Gale Encyclopedia of US History

Named after an 1873 social satire by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the Gilded Age encompasses the years from the 1870s to 1900. Scholars tend to see the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction as important contributors to the transformations that took place in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Congressional laws helped lay the groundwork for change. Whereas the Homestead Act (1862) opened the West for settlement by individual farmers, other laws, such as the Railroad Enabling Act (1866), the Desert Land Grant Act (1877), and the Stone and Timber Land Act (1878), transferred millions of acres of land and the resources and raw materials below ground into the hands of cattlemen, railroads, and mining and land development companies. Railroad expansion in combination with government land policies and the breaking of Native American resistance on the Plains in the 1870s and 1880s opened up the trans-Mississippi West for settlement and economic usage.

Constitutional change, too, contributed to this process. Between 1875 and 1900 the Supreme Court removed many state laws restricting interstate commerce but also blocked federal attempts at regulation. The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887, but its limited powers were further circumscribed by Court decisions. Legal change helped to create a political environment in which forces of social change could unfold.

Innovations in manufacturing and communication joined by demographic changes led to a fusion of population growth, urbanization, and industrialization. Technological changes, such as the introduction of the Bessemer converter in steelmaking; the telegraph and the telephone, the latter invented in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell; the discovery of electricity as an energy source by Thomas A. Edison; and developments in transportation and mass transit made possible the concentration of manufacturing consumption in cities. After 1880, the socalled "new immigration" from southern and southeastern Europe along with rural-urban migration within the United States provided workers and consumers for burgeoning urban marketplaces. Mass marketing companies like I. M. Singer, mail-order houses like Sears, Roebuck, and department stores like Wanamaker's catered to American consumer needs. By 1900, participation in national and urban markets was no longer a matter of choice.

Rapidly advancing industrialization led to the emergence of economies of scale. In 1850, the average capital investment in a company amounted to $700,000. In 1900, average investment had risen to $1. 9 million. To remain competitive and to satisfy investors and shareholders, companies needed to increase the return on investments. Manufacturers began to replace craft techniques with routinized and segmented work processes aided by new production technologies. New technologies enabling manufacturers to produce goods and to provide services at an unprecedented scale accelerated the swings in the boom-and-bust cycle of the U. S. economy.

A cycle of global capitalist expansion begun in the 1820s came to a halt in the 1870s and crashed in the 1890s. In 1873, the Credit Mobilier scandal and the collapse of Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific Railroad resulted in a recession from which the country only recovered four years later in 1877. In May 1893, the collapse of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad and of the National Cordage Company led to a stock market crash and a prolonged recession. Before the year was over, five hundred banks and sixteen thousand businesses had failed. At the height of the depression four million workers lost their jobs.

What had happened? New technologies of mass production and mass distribution had consistently driven down prices. Between 1873 and the late 1890s, commodity prices had dropped by 80 percent. At the same time, "sound money" politics had kept the currency supply tight, putting the squeeze on workers and farmers especially.

Banking and monetary policies contributed to this problem. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 introduced order into banking through a federally chartered banking system but also kept the money supply tight. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which enabled the government to buy silver in proportion to gold, was designed to increase the money supply, but it was repealed at the most inappropriate moment, the onset of the depression in 1893. The economic policies of the presidencies from Ulysses S. Grant to William McKinley were grounded in fiscal conservatism, economic individualism, and market liberalism, which neither anticipated such problems nor adequately solved them.

Workers and farmers met such policies with some resistance. Mostly unsuccessfully, workingmen challenged railroads and manufacturers in the Great Strike of 1877, the 1886 railroad strike, the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the 1894 Pullman Strike. Workers organized in the Knights of Labor and after 1889 in the newly founded American Federation of Labor, which advocated a more cautious business unionism. Agrarian resistance gained momentum with the People's, or Populist, Party, founded in 1890. The Populists experienced a meteoric rise in political fortunes at the ballot boxes in several southern and western states. Although the Populists were successful in several state and gubernatorial elections, their attempt to take control of the presidency through a "fusion ticket" with the Democrats failed in 1896, and the party disappeared thereafter.

Economic changes may have helped undermine support for such a third party as they aided in the recovery. In the late 1890s, poor European harvests increased demand for grain and cereals, and new gold discoveries in Alaska, Colorado, South Africa, and Australia created enough inflation to raise prices out of the doldrums.

This era that experienced social and economic change on a massive scale was marked by many contradictions. Along with the beginning of the modern American labor movement and a resurgence of the movement for women's rights, the age saw the implementation of rigid race segregation in the South through so-called Jim Crow laws, sanctioned by the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Gilded Age also witnessed the emergence of the United States as an imperialist foreign power. Desire for greatness on the seas, partially spawned by Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), led the United States into war with Spain in 1898 and into a subsequent war in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. The Gilded Age saw the birth pangs of the United States as a global power, an urban, industrial society, and a modern, liberal corporatist state. Many problems remained unsolved, however, for the Progressive Era and New Deal reform policies to address.

Tall tale

Roget's Thesaurus

1. An entertaining and often oral account of a real or fictitious occurrence: anecdote, fable, story, tale. Informal yarn.
2. An untrue declaration: canard, cock-and-bull story, falsehood, falsity, fib, fiction, inveracity, lie², misrepresentation, misstatement, prevarication, story, tale, untruth. Informal fish story. Slang whopper.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 787