When was the gilded era

These inventions provided the bases for modern consumerism and industrial productivity. During the s and s, the U. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double those of Germany or France, and 50 percent higher than those of Britain. The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe.

The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. The super-rich industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew W. Rogers, J. John D. Nearly all of the eligible men were political partisans, and voter turnout often exceeded 90 percent in some states. The dominant issues were cultural especially regarding prohibition, education, and ethnic or racial groups , and economic tariffs and money supply.

With the rapid growth of cities, political machines increasingly took control of urban politics. Meanwhile, the pairing of a wantonly violent and racist criminal justice system with laws that impede felon and ex-felon suffrage decimates the black vote. Such justifications for imperial military action echo from the s to the s, whether serving to target Sioux gold in the Black Hills or black gold in Iraq.

The Gilded Age also included white nationalist, anti-immigrant movements. Their legislative culmination was the Chinese Exclusion Act of , which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States.

Last year, President Donald Trump succeeded in imposing restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He continues, as he has since his campaign launch, to make political hay by demonizing migrants from Mexico and Central America.

These surface historical parallels seem so obvious. In the liberal historical imagination, the economic reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal years in the first half of the 20th century — primarily higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise — vanquished Gilded Age inequality.

This happy version of the story has many heroes, most of whom tend to be middle-class intellectuals and technocratic politicians: muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell who exposed robber barons, government appointees like Frances Perkins who fought to protect workers, and seemingly anti-laissez-faire presidents like Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts.

Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the s through the s. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism.

Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner. We have not been through all this before. The strike spread among other railroads, sparking violence across America between the working class and local and federal authorities.

At its peak, over , railroad workers were on strike. Many of the Robber Barons feared an aggressive, all-out revolution against their way of life.

Instead, the strike—later known as the Great Upheaval—ended abruptly and was labeled a dismal failure. As the working class continued to use strikes and boycotts to fight for higher wages and improved working conditions, their bosses staged lock-outs and brought in replacement workers known as scabs.

They also created blacklists to prevent active union workers from becoming employed elsewhere. Even so, the working class continued to unite and press their cause and often won at least some of their demands. Innovations of the Gilded Age helped usher in modern America. Urbanization and technological creativity led to many engineering advances such as bridges and canals, elevators and skyscrapers, trolley lines and subways.

The invention of electricity brought illumination to homes and businesses and created an unprecedented, thriving night life. In , Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the world a much smaller place for both individuals and businesses. Advances in sanitation and housing, and the availability of better quality food and material goods, improved quality of life for the middle class.

But while the middle and upper classes enjoyed the allure of city life, little changed for the poor. Most still faced horrific living conditions, high crime rates and a pitiable existence. Many escaped their drudgery by watching a vaudeville show or a spectator sport such as boxing, baseball or football, all of which enjoyed a surge during the Gilded Age. Upper-class women of the Gilded Age have been compared to dolls on display dressed in resplendent finery.

They flaunted their wealth and endeavored to improve their status in society while poor and middle-class women both envied and mimicked them. Some wealthy Gilded Age women were much more than eye candy, though, and often traded domestic life for social activism and charitable work.

Some created homes for destitute immigrants while others pushed a temperance agenda, believing the source of poverty and most family troubles was alcohol. Wealthy women philanthropists of the Gilded Age include:. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller , wife of John D.

Rockefeller, Jr. Many women during the Gilded Age sought higher education. Others postponed marriage and took jobs such as typists or telephone switchboard operators. Thanks to a print revolution and the accessibility of newspapers, magazines and books, women became increasingly knowledgeable, cultured, well-informed and a political force to be reckoned with. Jane Addams is arguably the best-known philanthropist of the Gilded Age. The neighborhood was a melting pot of struggling immigrants, and Hull-House provided everything from midwife services and basic medical care to kindergarten, day care and housing for abused women.

It also offered English and citizenship classes. Adams received the Nobel Peace Prize in Temperance leader Carrie Nation gained notoriety during the Gilded Age for smashing up saloons with a hatchet to bring attention to her sobriety agenda.

She was also a strong voice for the suffrage movement. Convinced God had instructed her to use whatever means necessary to close bars throughout Kansas , she was often beaten, mocked and jailed but ultimately helped pave the way for the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol and the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

As muckrakers exposed corrupt robber barons and politicians, labor unions and reformist politicians enacted laws to limit their power. The western frontier saw violent conflicts between white settlers and the United States Army against Native Americans. The Native Americans were eventually forced off their land and onto reservations with often disastrous results. Grant is widely considered one of the most corrupt in history, although Grant himself is often considered a more minor player in the on-going scandals that plagued his time in office.

There were more than a dozen notable scandals during his administration, but this article will focus on a representative case in this report: the Whiskey Ring.

The Whiskey Ring was a tax evasion scheme developed by the newly-empowered liberal Republican political machine in Missouri. The schemers bribed and cajoled administrators in every phase of the production of whiskey to underreport their numbers to avoid paying the whiskey tax — and therefore significantly increasing their profits.

The money was then diverted to the local political machine, to increase its power over potential rivals. The scandal was revealed in a series of investigations by Myron Colony, the commercial editor of the St. Louis Democrat , a paper opposed perhaps obviously to the Republican machine. Given his position, he was able to request figures from the different stages of the whiskey production process, eventually discovering the fraud when he reconciled the numbers.

The story received immediate attention from across the country, and helped to usher in the end of reconstruction following the election.