn, H. (2005). A people's history of the United States. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

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The Origin of the Term “The Gilded Age” and the Appropriateness of the Metaphor for the United States in the Late 1800s Research Paper

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Introduction

One country, two worlds, the corrupted political life, the development of railroads, alcoholism in the epoch of the gilded age.

Bibliography

The era of the Gilded Age, which occurred in the USA in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, was characterized by contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, there was a rapid growth in industrialization that led to the improvement of people’s lives due to economic growth.

On the other hand, however, there was the impoverishment of many citizens and immigrants who moved to more industrialized parts of the USA in search of better wages and living conditions. The massive gap that existed between these groups of individuals gave the name to the epoch: ‘gilded’ was a satirical term used to denote that bad issues were covered with more pleasant ones to present an overall positive image of the country. The present paper aims at illustrating the appropriateness of the metaphor for the USA in the late 1800s through the use of primary sources and complementary secondary ones.

The main characteristic feature of the Gilded Age was striking inequality. It is quite common to remember the era as the period when material excess was most noted. The production of everyday goods was much more extensive and elaborate than in previous centuries. The country celebrated the peak of its development with impressive cultural growth, material prosperity, and economic excellence.

However, the majority of goods that were manufactured at that period were meant to be consumed by the representatives of the middle and upper classes. Meanwhile, the working class individuals also wanted to relish the advantages of innovative products. Thus, the production of cheap equivalents to expensive goods developed gradually.

Such a disparity between the rich and the poor existed in different aspects of the material culture, including housing, cooking, clothing, and other dimensions. The poorest of native citizens were accompanied in their social status by immigrants who arrived in the country in large numbers. As Orser argues, immigrants lacking money were “racialized as poor.” Hence, the Gilded Age gave life to yet another form of racism besides the one based on skin color: the one driven by poverty.

During the Gilded Age era, new arrangements in social life emerged. According to Orser, there was a close connection between the evolving capitalistic politics in the country and social relations within it. The major component of social ties is represented by class relations. In the Gilded Age USA, the division of people not only by skin color but also by their wealth or poverty status was observed rather acutely.

Poverty among some Americans and immigrants in the era of the Gilded Age had a structural nature. Orser noticed a close relationship between financial hardship and the development of capitalism. Although poverty existed earlier than capitalism evolved, it was one of the constituting elements of the USA’s prevailing form of the economic system. As well as successes, failures under capitalism were viewed as entirely personal. Among other groups of underprivileged people, immigrants from China were the most frequent victims of injustice and discrimination.

Many Americans considered the Chinese as “subhuman” and referred them to the same “racially inferior” category as Indians and African Americans. While performing some of the most difficult jobs, Chinese immigrants were underpaid and did not receive sufficient respect or support from native citizens. This was one of the most striking examples of inequality persisting during the Gilded Age. Hence, the epoch’s name was justified through building invisible walls between people belonging to different nationalities and social classes. While for some the times were gold, others had no choice but to survive in the layer of dust under the gilded covering.

The Gilded Age takes its name from the title of the novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, in which the authors criticized the country’s politics after the Civil War as excessively corrupted. The USA was gilded in numerous business opportunities and moneymaking possibilities. However, the gold was hiding “an uglier society” of insensitive greed and extravagance. The so-called robber barons were the dominating branch in the USA’s political structure. These industrial leaders overcharged citizens through unreliable business practices, which led to growing wealth among the former and increasing poverty among the latter.

The understanding of the political situation in the Gilded Age America may be easier through the use of original artwork of that period. Keppler’s 1889 political cartoon “The Bosses of the Senate” reflects the public opinion of trusts. The caricature depicts trusts much larger than the Senate itself. The illustration of corporate interests is emphasized by huge figures representing various kinds of trusts: steel, copper, nail, oil, sugar, iron, coal, paper salt, and others. Below these gargantuan figures, small and modest members of the Senate are sitting. Some of the senators look up to the “giant money bags” as if searching for support or approval. Meanwhile, trusts representatives look down on senators with dull, contemptuous, and disrespectful expressions.

The portrayal of entrances to the hall is also rather pronouncing. The small gallery door, which is signed as the “People’s Entrance,” is barred and bolted. Meanwhile, a huge “Entrance for Monopolists” is wide open, letting in more and more trusted’ representatives. The two gateways highlight the striking contrast in the Gilded Age politics. Small enterprises had no opportunity to develop due to the overwhelming presence of large monopolies in each of the most vital spheres. Even the motto in the cartoon depicts the state of affairs prevailing in the USA’s politics during the Gilded Age: “This is the Senate of the Monopolists by the Monopolists and for the Monopolists!”

To reveal the truth about monopolists, journalists developed an innovative genre of their profession known as muckraking. One of the most scandalous revelations was associated with Rockefeller, a popular businessman who, according to investigations, turned out to be a monopolist. Journalists noted that while millions of Americans used kerosene, hardly any of them realized that Rockefeller’s organization, the Standard Oil Company, was the sole controller of kerosene’s production, manufacture, and export, as well as its cost in the USA and abroad. Therefore, Keppler’s cartoon reflects the conditions in which people lived and businesses operated in the Gilded Age.

One of the most prominent inventions of the Gilded Age era was railroads. With the help of this innovative transportation technique, many new opportunities became available. Specifically, people could travel faster, goods could be delivered easier, and products could be distributed to different parts of the country. One of the witnesses of California railroads’ construction, David L. Phillips, remarks that the emergence of new railroads led to considerable advantages.

First of all, as Phillips notes, the cost of transit from New York to San Francisco was reduced from $300 to $140. Such a simplified possibility to travel allowed California, which had been rather poor agriculturally, to arrange new trade connections with Japan, China, and the Pacific Ocean islands. The movement within the country became easier as well, making it much cheaper to get from San Francisco to New York and Chicago.

Philips notes that he witnessed “train-loads of tea” coming from Japan and China and going to New York and Chicago. The next opportunity referred to farmers who could earn more from their hard work due to the increased value of the land. Phillips remarks that whereas before the railroad was constructed, one acre of land cost nearly $1.25, its price grew considerably after the construction, and it now constituted about $8 per acre.

Another benefit of California railroads, according to Phillips, was that by opening many additional lines, they added “tens of millions to the permanent wealth of the State.” As a result, people’s quality of life increased to a great extent. Despite all of the positive things, Phillips mentions, there were those dissatisfied with exorbitant ticket prices.

Also, the railroad’s owners were considered monopolists, which made the author of the account feel sorry for them. Phillips explains that while railroad charges were high, they were not disproportional to prices on other services in the state. Also, the author argues, it was natural for the owners to become rich since they had made considerable investments in their business.

Taking into consideration the analysis of Keppler’s cartoon, it seems reasonable to disagree with Phillips’s arguments defending the railroad monopolists. Furthermore, there is an account of an interview that was held with John Grosvenor, who had worked on the railroad in the 1880s. The man recollects how strenuous his work there used to be. The working day lasted for ten hours, and conditions of work were unbearable.

Grosvenor and other laborers had to work in any weather conditions despite not having any special clothes. The payment constituted $1.10 per day, and it was barely enough to buy food and save something to send to his family. Thus, this is yet another justification of the appropriateness of the epoch’s title. Whereas some people could afford to travel by using the newly opened opportunities, the ones creating those opportunities could barely survive.

The disparity between social classes in the Gilded Age USA could be traced not only in people’s work activities but also in their leisure time. The upper and middle classes spent their free time playing sports and attending various entertainment shows. Meanwhile, working-class people had neither time nor strength or money to amuse themselves in such elaborate ways. Therefore, the majority of poor Americans consumed alcohol for relaxation and fun. However, not only poor citizens engaged in drinking – wealthy individuals took up the habit and combined it with gambling or rooting for their favorite sports teams.

Working-class men frequently attended saloons, where they could communicate over a glass of liquor. Hence, when middle-class activists started a campaign on banning alcohol, the poor part of society was appalled. Prohibitionists claimed that attending taverns caused family disorder, corruption, and cruelty against women and children. Instead, hardworking males view barrooms as a shelter from their excruciating jobs. Saloons combined the functions of union halls, social clubs, and even political centers for working-class men.

However, reformers were right in their appraisal that the nation was “saturated in alcohol.” The label of an anti-alcoholism cure dated by 1880 is expressive proof of the growing danger posed to the nation by alcohol consumption. “Dr. L. E. Keeley’s Double Chloride of Gold Cure for Drunkenness” was a popular treatment for alcohol-dependent individuals in the Gilded Age era. The label claims that two bottles of Dr. Keeley’s cure at the price of $9 could relieve the symptoms of alcoholism. The emergence of such a treatment method indicates that the age was not gold but only gilded: many people suffered from strenuous labor conditions and could find no better way of relaxation than drinking.

The analysis of primary and secondary sources on the Gilded Age allows inferring that the metaphor employed to create the epoch’s title was quite appropriate. There was a vast gap between the levels of life for different classes of people living in the USA in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. There were individuals whose quality of life was gold: they could afford living in large houses, consuming healthy products, and wearing expensive clothes.

There were also those below the poverty line whose living arrangements varied between simple and miserable and who worked hard to afford the necessities. The hole between these two parts of society was covered by a thin gilded wrapping, which was not enough to conceal the desperate inequalities existing in the country’s political, economic, and social spheres. Thus, the title of the era, the Gilded Age, was rather suitable.

“Dr. L. E. Keeley’s Double Chloride of Gold Cure for Drunkenness Label.” The National Archives , 1880. Web.

Greenwood, Janette Thomas. The Gilded Age: A History in Documents . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Keppler, Joseph. “The Bosses of the Senate.” Digital Image. United States Senate , 1889. Web.

Kordas, Ann. “Material Culture.” In Handbook to Life in America: The Gilded Age, 1870 to 1900 , edited by Rodney P. Carlisle, 37-54. New York: Facts on File, 2009.

“Mr. John Grosvenor.” Library of Congress , 1938. Web.

Orser, Charles E. “Beneath the Surface of Tenement Life: The Dialectics of Race and Poverty during America’s First Gilded Age.” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 3 (2011): 151-165.

Phillips, David L. “What California Railroads Have Done.” Library of Congress . Web.

Purdy, Elizabeth R., and Arthur Holst. “Cities and Urban Life.” In Handbook to Life in America: The Gilded Age, 1870 to 1900 , edited by Rodney P. Carlisle, 71-86. New York: Facts on File, 2009.

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IvyPanda . 2021. "The Origin of the Term "The Gilded Age" and the Appropriateness of the Metaphor for the United States in the Late 1800s." July 17, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-origin-of-the-term-the-gilded-age-and-the-appropriateness-of-the-metaphor-for-the-united-states-in-the-late-1800s/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Origin of the Term "The Gilded Age" and the Appropriateness of the Metaphor for the United States in the Late 1800s." July 17, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-origin-of-the-term-the-gilded-age-and-the-appropriateness-of-the-metaphor-for-the-united-states-in-the-late-1800s/.

IvyPanda . "The Origin of the Term "The Gilded Age" and the Appropriateness of the Metaphor for the United States in the Late 1800s." July 17, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-origin-of-the-term-the-gilded-age-and-the-appropriateness-of-the-metaphor-for-the-united-states-in-the-late-1800s/.