Description
INSTRUCTIONS:
Now that you have read the passages from American Perspectives and chapter 16 in Give Me Liberty, you will need to
use this information to compose a short essay about the Gilded Age.
Your essay needs to explain the following elements:
1. Define the Gilded Age and the key features (who, what, where, when, why, and how) of the age.
2. Explain how these features impacted society, politics, and culture in the United States. These prompts should
inform YOUR THESIS.
3. In your essay, be sure to use KEY TERMS and EXAMPLES from Give Me Liberty and the American Perspectives
readings to provide sufficient PROOF of your reading and understanding of the materials.
4. All paraphrased and or quoted materials used in your essay MUST be properly cited BOTH IN TEXT (footnotes or
Author page number) and have a Bibliography page for the works cited. FOR FULL CREDIT: YOU MUST USE ALL OF
THE MATERIALS ASSIGNED….
RUBRIC: (this is what you are GRADED on)
1. Introduction Paragraph:
Introduce your topic and include your thesis statement. Perhaps include some insight into the main points that you are
going to offer in the essay.
II. Body Paragraphs:
One at a time, explain the features of the Gilded Age and the impact of the age on politics, culture, and society. (4
body paragraphs total)
**Be sure to include your examples****
III. Conclusion.
Wrap it all up (restate thesis and main points)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Now that you have read the passages from American Perspectives and chapter 16 in Give Me Liberty, you will need to
use this information to compose a short essay about the Gilded Age.
Your essay needs to explain the following elements:
1. Define the Gilded Age and the key features (who, what, where, when, why, and how) of the age.
2. Explain how these features impacted society, politics, and culture in the United States. These prompts should inform
YOUR THESIS.
3. In your essay, be sure to use KEY TERMS and EXAMPLES from Give Me Liberty and the American Perspectives
readings to provide sufficient PROOF of your reading and understanding of the materials.
4. All paraphrased and or quoted materials used in your essay MUST be properly cited BOTH IN TEXT (footnotes or
Author page number) and have a Bibliography page for the works cited. FOR FULL CREDIT: YOU MUST USE ALL OF
THE MATERIALS ASSIGNED….
RUBRIC: (this is what you are GRADED on)
1. Introduction Paragraph:
Introduce your topic and include your thesis statement. Perhaps include some insight into the main points that you are
going to offer in the essay.
II. Body Paragraphs:
One at a time, explain the features of the Gilded Age and the impact of the age on politics, culture, and society. (4 body
paragraphs total)
**Be sure to include your examples****
III. Conclusion.
Wrap it all up (restate thesis and main points)
IV: Bibliography page
Provide a Bibliography page for the sources cited. This page must be properly cited with Turabian or Chicago style
citations.
ALSO: BE SURE TO USE ALL OF THE SOURCES PROVIDED FROM ABOVE IN YOUR ESSAY. You must use these
sources within the body of your text as either footnotes or Author/year (Williams, 2022) style.
A
n immense crowd gathered in New York harbor on October
28, 1886, for the dedication of Liberty Enlightening the World, a
fitting symbol for a nation now wholly free. The idea for the
statue originated in 1865 with ?douard de Laboulaye, a French
educator and the author of several books on the United States, as a
response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The statue, de
Laboulaye hoped, would celebrate both the historic friendship
between France and the United States and the triumph, through the
Union’s victory in the Civil War, of American freedom. Measuring
more than 150 feet from torch to toe and standing atop a huge
pedestal, the edifice was the tallest man-made structure in the Western
Hemisphere. It exceeded in height, newspapers noted with pride, the
Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the ancient world.
In time, the Statue of Liberty, as it came to be called, would
become Americans’ most revered national icon. For over a century it
has stood as a symbol of freedom. The statue has offered welcome to
millions of immigrants?the ?huddled masses yearning to breathe
free” celebrated in a poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on its base in
1903. In the years since its dedication, the statue’s familiar image has
been reproduced by folk artists in every conceivable medium and has
been used by advertisers to promote everything from cigarettes and
lawn mowers to war bonds. As its use by Chinese students demanding
democracy in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed, it has
become a powerful international symbol as well.
Although the Civil War was over, the country in the late nineteenth
century was racked by violence, by not only white supremacists in the
South but widespread labor conflict, warfare against Native Americans
in the West, and political assassinations. Indeed, the year of the statue’s
dedication, 1886, also witnessed the great upheaval,” a wave of strikes
and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600
and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600
dignitaries (598 of them men) who gathered on what is now called
Liberty Island for the dedication hoped the Statue of Liberty would
inspire renewed devotion to the nation’s political and economic
system. But for all its grandeur, the statue could not conceal the deep
social divisions and fears about the future of American freedom that
accompanied the country’s emergence as the world’s leading
industrial power. Nor did the celebrations address the crucial
questions that moved to the center stage of American public life
during the 1870s and 1880s and remained there for decades to come:
What are the social conditions that make freedom possible, and what
role should the national government play in defining and protecting
the liberty of its citizens?
CHRONOLOGY
1872
Cr?dit Mobilier scandal
1873
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age
Battle of the Little Bighorn
1876
1877
Reconstruction ends
Munn v. Illinois
Great Railroad Strike
1879
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty
1883
Civil Service Act
Railroads create time zones
THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
D Ideas of Industrial Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century
Transcript
Between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, the
United States underwent one of the most rapid and profound
economic revolutions any country has ever experienced. There were
numerous causes for this explosive economic growth. The country
enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an
expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of
capital for investment. In addition, the federal government actively
promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high
tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition,
granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction, and
used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by
farmers and mining companies.
The Industrial Economy
The rapid expansion of factory production, mining, and railroad
construction in all parts of the country except the South signaled the
transition from Lincoln’s America?a world centered on the small
farm and artisan workshop-to a mature industrial society. Americans
of the late nineteenth century marveled at the triumph of the new
economy. ?One can hardly believe,” wrote the philosopher John
Dewey, ?there has been a revolution in history so rapid, so extensive,
so complete.”
By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world’s
industrial output-more than the total of Great Britain, France, and
Germany combined. Half of all industrial workers now labored in
plants with more than 250 employees. On the eve of the Civil War, the
first industrial revolution, centered on the textile industry, had
transformed New England into a center of manufacturing. But
otherwise, the United States was still primarily an agricultural nation.
By 1880, for the first time, the Census Bureau found a majority of the
workforce engaged in non-farming jobs. The traditional dream of
economic independence seemed obsolete. By 1890, two-thirds of
Americans worked for wages, rather than owning a farm, business, or
craft shop. Drawn to factories by the promise of employment, a new
working class emerged in these years. Between 1870 and 1920, almost
11 million Americans moved from farm to city, and another 25 million
immigrants arrived from overseas.
Most manufacturing now took place in industrial cities. New York,
with its new skyscrapers and hundreds of thousands of workers in all
sorts of manufacturing establishments, symbolized dynamic urban
growth. After merging with Brooklyn in 1898, its population exceeded
3.4 million. The city, along with Boston, financed industrialization and
westward expansion, its banks and stock exchange funneling capital to
railroads, mines, and factories. But the heartland of the second
industrial revolution was the region around the Great Lakes, with its
factories producing iron and steel, machinery, chemicals, and
packaged foods. Pittsburgh had become the world’s center of iron and
steel manufacturing. Chicago, by 1900 the nation’s second-largest city,
with 1.7 million inhabitants, was home to factories producing steel and
farm machinery and giant stockyards where cattle were processed into
meat products for shipment east in refrigerated railcars. Smaller
industrial cities also proliferated, often concentrating on a single
industry-cast-iron stoves in Troy, New York, furniture in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.
Railroads and the National Market
The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the ?second
industrial revolution.? Spurred by private investment and massive
grants of land and money by federal, state, and local governments, the
number of miles of railroad track in the United States tripled between
1860 and 1880 and tripled again by 1920. opening vast new areas to
A
n immense crowd gathered in New York harbor on October
28, 1886, for the dedication of Liberty Enlightening the World, a
fitting symbol for a nation now wholly free. The idea for the
statue originated in 1865 with ?douard de Laboulaye, a French
educator and the author of several books on the United States, as a
response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The statue, de
Laboulaye hoped, would celebrate both the historic friendship
between France and the United States and the triumph, through the
Union’s victory in the Civil War, of American freedom. Measuring
more than 150 feet from torch to toe and standing atop a huge
pedestal, the edifice was the tallest man-made structure in the Western
Hemisphere. It exceeded in height, newspapers noted with pride, the
Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the ancient world.
In time, the Statue of Liberty, as it came to be called, would
become Americans’ most revered national icon. For over a century it
has stood as a symbol of freedom. The statue has offered welcome to
millions of immigrants?the ?huddled masses yearning to breathe
free” celebrated in a poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on its base in
1903. In the years since its dedication, the statue’s familiar image has
been reproduced by folk artists in every conceivable medium and has
been used by advertisers to promote everything from cigarettes and
lawn mowers to war bonds. As its use by Chinese students demanding
democracy in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed, it has
become a powerful international symbol as well.
Although the Civil War was over, the country in the late nineteenth
century was racked by violence, by not only white supremacists in the
South but widespread labor conflict, warfare against Native Americans
in the West, and political assassinations. Indeed, the year of the statue’s
dedication, 1886, also witnessed the great upheaval,” a wave of strikes
and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600
and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600
dignitaries (598 of them men) who gathered on what is now called
Liberty Island for the dedication hoped the Statue of Liberty would
inspire renewed devotion to the nation’s political and economic
system. But for all its grandeur, the statue could not conceal the deep
social divisions and fears about the future of American freedom that
accompanied the country’s emergence as the world’s leading
industrial power. Nor did the celebrations address the crucial
questions that moved to the center stage of American public life
during the 1870s and 1880s and remained there for decades to come:
What are the social conditions that make freedom possible, and what
role should the national government play in defining and protecting
the liberty of its citizens?
CHRONOLOGY
1872
Cr?dit Mobilier scandal
1873
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age
Battle of the Little Bighorn
1876
1877
Reconstruction ends
Munn v. Illinois
Great Railroad Strike
1879
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty
1883
Civil Service Act
Railroads create time zones
THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
D Ideas of Industrial Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century
Transcript
Between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, the
United States underwent one of the most rapid and profound
economic revolutions any country has ever experienced. There were
numerous causes for this explosive economic growth. The country
enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an
expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of
capital for investment. In addition, the federal government actively
promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high
tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition,
granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction, and
used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by
farmers and mining companies.
The Industrial Economy
The rapid expansion of factory production, mining, and railroad
construction in all parts of the country except the South signaled the
transition from Lincoln’s America?a world centered on the small
farm and artisan workshop-to a mature industrial society. Americans
of the late nineteenth century marveled at the triumph of the new
economy. ?One can hardly believe,” wrote the philosopher John
Dewey, ?there has been a revolution in history so rapid, so extensive,
so complete.”
By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world’s
industrial output-more than the total of Great Britain, France, and
Germany combined. Half of all industrial workers now labored in
plants with more than 250 employees. On the eve of the Civil War, the
first industrial revolution, centered on the textile industry, had
transformed New England into a center of manufacturing. But
otherwise, the United States was still primarily an agricultural nation.
By 1880, for the first time, the Census Bureau found a majority of the
workforce engaged in non-farming jobs. The traditional dream of
economic independence seemed obsolete. By 1890, two-thirds of
Americans worked for wages, rather than owning a farm, business, or
craft shop. Drawn to factories by the promise of employment, a new
working class emerged in these years. Between 1870 and 1920, almost
11 million Americans moved from farm to city, and another 25 million
immigrants arrived from overseas.
Most manufacturing now took place in industrial cities. New York,
with its new skyscrapers and hundreds of thousands of workers in all
sorts of manufacturing establishments, symbolized dynamic urban
growth. After merging with Brooklyn in 1898, its population exceeded
3.4 million. The city, along with Boston, financed industrialization and
westward expansion, its banks and stock exchange funneling capital to
railroads, mines, and factories. But the heartland of the second
industrial revolution was the region around the Great Lakes, with its
factories producing iron and steel, machinery, chemicals, and
packaged foods. Pittsburgh had become the world’s center of iron and
steel manufacturing. Chicago, by 1900 the nation’s second-largest city,
with 1.7 million inhabitants, was home to factories producing steel and
farm machinery and giant stockyards where cattle were processed into
meat products for shipment east in refrigerated railcars. Smaller
industrial cities also proliferated, often concentrating on a single
industry-cast-iron stoves in Troy, New York, furniture in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.
Railroads and the National Market
The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the ?second
industrial revolution.? Spurred by private investment and massive
grants of land and money by federal, state, and local governments, the
number of miles of railroad track in the United States tripled between
1860 and 1880 and tripled again by 1920. opening vast new areas to
1860 and 1880 and tripled again by 1920, opening vast new areas to
commercial farming and creating a truly national market for
manufactured goods. In 1886, the railroads adopted a standard
national gauge (the distance separating the two rails), making it
possible for the first time for trains of one company to travel on any
other company’s track. By the 1890s, five transcontinental lines
transported the products of western mines, farms, ranches, and forests
to eastern markets and carried manufactured goods to the West. The
railroads reorganized time itself. In 1883, the major companies
divided the nation into the four time zones still in use today.
TABLE 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870-1920
1870 1900
1920
2.7
408
254
5.7
841
599
6.4
956
843
14
28.5
44.5
2.5
5.9
11.2
Farms (millions)
Land in farms (million acres)
Wheat grown (million bushels)
Employment (millions)
In manufacturing (millions)
Percentage in workforcea
Agricultural
Industryb
Trade, service, administration
Railroad track (thousands of miles)
Steel produced (thousands of tons)
Gross national product (billions of dollars)
52
27
29
38
31
31
44
20
27
258
53
0.8
407
46
11.2
7.4
18.7
91.5
The growing population formed an ever-expanding market for the
mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing of goods,
essential elements of a modern industrial economy. The spread of
national brands like Ivory soap and Quaker Oats symbolized the
continuing integration of the economy. So did the growth of national
chains, most prominently the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company,
better known as A & P grocery stores. Based in Chicago, the national
mail-order firms Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold
clothing, jewelry, farm equipment, and numerous other goods to rural
families throughout the country.
The Spirit of Innovation
A remarkable series of technological innovations spurred rapid
communication and economic growth. The opening of the Atlantic
cable in 1866 made it possible to send electronic telegraph messages
instantaneously between the United States and Europe. During the
1870s and 1880s, the telephone, typewriter, and handheld camera
came into use.
Scientific breakthroughs poured forth from research laboratories
in Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, created by the era’s
greatest inventor, Thomas A. Edison. During the course of his life,
Edison helped to establish entirely new industries that transformed
private life, public entertainment, and economic activity, including
the phonograph, lightbulb, motion picture, and a system for
generating and distributing electric power. He opened the first electric
generating and distributing electric power. He opened the first electric
generating station in Manhattan in 1882 to provide power to
streetcars, factories, and private homes, and he established, among
other companies, the forerunner of General Electric to market
electrical equipment. The spread of electricity was essential to
industrial and urban growth, providing a more reliable and flexible
source of power than water or steam. However, it was not Edison but
another inventor, Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb born in modern-day
Croatia who emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-eight,
who developed an electric motor using the system of alternating
current that overcame many of the challenges of using electricity for
commercial and industrial purposes.
0
Competition and Consolidation
Economic growth was dramatic but highly volatile. The combination
of a market flooded with goods and the federal monetary policies
(discussed later in this chapter) that removed money from the national
economy led to a relentless fall in prices. The world economy suffered
prolonged downturns in the 1870s and 1890s. Indeed, before the
1930s, the years from 1873 to 1897 were known throughout the world
as the Great Depression.
Businesses engaged in ruthless competition. Railroads and other
companies tried various means of bringing order to the chaotic
marketplace. They formed “pools? that divided up markets between
supposedly competing firms and fixed prices. They established trusts
ed trusts
supposedly competing
Tixed prices. They
– legal devices whereby the affairs of several rival companies were
managed by a single director. Such efforts to coordinate the economic
activities of independent companies generally proved short-lived,
disintegrating as individual firms continued their intense pursuit of
profits.
To avoid cutthroat competition, more and more corporations
battled to control entire industries. Many companies fell by the
wayside or were gobbled up by others. The process of economic
concentration culminated between 1897 and 1904, when some 4,000
firms vanished into larger corporations that served national markets
and exercised an unprecedented degree of control over the economy.
By the time the wave of mergers had been completed, giant
corporations like U.S. Steel (created by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901
by combining eight large steel companies into the first billion-dollar
economic enterprise), Standard Oil, and International Harvester (a
manufacturer of agricultural machinery) dominated major industries.
The Rise of Andrew Carnegie
In an era without personal or corporate income taxes, some business
leaders accumulated enormous fortunes and economic power. Under
the aggressive leadership of Thomas A. Scott, the Pennsylvania
Railroad-for a time the nation’s largest corporation-forged an
economic empire that stretched across the continent and included
coal mines and oceangoing steamships. With an army of professional
managers to oversee its far-flung activities, the railroad pioneered
modern techniques of business organization.
Another industrial giant was Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated with
his family from his native Scotland at the age of thirteen and as a
teenager worked in a Pennsylvania textile factory. During the
depression that began in 1873, Carnegie set out to establish a steel
company that incorporated vertical integration-that is, one that
controlled every phase of the business from raw materials to
transportation, manufacturing, and distribution. By the 1890s, he
dominated the steel industry and had accumulated a fortune worth
hundreds of millions of dollars. Carnegie’s complex of steel factories
at Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the most technologically advanced
in the world.
Carnegie’s father, an immigrant Scottish weaver who had taken
part in popular efforts to open the British political system to working-
class participation, had instilled in his son a commitment to
democracy and social equality. From his mother, Carnegie learned
that life was a ceaseless struggle in which one must strive to get ahead
or sink beneath the waves. His life reflected the tension between these
elements of his upbringing. Believing that the rich had a moral
obligation to promote the advancement of society, Carnegie
denounced the “worship of money” and distributed much of his
wealth to various philanthropies, especially the creation of public
libraries in towns throughout the country. But he ran his companies
with a dictatorial hand. His factories operated nonstop, with two
twelve-hour shifts every day of the year except the Fourth of July.
Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age
D! Ideas of Freedom Following the Civil War
Transcript
Remarkable as it was, the country’s economic growth distributed its
benefits very unevenly. For a minority of workers, the rapidly
expanding industrial system created new forms of freedom. In some
industries, skilled workers commanded high wages and exercised
considerable control over the production process. A worker’s
economic independence now rested on technical skill rather than
ownership of one’s own shop and tools as in earlier times. What was
known as “the miner’s freedom? consisted of elaborate work rules that
left skilled underground workers free of managerial supervision on
the job. Through their union, skilled iron and steelworkers fixed
output quotas and controlled the training of apprentices in the
technique of iron rolling. These workers often knew more about the
details of production than their employers did.
Such “freedom,” however, applied only to a tiny portion of the
industrial labor force and had little bearing on the lives of the growing
army of semiskilled workers who tended machines in the new
factories. For most workers, economic insecurity remained a basic fact
of life. During the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, millions of
workers lost their jobs or were forced to accept reductions of pay. The
“tramp? became a familiar figure on the social landscape as thousands
of men took to the roads in search of work. Many industrial workers
labored sixty-hour weeks with no pensions, compensation for injuries,
or protections against unemployment. Although American workers
received higher wages than their counterparts in Europe, they also
experienced more dangerous working conditions. Between 1880 and
1900, an average of 35,000 workers perished each year in factory and
mine accidents, the highest rate in the industrial world.
Much of the working class remained desperately poor and to
survive needed income from all family members. In 1888, the Chicago
Times published a series of articles by reporter Nell Cusack under the
title “City Slave Girls,? exposing wretched conditions among the
growing number of women working for wages in the city’s homes,
factories, and sweatshops. The articles unleashed a flood of letters to
the editor from women workers. One woman singled out domestic
service-still the largest employment category for women-as “a
slave’s life,” with ?long hours, late and early, seven days in the week,
bossed and ordered about as before the war.”
Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing Wealth
and Poverty
At the other end of the economic spectrum, the era witnessed an
unprecedented accumulation of wealth. Class divisions became more
and more visible. In frontier days, all classes in San Francisco, for
example, lived near the waterfront. In the late nineteenth century,
upper-class families built mansions on Nob Hill and Van Ness Avenue
(known as ?millionaire’s row?). In eastern cities as well, the rich
increasingly resided in their own exclusive neighborhoods and
vacationed among members of their own class at exclusive resorts like
Newport, Rhode Island. The growing urban middle class of
professionals, office workers, and small businessmen moved to new
urban and suburban neighborhoods linked to central business districts
by streetcars and commuter railways. ?Passion for money,” wrote the
novelist Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), dominated
society. Wharton’s book traced the difficulties of Lily Bart, a young
woman of modest means pressured by her mother and New York high
society to “barter? her beauty for marriage to a rich husband in a
world where “to be poor … amounted to disgrace.?
By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total
income as the bottom half of the population and owned more
property than the remaining 99 percent. Many of the wealthiest
Americans consciously pursued an aristocratic lifestyle, building
palatial homes. attending exclusive social clubs, schools, and colleges.
holding fancy-dress balls, and marrying into each other’s families. In
1899, the economist and social historian Thorstein Veblen published
The Theory of the Leisure Class, a devastating critique of an upper-class
culture focused on “conspicuous consumption”?that is, spending
money not on needed or even desired goods, but simply to
demonstrate the possession of wealth. One of the era’s most widely
publicized spectacles was an elaborate costume ball organized in 1897
by Mrs. Bradley Martin, the daughter of a New York railroad financier.
The theme was the royal court of prerevolutionary France. The
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was decorated to look like the palace of
Versailles, the guests wore the dress of the French nobility, and the
hostess bedecked herself with the actual jewels of Queen Marie
Antoinette.
Not that far from the Waldorf, much of the working class lived in
desperate conditions. Matthew Smith’s 1868 best-seller Sunshine and
Shadow in New York opened with an engraving that contrasted
department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart’s $2 million mansion
with housing in the city’s slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis, in How
the Other Half Lives (1890), offered a shocking account of living
conditions among the urban poor, complete with photographs of
apartments in dark, airless, overcrowded tenement houses.
FREEDOM IN THE GILDED AGE
The era from 1870 to 1890 is the only period of American history
commonly known by a derogatory name?the Gilded Age, after the
title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.
?Gilded? means covered with a layer of gold, but it also suggests that
the glittering surface masks a core of little real value and is therefore
deceptive. Twain and Warner were referring not only to the
remarkable expansion of the economy in this period but also to the
corruption caused by corporate dominance of politics and to the
oppressive treatment of those left behind in the scramble for wealth.
“Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must,” was the era’s
slogan, according to The Gilded Age.
The Social Problem
As the United States matured into an industrial economy,
Americans struggled to make sense of the new social order.
Debates over political economy engaged the attention of
millions, reaching far beyond the tiny academic world into
the public sphere inhabited by self-educated workingmen
and farmers, reformers of all kinds, newspaper editors, and
politicians. This broad public discussion produced
thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles on such
technical issues as land taxation and currency reform, as
technical issues as land taxation and currency reform, as
Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five
well as widespread debate over the social and ethical
implications of economic change.
Points House of Industry, taken by
Many Americans sensed that something had gone wrong
Jacob Riis around 1889, offers a
striking contrast to the bleak
in the nation’s social development. Talk of ?better classes.”
homes of New York City’s poor
?respectable classes,” and “dangerous classes? dominated
families, depicted in many of his
public discussion, and bitter labor strife seemed to have
photographs.
become the rule. During the Gilded Age, Congress and a
number of states established investigating committees to
inquire into the relations between labor and capital. Their hearings
produced powerful evidence of distrust between employees and
employers. In 1881, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported that virtually every worker it interviewed in Fall River, the
nation’s largest center of textile production, complained of overwork,
poor housing, and tyrannical employers.
Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy
The appearance of what Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward
Atkinson called ?a permanent factory population” living on the edge
of poverty alongside a growing class of millionaires posed a sharp
challenge to traditional definitions of freedom. ?The great curse of the
Old World?the division of society into classes,” declared The Nation,
had come to America. It became increasingly difficult to view wage
labor as a temporary resting place on the road to economic
labor as a temporary resting place on the road to economic
independence.
Given the vast expansion of the nation’s productive capacity, many
Americans viewed the concentration of wealth as inevitable, natural,
and justified by progress. By the turn of the century, advanced
economics taught that wages were determined by the iron law of
