Reference
- Gilded Age, 1870S-90She Gilded Age, a descriptive label for the period from the end of Reconstruction to the start of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency in 1901, came into general use during the middle of the twentieth century. In political history these decades carry a pejorative connotation that has persisted despite much scholarly work on the complexity of the period's public life. Broadly speaking, the Gilded Age is regarded as a time when politicians failed to engage the issues of industrialism, urbanization, and agricultural discontent. Instead, so the argument runs, Republicans and Democrats wasted their time and energies on such peripheral issues as the protective tariff and civil service. By 1901, according to this interpretation, the United States was no better off than it had been when Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency in March 1877.
Historical scholarship has challenged this pejorative view of the late nineteenth century, but the stereotype remains powerful. The term Gilded Age itself derives from a novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873, that depicted economic life as a speculative excess where fraud and chicanery abounded. More than half a century later, the phrase seemed to capture the essence of the period between Reconstruction and the emergence of the reform spirit called progressivism.
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Perspectives
The Gilded Age (1873)
The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a political roman à clef--a direct and caustic attack on government, politicians, and big business in Post-Civil War America. It is the book that gave an era its name. Published in 1873, the first year of the second scandal-ridden Grant administration, it is the first novel of consequence about Washington in all of American writing, as Ward Just notes in his Introduction. The Gilded Age "gives Washington the aspect of a clumsy frontier town of ludicrous aspirations, populated mainly by fools, racketeers, opportunists, and parvenus, most of them members of the United States Congress," Just writes. The Gilded Age trains its satire on corruption in politics, business and the courts; "As Twain famously said, there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress, and the great triumph of The Gilded Age is that we are given chapter and verse on how the thievery is done." Just notes that readers will see for themselves whether Twain and Warner's subtitle for The Gilded Age--"A Tale of To-Day"--is still accurate.
The Long Gilded Age
From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the United States experienced unprecedented structural change. Advances in communication and manufacturing technology brought about a revolution for major industries such as railroads, coal, and steel. The still-growing nation established economic, political, and cultural entanglements with forces overseas. Local strikes in manufacturing, urban transit, and construction placed labor issues front and center in political campaigns, legislative corridors, church pulpits, and newspapers of the era. The Long Gilded Age considers the interlocking roles of politics, labor, and internationalism in the ideologies and institutions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Presenting a new twist on central themes of American labor and working-class history, Leon Fink examines how the American conceptualization of free labor played out in iconic industrial strikes, and how "freedom" in the workplace became overwhelmingly tilted toward individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. He investigates the legal and intellectual centers of progressive thought, situating American policy actions within an international context. In particular, he traces the development of American socialism, which appealed to a young generation by virtue of its very un-American roots and influences. The Long Gilded Age offers both a transnational and comparative look at a formative era in American political development, placing this tumultuous period within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and social transformation.
Gilded Age
Mark Twain here collaborates with Charles Dudley Warner in a novel which gave its name to the era in which it was written. Here is a definitive dissection of the pretenses of the high Victorian era, its corruption, hypocrisy, and, in Twain's eye, comic absurdities.
Morals and Manners: Middle-Class Society
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Discover how the American middle class was a direct product of industrialization and the new employment categories it created. Investigate the key features of the new middle class lifestyle, encompassing suburban living, consumption, and leisure. Also identify defining middle-class values, from respectability and manners to personal hygiene and the "cult of domesticity."
Sunshine and Shadow
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowNow the spotlight shines on the growth, glamour and grief of New York during America's giddy postwar "Gilded Age." Exploring the incomparable wealth of the robber barons and the unabashed corruption of political leaders, such as Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, the episode examines the era when the expansion of wealth and poverty -- and the schism between them -- built to a crescendo. The program ends as the city itself dramatically expands its boundaries, annexing Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island into a single massive metropolis -- Greater New York.
The Gilded Age
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowTHE GILDED AGE presents a compelling and complex story of one of the most convulsive and transformative eras in American history. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the U.S. population doubled in the span of a single generation, national wealth expanded, and two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life.
Online Articles
- Arkansas’s Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class ProtestAMONG THE POOREST states in the United States, with a sparse population, Arkansas saw the passage of the first US "right to work" law during World War II. The anti-labour stance of president Bill Clinton in the 1990s can be traced back to his time as state governor a decade earlier. Thousands of poor Arkansans have lost Medicaid coverage under the current governor, Asa Hutchinson. Union rights are a dead letter among homegrown liberals.
In Arkansas's Gilded Age, Matthew Hild shows how a vibrant working-class movement reached its height there during the last third of the 19th century. He argues that activists from agricultural, transport, and extractive labour sectors embraced the ideology of "producerism" and mounted a "third-party challenge" against the Arkansas Democratic Party. (4) An often-tenuous coalition of farmers and skilled workers influenced later homegrown working-class movements. - The Merry War Goes On: Elite Suffrage in Gilded Age Manhattane article informs on the elite suffragists in Gilded Age Manhattan. Topics discussed include history of various movements on women's right to suffrage; challenges of supporting enfranchisement in 1894; and efforts taken by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association and the New York City Woman Suffrage League in providing base for the woman suffrage movement in the Empire State and Manhattan.
- “Bank-Wreckers, Defaulters, and Embezzlers”: America’s Popular Fear and Fascination with the Misappropriation of Bank Deposits during the Gilded Age and Progressive EraThis article explores how “bank-wreckers, defaulters, and embezzlers” were popularly perceived during Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, and how they contributed to a broader concern over the safety of deposits and helped drive efforts to achieve greater financial security. Their actions, often described as “wrecking,” referred to instances in which a banking institution was damaged or destroyed due to the embezzlement or general misappropriation of depositor funds by bank officials or employees. Wrecking occurred inside and outside of the era’s major banking panics, and attracted popular and critical attention over this period, especially between the 1880s and the early 1910s. It is argued that this phenomenon resonated within the popular imagination, which was reflected, reinforced, and even instilled through the media, and that this helped sustain doubts on the reliability of the nation’s banks and bankers. This article shows how notions of class, character, and gender influenced how people thought about the problem: wrecking demonstrated that respectability could be illusory and that men of the era could be tempted to “get rich quick” through dubious means. Some of the major attempts to resolve the problem are also discussed to highlight how efforts to prevent wrecking relate to the period’s general push to bolster economic stability. Ultimately, the article shows how seemingly disparate events can aggregate into a larger problem, which can in turn motivate solutions and reforms.
America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowExamine the complex and fascinating story of the conquest of the American West. First, assess key myths surrounding the West and how it was settled. Explore the motives and realities of westward migration, the components of the western economy, and the conflicts with Native Americans that led to violence and tragedy.