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THE GILDED AGE (1877 – 1896)
The post-Civil War era from the 1870's into the 1890's is often referred to by historians as "The
Gilded Age," a term borrowed from the title of a novel published in 1873 by Mark Twain and
Charles Dudley Warner. The principal characters in the novel pursue various schemes (not
always strictly legal) for acquiring wealth, and through them the story becomes a moral tale
reflecting the self-serving corruption of the time. The word "gilded," meaning "covered with a
thin veneer of gold," itself suggests fakery, deception, and dishonesty, and "Gilded Age" is a
clever and satirical corruption of "Golden Age."
While the years between the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of the 20th century were
certainly marked by a disturbing level of financial and political corruption, they were also years
of unprecedented growth and development, achieved during an era when there was little legal
or governmental oversight. England, which had pioneered the original Industrial Revolution in
the late 18th century, had endured a similar experience—rapid growth causing problems and
dislocations which government was slow to recognize or address. The consequences of rapid
industrialization, in England, America, and wherever industrialization took hold, gave rise to an
enduring debate about the proper role of government in modern society. In the interests of
stimulating economic growth and prosperity, should it simply leave businessmen alone and
give them free rein to pursue profits? Should it pass laws to regulate business practices in
order to "promote the general Welfare," as mandated by the Constitution, and to protect the
public from fraudulent and dangerous business practices? Or should it try to steer a middle
course between the two? This issue remains as contentious and vital today as it was in the late
1800's, but in general, most administrations, then and now, have attempted to steer a middle
course.
There were four Presidents of the United States during The Gilded Age, one of whom served
twice. James A. Garfield, the 20th U.S. President, was elected in 1880. A Republican from
Ohio, and a former Brigadier General in the Union Army who had seen service in Chattanooga
during the Civil War, he had been a Congressman in the House of Representatives prior to his
election to the presidency. As an opponent of the "spoils system" which too often filled
governmental posts with incompetent appointees, Garfield sought "civil service reforms" aimed
at improving the quality of civil servants (government workers). Such reforms, however, were
opposed by powerful politicians in big cities like New York, where a kind of local spoils system
had taken root since the time of Andrew Jackson. They naturally wanted the prevailing system
of patronage and appointments to continue, and by the 1880's they had become known as
"Stalwarts." To appease them at election time, Garfield chose as his running mate, Chester A.
Arthur of New York, who was connected to the Stalwarts. This issue of civil service reform
would come back to haunt Garfield only four months into his presidency, when a disappointed
and mentally unstable civil service office-seeker named Charles J. Giteau shot him at the
Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881. Giteau seems
to have believed that by removing Garfield from office, he would raise a known Stalwart,
Chester A. Arthur, to the presidency and thereby kill civil service reform, which he believed had
prevented him from securing a civil service position. Garfield lived for another eleven weeks
but died on September 19, 1881, largely as a result of mistakes made by his doctors, and
Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States. After a highly
publicized trial, Giteau was executed near Washington, D.C., on June 30, 1882. Ironically,
Arthur disappointed his former Stalwart associates by supporting Garfield's civil service reform
agenda, and on January 16, 1883, he signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act,
mandating appointments to federal office based on merit. This decision, however, ruined any
chance Arthur may have had of seeking his own election to the presidency in 1884.
In 1884, Grover Cleveland of New York, a Democrat, former Mayor of Buffalo and former
Governor of New York, was elected the 22nd President of the United States. He was the only
Democrat elected during the Gilded Age and the only president to serve two split terms
(elected in 1884 and again in 1892). In fact, although he lost the electoral vote in 1888, he
nonetheless received the most popular votes. His election in 1884 was due in part to support
from the so-called "Mugwumps," Republicans disgusted with corruption within their ranks who
bolted the party to vote for a Democrat. Cleveland was generally supportive of business
interests, but he refused to sanction laws which would give businesses preferential treatment.
He favored, for example, a reduction of the high tariff which business people generally
supported. This issue was critical in the election of 1888, in which he narrowly lost a reelection
bid to the grandson of William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who became the
23rd President of the United States. Like Garfield before him, Harrison had been a Brigadier
General in the Union Army during the Civil War, and in the 1880's he had served as a Senator
from Indiana. During his single term in the White House, Harrison agreed to the reinstatement
of a high tariff (the McKinley Tariff of 1890) and saw federal expenditures reach the $1 billion
level for the first time in American history, a development for which he took considerable
criticism. Also in 1890, he signed into law the Sherman Antitrust Act, proposed by Senator
John Sherman of Ohio, a younger brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Although
the intent of the law was to break up large business conglomerates (monopolies and trusts)
and to foster competition in the marketplace, Harrison did little to enforce it. His presidential
agenda was that of a moderate who sought in various ways to appease both Republicans and
Democrats, but this political strategy did not help him at the polls in 1892, where he lost to
Grover Cleveland, who returned to Washington as the 24th President of the United States.
Worsening economic conditions had contributed to Harrison's failure to be reelected and
culminated in the so-called Panic of 1893, which Cleveland was left to deal with. After acting to
protect the nation's gold supply and to limit the amount of silver in circulation, he oversaw a
reduction of the McKinley Tariff and then moved to intervene in labor disputes unleashed by
the economic downturn. The nation's economic woes and some of Cleveland's policies for
dealing with them contributed to his failure to gain the Democratic Party's nomination in 1896.
Seven new states were admitted to the Union during the Gilded Age, six of them during
Benjamin Harrison's administration: North Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Montana
(1889), Washington (1889), Idaho (1890), and Wyoming (1890). One additional state was
admitted during Cleveland's second term of office: Utah (1896).
Utah was settled largely by Mormons, members of a uniquely American brand of Christianity
which arose during the Second Great Awakening, called the Church of Christ of Latter Day
Saints. Following the murder of the church's founder, Joseph Smith, in Illinois in 1844, there
was a struggle for leadership of the movement, and a group of Mormons under Brigham Young
then moved westward, eventually settling near Utah's Great Salt Lake. Their beliefs, their
insularity, and especially their practice of polygamy had made Mormons unwelcome wherever
they went, so Young and his followers sought the desolation of the American West as a place
of refuge. Soon, however, modern civilization caught up with them. The great Comstock silver
strike brought thousands of hopeful miners to the region in 1858 and influenced the
organization of a separate Nevada Territory. Then a decade later, the first transcontinental
railroad was completed in the Utah territory. Concern about the Mormon practice of polygamy,
however, derailed statehood attempts for almost 50 years and led to the passage of several
federal laws prohibiting it. Finally, in 1890, the Mormon leadership in Utah officially abandoned
polygamy, paving the way for statehood, which finally became a reality in 1896 during the final
months of Cleveland's second administration. Today, over half of the residents of Utah are
Mormons, reflecting the state's unique heritage, and small groups of Mormon fundamentalist
dissenters continue to practice polygamy in defiance of state and federal law in isolated
western and Canadian communities.
In the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, the population of the United States roughly
doubled, from about 30 million to about 60 million. Included in that number of new Americans
were perhaps as many as 20 million immigrants from Europe. Most of them came from
northern Europe (Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia), and they often brought
useful specialized skills with them. At the same time, however, a rapidly increasing number of
poor and unskilled immigrants began to arrive from southern and eastern Europe (Poland,
Russia, Italy), and by 1900 their numbers would rise explosively. In 1892, Ellis Island in New
York Harbor became the principal entry point for foreigners seeking to enter the United States,
and it would remain so until its closing in 1954. Urban areas on the east coast, where many
immigrants settled, at least initially, often became overcrowded, polluted, crime-ridden, and
disease-ridden. Such rapid and expansive urban growth was both unprecedented and
unplanned. While immigrants often moved on to new locations in the American heartland, their
places in eastern cities were quickly replaced by new foreigners just arrived on American
shores, and within those cities, ethnic groups tended to cluster in particular areas. Immigrants
from China began to arrive on the west coast in the 1850's, and although they were few in
number and frequently resented by Americans, they were tolerated for their willingness to do
work which whites typically refused. Many were employed, for example, in building the most
difficult leg of the first transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevadas. They also found
employment as miners, servants, farmers, fishermen, mill workers, and launderers. Even by
1890 there were only about 100,000 Chinese living in America. Americans whose ancestors
had arrived long ago and even immigrants who had become more recently well-established in
America often resented these new arrivals and fueled a "nativist" backlash which had cultural,
racial, and economic roots. An anti-immigrant political party had in fact been organized in
America in the 1850's, popularly known as the "Know Nothings." Anti-immigration laws were
passed, particularly aimed at limiting the number of Chinese and eastern Europeans allowed
into the country. Although the vast majority of immigrants woud in time be assimilated into
American culture and would lend to the nation its distinctive "melting pot" character, their
transition to citizenship status was often uneven, difficult, and prolonged.
Many new immigrants found work as laborers building the nation's rapidly expanding system of
railroads. Plans for a transcontinental railroad from the east coast to the west coast had been
laid before the Civil War, but the war consumed both resources and capital, delaying serious
work on the project until the war's conclusion. The Union Pacific Railroad was to run westward
from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific Railroad was to be built eastward from
Sacramento, California. European immigrants provided much of the labor on the Union Pacific
route, while many Chinese immigrants were recruited by the Central Pacific. Built over largely
flat terrain, the Union Pacific line was completed fairly quickly and with relative ease. The
Central Pacific line, on the other hand, had to negotiate the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains,
making the enterprise much more time-consuming and technically difficult. Nonetheless, the
two rail lines were ultimately linked near Ogden, Utah, in 1869. The nation's network of rail
lines in both the East and the West expanded dramatically during the Gilded Age and had a
profound impact on the opening and development of American territory west of the Mississippi.
Arduous westward journeys by wagon were gradually rendered unnecessary since both people
and supplies could be more quickly and safely transported across the Great Plains and
western mountain ranges by rail. Civilization sprang up along the new railroad routes, and the
population of western territories grew rapidly in consequence. Many of the entrepreneurs who
actually built the railroads, the bankers who financed the effort, and the factory owners who
manufactured the rails, the spikes, and the engines, thought of themselves as "captains of
industry" who were involved in vitally important work, while enriching themselves substantially
at the same time. Often, they returned a portion of their extravagant earnings in the form of
philanthropic endowments. Railroad magnates Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford, for
example, endowed colleges, as did the Pittsburgh steel titan, Andrew Carnegie. Their critics,
however, preferred to think of them as "robber barons."
Settlers in western territories became dependent upon the railroad in a variety of ways, and
railroad owners frequently took advantage of them in the interest of profit. Farmers often
needed the railroad to transport their produce to market, and transportation costs cut deeply
into the meager income they derived from the sale of their crops. Although they succeeded in
organizing themselves to oppose the railroads, predatory banks, and federal laws that made
their lives difficult, and although they even formed their own Populist political party, farmers
never succeeded in realizing their primary goals, and as farming practices became increasingly
mechanized, their numbers dwindled dramatically. Ranchers needed the railroad also to
transport their cattle to market and were similarly faced with high transportation costs. Although
farmers and ranchers were natural allies in their need to negotiate better arrangements with
the railroads, they often quarreled over the limited sources of water available in the West and
over how western land should be exploited. Farmers could not tolerate hundreds of head of
cattle tramping over their crops, so they began to fence in their fields with barbed wire, a new
invention of the day which made it possible to build miles of fences relatively cheaply. Fences,
however, complicated the ranchers' cattle drives each season, as they moved their herds to
the nearest railway hubs and to market.The result, for a brief time, was a series of "range wars"
in the West between farmers and ranchers. These conflicts were not always easy to resolve,
given the rudimentary system of law and order in western territories at the time. The Gilded
Age, in fact, coincided with the era often referred to as the "Old West," an era that would be
much glorified in popular culture later. Prominent characters of the Old West included Jesse
James, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and the Dalton Gang—a
motley collection of lawmen and law-breakers who from today's perspective are sometimes
difficult to distinguish. By the end of the century, however, as eastern-style civilization took hold
in the West, the day of the western gunfighter and train robber came to an end.
Another effect of railroad development in the West was the final suppression of the American
Plains Indian. In the early 1800's there had been as many as 60 million buffalo roaming freely
in the West, but hunters decimated the herds during the course of the century, driving this
iconic American animal to near extinction. It had been hunted for sport and for profit, with tons
of buffalo hides transported to market by the railroad. Plains Indians depended upon the
buffalo as a vital element of their traditional cultures, so loss of the animal was devastating to
them. On occasion they had attempted to thwart progress on railroad construction, but their
resistance only prompted the railroads to hire ex-Civil War soldiers to patrol the rail lines and
the federal government to deploy cavalry forces in the West. The massacre of George
Armstrong Custer's cavalry force at the Little Big Horn river in present-day Montana in 1876
was the high point of the Plains Indians' resistance in the West, but it also proved to be their
undoing. Public sentiment turned against them and led to their final suppression and relegation
to reservations in the 1890's, bringing to an end the tragic story of their attempt to maintain
their culture and independence.
As noted above, immigrants, farmers, ranchers, and Indians faced difficult times during the
Gilded Age, but they were not alone. Other groups which were victimized, exploited, or
marginalized included a variety of lowly-paid workers, blacks, and women. Factory and railroad
owners, among others, sought to maximize profits by strictly limiting the wages paid to their
employees. The work day was typically long, wages were low, and the work itself was
frequently dangerous, but workers had little leverage to improve their lot. Troublemakers were
simply fired. Employers sometimes even devised ways to recover what they paid out in wages,
by inducing their workers to live in crowded dwellings which the company made available,
thereby reclaiming a portion of the wages paid out by the company in the form of rent. When
workers banded together into unions for their mutual benefit, used their numbers to gain
concessions, and threatened to or actually went on strike and refused to work, companies
typically branded their leaders as socialists, communists, or anarchists, hired new laborers
called "scabs" to take their places, and formed their own police forces for intimidating strikers
and protecting scabs. Occasionally, in key industries, the federal government involved itself in
settling labor disputes between employers and workers. Although workers made some limited
progress during the Gilded Age, the public generally aligned itself with employers and the
federal government, particularly whenever workers resorted to violence to achieve their aims.
Southern blacks, similarly, made little progress during the Gilded Age. Relegated to a thirdclass status by southern whites and virtually disenfranchised again by "black codes" and "Jim
Crow laws," they realized few benefits from their freedom and in many cases found life more
difficult as free men than it had been as slaves. Their continuing misfortune would lead many of
them in the early 20th century to abandon the South altogether and to begin a massive
migration into northern states. Women too made little progress during the Gilded Age. A few
vocal advocates of women's rights, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
continued to be active in reform movements, to agitate for equality with men, and particularly to
acquire the right to vote, but in general their success was limited. Nonetheless, they laid the
groundwork for important reforms to come in the early 20th century.
The Gilded Age was also an age of invention, witnessing the appearance of a number of
significant innovations which were to be developed and mass-produced by American industry
and which would transform both America and the world. Alexander Graham Bell invented the
telephone in 1876, and by 1890 over a quarter million miles of telephone lines had been strung
across the country, almost a quarter million telephones were in use, and almost 500 million
telephone conversations had occurred. Thomas A. Edison, perhaps the most prolific inventor of
the age, assembled a team of technicians who contributed to the development of telephone
technology. They also developed the first phonograph for recording sound (1876) and the first
commercially viable electric light bulb (1879), as well as a power-generating system for
delivering electricity to the public. The light bulb consisted of a glass envelope (bulb) with a
wire inside, called a "filament," which glowed and produced light when energized by electricity.
Countless experiments were conducted by Edison and his team to find a substance which
would become hot and glow for long periods of time without burning through and breaking the
electrical circuit through it. They discovered that air had to be pumped out of the glass bulb,
creating a virtual vacuum, in order for the filament to survive intact for any appreciable length of
time. In an attempt to improve the light bulb in 1883, they inserted into an evacuated bulb a
metal plate with wires passing through the glass and running to the positive pole of a battery,
and to their surprise, they found that an electrical current was flowing from the filament to the
plate, even though the two were not physically connected. Under ordinary circumstances, for
current to flow, all circuit elements must be physically connected, forming a "closed circuit."
This odd discovery was noted at the time but not investigated further. It would later be called
"the Edison Effect" or "the thermionic effect." After the electron was discovered by British
physicist J.J. Thomson in 1897, it was realized that electrical current is the flow of electrons
and that the Edison Effect was in fact caused by electrons being driven off the filament by its
high heat and then being attracted across empty space to the more positive metal plate. The
flow of electrons through the empty space between filament and plate, in effect, completed the
circuit between them. This realization led inventors in the early 20th century to develop a wide
variety of specialized "vacuum tubes," which made possible the invention of radio, the first
wireless form of communication.
The electrical power-generating system which Edison promoted and even implemented on a
limited basis in New York City, generated "direct current or DC," essentially a constant,
unvarying potential of around 100 volts. A competing system, however, was under
development by others at the same time, called "alternating current or AC," a voltage which
varies in a regular and consistent manner many times per second. Serbian immigrant, Nikola
Tesla, and German immigrant, Charles Steinmetz, contributed substantially to the design of
this alternative power system, which was promoted by American inventor George
Westinghouse. For a variety of technical reasons, AC was ultimately deemed superior to DC,
and by the 1890's, power plants were being constructed in the Northeast for generating
alternating current. Today, alternating current power systems are the norm, both in America
and across the world.
In 1888, George Eastman invented a new type of flexible film that could be rolled up onto a
spool, a simple box camera using it, and a relatively simple system for developing and printing
images. He called his camera the "Kodak," a word invented to catch the public's attention in
advertising. This development marked the beginning of a revolution in photography, which for
the first time made inexpensive cameras, film, and developing services available to everyone.
In 1889, Edison and his associates took Eastman's flexible film and developed a commercially
viable motion picture camera for it, as well as a projection system for displaying the moving
images. The American motion picture industry would arise from the creative possibilities
opened up by this innovation.
In 1893, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a scholarly essay and delivered a
speech entitled, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in which he argued that
the frontier experience had shaped and determined the American character. It had made
Americans tough-minded, individualistic, physically robust, persistent, liberty-loving,
independent, suspicious of government, and innovative. He also observed, however, that the
frontier experience was finally drawing to a close and wondered what impact its closing might
have on the American character. His ideas worried those who feared that America's best days
were perhaps already past and encouraged those who believed that America was merely
shedding its cultural adolescence. At any rate, Turner sparked a debate which continues.
Although the post-Civil War era has sometimes been denigrated as a time of minimal
importance in American history or reviled as a corrupt "Gilded Age," it was in fact an important
period of transition to the modern age. The rapid growth of the Republic's population alone
forced change, in immigration policy, in development of western territories, and in improvement
of basic infrastructure. It led to a growing debate about the proper role of government in
American life, a debate which continues to this day. Political corruption led to civil service
reforms, and free-wheeling business practices evoked cries of protest from workers and
farmers. Many on the margins of American society were eager for change and beginning to or
poised to act on their discontent. New inventions empowered the common man, made mass
communications possible, and made travel cheaper and quicker. The United States was
changing rapidly and was about to enter a new and radically different century.