American Gilded Age

5 Key excerpts on "American Gilded Age"

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  eBook - ePub

  Reading the American Novel 1865 - 1914

  • G. R. Thompson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 16 The “Gilded Age” Genteel Critics and Militant Muckrakers

  The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner gave the Age of Big Business one of its most memorable labels. In American cultural history, the term “Gilded Age” invokes the period from the end of the Civil War through the 1890s, and slightly beyond. Associated with the rapid rise of Big Business are the Labor Movement, the Factory System, and the attempt of Corporate Capital (personified as the Robber Barons) to control it all – by violence if necessary. Within this time frame, political historians have identified other periods, most notably Reconstruction and the Progressive Era, terms embodying the contradictory tendencies of the times. But for most literary scholars and cultural critics, the “Gilded Age” is the label that has stuck.1

  The term emphasizes the problems and evils of laissez-faire capitalism. Gilded means covered with a thin layer of (usually) fake gold. In their comic Dickensian way, Twain and Warner strip away the pretty surface and expose the ugliness beneath the top layer of society, politics, and business. The word gilded also suggests American Victorian respectability and artifice, from the gilt-edges and decorations of fake books in simulated libraries, to elaborate gilded picture frames in over-decorated parlors, to insincere piety regarding personal behavior and business ethics.

  Novels of social criticism in the era generally took one of two forms: “genteel criticism” and “muckraking.” Among the Genteel Critics and historical romancers who sometimes cast a jaundiced eye on American manners, morals, and institutions are Henry Adams, Booth Tarkington, Winston Churchill, Robert Herrick, and W. D. Howells. The Muckrakers wrote both fiction and nonfiction in which they more militantly exposed the ugly underside of American capitalism and putative democracy. Important muckraking works include novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, John William De Forest, and David Graham Phillips; and journalistic exposés by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, Thorstein Veblen, and Helen Hunt Jackson. The most famous of the American muckraking novels is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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  A History of American Consumption

  Threads of Meaning, Gender, and Resistance

  • Terrence H. Witkowski(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 The Gilded Age, 1865 to 1900

  Mark Twain – the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) – was still known mostly for his humorous travel books when, in 1873, he and his Hartford, Connecticut neighbor, the writer and editor Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), co-authored a novel they dubbed The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Their social satire of greed, land speculation, and corruption within government and among the newly rich gave the post-Civil War decades their lasting soubriquet – the Gilded Age. Like Shakespeare’s King John, who is advised “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,/ … Is wasteful and ridiculous excess,” the extravagance of the very wealthy and powerful was a signal issue of the day (Cashman 1993). Indeed, extreme income inequality did characterize this period. Industrialists and financiers accumulated unprecedented wealth through deftly exploiting the prevailing system of laissez-faire capitalism. This did not go unnoticed among their numerous and often hostile critics who in 1882 coined the term “robber barons,” another soubriquet that would become part of the American lexicon (Tipple 1959). The expanding working classes, augmented by waves of new immigrants, found jobs in the factories and on the railroads, but lived under harsh conditions, toiled long hours at low pay, and suffered from very high rates of industrial accidents (Gordon 2016). Workers joined labor unions and, among other actions, organized massive railway strikes in 1877, 1886, and 1894 that inevitably resulted in deaths and violence.

  This chapter begins with an overview of the material and market context of Gilded Age consumption. In addition to reviewing key macro demographic and economic highlights, this section will briefly trace institutional developments in consumer marketing – department stores, five-and-ten cent stores, direct mail catalogs and distribution, chromolithographic printing, national magazines, and modern packaging – that affected many aspects of consumption. The next section on meaning follows the long-standing cultural threads of refinement and patriotism expressed through consumption, and then introduces the important topic of consumer brands and branding. The gender section first reviews female agency through new shopping environments (e.g., the department store) and new products (e.g., the bicycle), and then strings a new thread – men’s consumption and how it may have been shaped in part as compensation to real and perceived threats to male social status and masculinity. The threads of resistance will recount some of the critiques of leisure class excess and will introduce and explicate an important new term: to boycott. Conceptual distinctions pertaining to boycotting will be delineated along with a recap of some boycott actions taken in the 1880s and 1890s.

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  AP® U.S. History All Access Book + Online + Mobile

  • Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Industrialism and the Gilded Age (1865–1898)

  The period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century is known as the Gilded Age. Mark Twain first used the term “Gilded Age” to describe the years after the Civil War. He saw rampant greed, materialism, and corruption dominating American political and social life and viewed the outward appearance of prosperity and gaiety as being nothing more than a thin coating of gold on a fundamentally flawed society.

  Politics of the Period, 1877–1882

  The presidencies of Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) mark the boundaries of half a century of relatively weak executive leadership, and legislative domination by Congress and the Republican Party.

  The Compromise of 1877

  With Southern Democratic acceptance of Rutherford B. Hayes’s Republican presidency, the last remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the Old Confederacy (South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana), and the country was at last reunified as a modern nation-state led by corporate and industrial interests. The Hayes election arrangement also marked the government’s abandonment of its earlier vague commitment to African American equality.

  Republican Factions

  “Stalwarts” led by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling favored the old spoils system of political patronage. “Half-Breeds” headed by Maine Senator James G. Blaine pushed for civil service reform and merit appointments to government posts.

  Election of 1880

  In the 1880 presidential election, James A. Garfield of Ohio, a Half-Breed, and his vice presidential running mate, Chester A. Arthur of New York, a Stalwart, defeated the Democratic candidate, General Winfield S. Hancock of Pennsylvania and former Indiana congressman William English. Tragically, the Garfield administration was brief, as the president was assassinated in 1881 by a disturbed office-seeker, Charles Guiteau. Though lacking much executive experience, the stalwart Arthur had the courage to endorse reform of the political spoils system by supporting passage of the Pendleton Act (1883), which established open competitive examinations for civil service positions.

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  Inflated

  How Money and Debt Built the American Dream

  • R. Christopher Whalen(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , which told the tale of politicians, soiled doves, and other characters who were caught up in the speculative, get-rich-quick environment of the period. Twain used the comparison between Washington and the hinterland to great effect in his classic tale, which like many commentaries of the period employed near-fiction as a foil with which to comment on the political currents of the day. The comparison of Twain’s Gilded Age and the technology and real estate bubbles seen in the United States a century or more later seems to confirm the repetitive nature of man’s behavior when it comes to money. In the preface, Twain described his work in his typically facetious style:

  This book was not written for private circulation among friends; it was not written to cheer or instruct a diseased relative of the author’s; it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse the idle hour. It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore is submitted without the usual apologies. It will be seen that it deals entirely with a state of society; the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.1

  Twain’s description of American political life and especially Washington in The Gilded Age summarized a period of great economic growth and equally great political corruption; a period of enormous political partisanship and also great political reform. Steven Mintz of the University of Houston observed:

  Mark Twain called the late nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America’s formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers was transformed into an urban society dominated by industrial corporations.2

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  United States History from 1865

  • John Baick, Arnold M. Rice(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Collins Reference

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3

  The Rise of Industrialism in the Gilded Age

  1866: National Labor Union founded; Field lays transatlantic cable.

  1869: Union Pacific transcontinental line completed; Knights of Labor founded.

  1873: Panic of 1873 begins.

  1876: Bell invents the telephone.

  1877: Munn v. Illinois decided; railroad workers strike.

  1879: Rockefeller organizes Standard Oil Trust.

  1886: Haymarket Square Riot takes place; American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded.

  1887: Wabash Rate Case decided; Interstate Commerce Act passed.

  1890: Sherman Antitrust Act passed.

  1892: Carnegie Steel Company workers strike.

  1894: Pullman Palace Car Company workers strike.

  1905: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded.

  1908: Muller v. Oregon decided.

  In the quarter century after 1865, the nation witnessed the rise of big business. The Civil War was a catalyst for this change, as the unprecedented demands of the war led to a restructuring of the Northern economy and government. Before the century was over, America shifted its economic priorities from those of a rural agricultural nation to those of an urban industrial nation. The tremendous expansion of business enterprise was accompanied by the spread of the Gilded Age’s dominant economic theory, which held that the business sector should be left to individual initiative. However, the monopolistic practices of the large industrial firms, the abuses of the railroads, and the support of the federal government showed that free enterprise was more theory than practice. Eventually, the scale of the abuse led to popular resistance, and the federal government would be forced to curb the greatest abuses of the economic order

  .

  By the 1870s, the American worker felt the impact of this new economic system. The most obvious change was the reliance on the unskilled factory worker, replacing the skilled artisans of the past. Consequences of this change included the loss of bargaining power usually enjoyed by skilled workers; the breakdown of reciprocal employer-employee relations in the new corporations; and increased competition for jobs resulting from an expanded labor force that now included former slaves, women, children, and immigrants. For American laborers, low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions became the norm

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