Notes on the Gilded Age
Notes on the Gilded Age
Overview of the Gilded Age (1877-1900)
The Civil War and Reconstruction had divided America. However, even before Reconstruction ended America’s industrial expansion was well under way. England and Germany had gone through a similar transformation earlier, but American industrialization was larger in scale than either country, transforming the national culture more profoundly.
Businesspersons and industrialists received unprecedented government support during the Civil War and reached unprecedented heights in the postwar period, continuing to rise with few interruptions for the rest of the 19th century.
Much of the aid came in the form of the government’s most plentiful asset, millions of acres of land.
As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, it was reinforced by a resurgence of the “Ideology of Success,” the belief that everyone who exercised hard work (industry) and economy (restraint) could become successful in America.
Although the idea would generally be untrue for most Americans for several generations, and for some never, it nonetheless provided the hope, people needed to believe in and embodied the “Gospel of Wealth.”
However, some, especially in business, espoused “Social Darwinism” as the reason for the success of individuals. Wealth, leadership, success, and prosperity were determined by evolutionary superiority (survival of the fittest).
The population to operate the factories and swell the markets poured in from Europe and to a lesser extent Asia. Between 1877 and 1900, the U.S. population grew from 38,500,000 to 76,000,000.
-More than 12,000,000 came from Southern and Eastern European countries like Italy and Poland. However, many Anglo-Saxon Americans questioned whether these immigrants could be absorbed. However, in the end the extraordinary needs of industry for laborers, plus the American commitment to free immigration, generally won out.
The impact of railroads and industry :
The growth of the railroads after the Civil War was phenomenal. By the early l900’s America possessed 1/3 of the world’s railroad tracks. The early railroads were local, catering to regional service. However, with the federal giveaways of 54 million acres of public domain and $60 million dollars in loans, by l869 the first transcontinental railroad was completed. In addition, with other land grants and public loans, other railroads were built.
By l871, the federal government had given the railroads more than 135 million acres of land and millions of dollars in interest-free loans. Federal support, plus generous state policies, eventually led to the creation of three transcontinental routes and the consolidation of hundreds of smaller railroads.
These smaller railroads had also been given federal aid but went bankrupt through competition with other railroads using ruthless strategies like “the discrimination in railroad freight rates.” Once monopolies ran the smaller railroads out of business, they continued to charge, “whatever the market would bear.”
Critical changes to railroads also facilitated their growth. This included the standardization of track gauge, improved engines, and eventually refrigerator cars to carry goods over long distances.
A by-product of this period of long-term capitalization in the railroads was the rise and development of new industries, or booms to existing industries like coal and steel, glass, lumber, rubber, etc.
Generous government policies plus regional and national monopolization led to abuses including stock manipulation, rate discrimination, and rebates along with bribery and other forms of corruption.
Industry:
Countless businesspersons contributed to the growth and power of the national economy; men like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Gustavus Swift.
Other captains of industry including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Philip Armour were considered “Robber Barons” for their questionable morality taking advantage of poor laborers and their ruthless accumulation of wealth.
Often the “captains of industry” professed a belief in unfettered free enterprise and unrestricted competition. However, this led to savage price wars between competitors to dominate their particular industry.
This led some business leaders to believe open competition created chaos and sought ways to bring order.
-One example was Gentleman Agreements; unwritten agreements between owners in different industries looking to control prices and competition—such agreements failed.
-A second example was the so-called Pools. Unlike Gentlemen Agreements, these were written agreements between businesses to control prices and competition in the same field. However, they too failed and replaced by Trusts.
Trusts dominated a particular industry through monopolization, often using vertical and horizontal consolidation.
Despite the dominance of business during the late nineteenth century the captains of industry remained insecure, fearful that despite their financial power, generous support from the federal government and states, their unethical behavior would come back to haunt them.
This was especially true in the agrarian mid-western and western states where farmers were exploited by the railroads and other businesses. They could not always be sure they, or their lobbyists, would have judges, legislatures or supportive states in their corner.
To prevent states from controlling their practices, they sought protection in the Constitution under the so-called “Doctrine of Vested Rights.” This constitutional theory claimed nothing was more sacred and fundamental to “God and Justice” than the sanctity of private property.
Between l869 and 1898, businesses sought indirect and direct protection from potential, state regulation under the Fourteenth Amendment. They sought a substantive reinterpretation of the 14th amendment, one that would provide business protection under the Amendment. This occurred as a result of business appeals to state regulation over their practices in three Supreme Court cases:
Slaughterhouse Cases (1869): The Louisiana State Legislature awarded a virtual monopoly to one slaughterhouse business. The other slaughterhouse businesses filed a suit that worked its way up to the Supreme Court. They argued that the state legislature’s action violated their rights against arbitrary state action and equal protection under the 14th amendment. The Supreme Court rejected their claim, essentially saying they had no standing under the amendment since it was specifically passed to protect the civil and political rights of the recently freed slaves in the southern states, and for individuals, which they were not. The court upheld the Louisiana State Legislature.
Munn v. Illinois (1873): This case presented exactly the scenario big business was afraid of happening, a state attempting to regulate the practices of businesses, specifically the railroads. After years of being victims of railroad rate discrimination, agrarian radicals managed to win a majority of seats in the Illinois State Legislature.
To punish the railroads the Grange (agrarian radicals) controlled legislature passed a law setting the rates for the storage of grain in grain elevators in cities with populations of 500, 000 or more. Chicago was the only city in Illinois with such a population and where 95% of all grain was stored in grain elevators owned by the railroads. Again, the railroads filed suit taking it to the Supreme Court seeking protection under the 14th Amendment. However, The Supreme Court still, took a strict interpretation of the 14th Amendment, ruling the railroads or any business, could not find protection under the amendment.
Smyth v. Ames (1898): By the end of the century, most Americans were less hostile toward business or at least began to see its benefits.
Moreover, the composition of the Supreme Court had changed with presidential appointments of justices who were outright favorable to big business. The court decided to take a more expansive interpretation of the 14th amendment and included business under its protection, striking down a Nebraska state statute that attempted to regulate railroad freight rates. While the decision touched on corporations as individuals, it did not hurt that the case involved a business involved in interstate state commerce and generally beyond the jurisdiction/regulation of the states under the Interstate Commerce Act.
Ironically, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was designed to regulate the railroad industry, specifically its monopolistic practices. It created the Interstate Commerce Commission to monitor railroads to ensure the railroad rates were “reasonable and just,” but did not give the government power to fix specific rates.
Cities during the Gilded Age:
As mentioned, between the 1870 and 1900 the cities grew at a fantastic rate. There was continual conflict between older Anglo-Saxon stock Americans who had been displaced by the railroads or sought the “milk and honey in the cities,” and the newer immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans. By l916 several books, like Madison Grant’s, The Passing of a Great Race, (l916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, (l920) argued that these races were injecting an inferior racial gene pool into America, destroying the exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon race.
In certain areas of the country where foreign immigrants, like the Chinese, had been in America since the l840s when they arrived to pan for gold and became the source of cheap labor for building the railroads in the 1860’s under the Burlingame Treaty of l865.
Chinese became the object of xenophobia and race hatred during the 1870’s. A part of this had to do with the exploding growth of San Francisco, a major area for Chinese settlement during the railroad building years and the subsequent white migration to the west with the evolving transcontinental railroads. Suddenly the Chinese represented a “yellow peril,” and American Irishmen like Denis Kearney wrote a manifesto warning that the Chinese were pushing the Anglo-Saxons out of the economic competition. He called on Congress to pass a law stopping the immigration of Chinese.
In truth, anti-Chinese or anti-Asian behavior before the l870s:
The Foreign Miners’ Law of l850, a law originally passed to limit Mexican miners, was increasingly applied to Chinese miners.
Californians fearing economic competition charged $50 for each foreigner, especially Chinese entering California.
In the late l850s, race riots drove Chinese out of the mining regions of northern California. The popular statement, “Not a Chinaman’s chance” became tragically true.
In the late 1860’s “anti-coolie” clubs attempted to keep the Chinese in their place or drive them out of California.
In l871, a fierce race riot in Los Angeles saw large numbers of Chinese injured or killed. Many believed with the completion of the transcontinental railroad the Chinese would surely go back to China. This was not the case. By 1876, more than 116,000 Chinese lived in California.
Race hatred of the Chinese was so strong that San Francisco passed the Cubic Air Ordinance decreeing all adults must have 500 cubic feet of living space, but like the black codes, it only applied to Chinatown. Chinese were arrested for violating the law and sent to jail. In jail whites, understanding the religious importance of their “pigtails” cut them off.
Anti-Chinese sentiment culminated in Congressional passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law stopped Chinese immigration for a ten-year period. Moreover, in 1892, the Geary Act (“Dog Tag Law”) required Chinese to carry their residential permit with them or risk imprisonment and deportation.
We should also mention scholars and writers believed the expelling of Native Americans from their land and their virtual extermination through wars and broken treaties was genocide. Helen Hunt Jackson writing about this period titled it A Century of Dishonor in her 1881 book. To soothe their consciences, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act (1887). The Act stated its objective was to assimilate Indians into American mainstream society. For those who accepted it they would receive 160 acres of land to be theirs “forever,” and education to help with their assimilation. Individual ownership of land on the European-American model was seen as an essential. The act also provided that Indian reservation lands remaining after allotments would be sold on the open market, allowing purchase and settlement by non-Native Americans.
Urbanization:
To meet employer demands, factories and tenements sprang up overnight. There was virtually no city planning and concern for the new urban workers. The lack of planning and the pursuit of profit resulted in unsafe and unsanitary work and home environments. By 1900 cities, especially New York, suffered from high mortality rates, cholera, tuberculosis and other environmental diseases. Immigrants frequently found themselves in crowded tenement buildings while middle-class residents took advantage of new transportation like streetcars and moved to suburbs or other “bedroom communities” which allowed them to work in the city but avoid the overcrowding, air pollution, and noise.
The Gilded Age represented the first time a significant number of women and children entered the labor force on a full-time basis. Employers provided no workmen’s compensation for accidents or illness, and certainly no health benefits.
The medical treatment of women reflected outdated Victorian values and male chauvinism. The origins of women’s illnesses were often attributed to “nervousness or some dysfunction of the uterus.” Treatments from the 1870’s to the end of the century involved massive doses of mercury, lead, or opium. Later gynecologists prescribed the use of leeches placed around or in the uterus. Later in the century, doctors prescribed complete bed rest, massage, and electric shocks to cure their illnesses. In addition, there was a double standard in the way female doctors were treated compared to male physicians.Labor and Farmers:
Labor’s response to big business domination over their wages, working conditions and even homes (company homes) was a series of attempts at organizing labor beginning with the National Labor Union in l866. The union was virtually ineffective.
The Knights of Labor was established in l869 by a minister named Uriah Stevens but most prominently led by Terrence V. Powderly. Both believed using “moral suasion” to get employers to give laborers better wages and living conditions. It was an industrial based union, welcoming both skilled and unskilled labor. In the beginning, it even attempted to bring blacks and women into the union.
In general, the Knights endorsed the restriction of child labor, a graduated income tax, more land set aside for homesteading, cooperatives, and the nationalization of the telegraph and railroad.
In 1884, a spontaneous strike against the railroads of Jay Gould demonstrated the power of the strike. While the Knights leadership continued to support “moral suasion” as the main tactic, rank and file members revolted and led strikes. By l886, the membership of the Knights had grown to 600,000. Ironically, in the same year, a strike by the McCormick Reaper workers in Chicago led to the Haymarket Square incident. Over l, 500 people gathered for a mass meeting at Haymarket Square to protest against the brutality against striking workers the day earlier. While several speakers were denouncing the violence, someone threw a bomb. In the days that followed known anarchists like August Spies were rounded up, charged, and convicted of murder. Blamed by the media, the Knights of Labor had nothing to do with the strike. Still, such accusations led to its demise in the same year its membership peaked.
The American Federation of Labor succeeded the Knights of Labor. Founded by Adolph Strasser in 1888 it grew to prominence under Samuel Gompers. The AFL was a craft or guild union (skilled labor only) and used an apprentice system for controlling the number of skilled craftsmen in every guild. This made bargaining with businesses more effective in a strike. It was much harder to replace skilled labor as opposed to unskilled labor. It sought recognition of its union status to bargain with employers for better working conditions, higher wages and shorter hours.
Farmers during the Gilded Age sought to imitate the practices of manufacturing in the North which succeeded by mass production. To achieve this Farmers Alliances (Northern, Western, Southern and Colored) introduced education and cooperatives. However, unlike manufactured products growing more crops did not result in greater profits. The more they produced, the more prices fell. Increasingly in the l880’s farmers especially in states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas fell into foreclosure. This led many to arm themselves to resist eviction. According to Populist radical Mary Lease, it was time to produce “less corn and raise more hell.” The farmers succeeded in taking over a number of southern but mostly western state legislatures, including Texas. In 1892, they organized a third political party, the Populist and ran James Weaver as a candidate for President against the Republican Benjamin Harrison and the Democrat Glover Cleveland who won. Farmers accused both parties of neglecting the farmer and supporting a banking system that favored of business over the farmers.
Use the following essay questions based on the notes to guide your study for the Gilded Age:
1.Compare and contrast the views of Social Darwinism, the Ideology of Success, the Gospel of Wealth, and Laissez-faire. What do they all have in common and in what ways are they different? Explain why each had a popular appeal in America in the late nineteenth century.
2.What factors account for the dramatic growth in business after the Civil war?
3.What factors shaped the growth of labor unions during this period? What factors delayed or weakened their growth? What were their limitations and what achievements can they claim.
4.Compare and contrast the goals, tactics, leadership, and accomplishments of the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
5. Who financed the railroad expansion in the late nineteenth century? How did this expansion affect the economic development of the country?
6.How did immigration to America change in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and what was the response to that change?
7.Describe the explosive growth of urbanization in the late nineteenth century. What factors led to this growth, and where did the largest growth take place?
8.Discuss the most serious challenges the urban population faced, how were those challenges addressed, and how effective were the solutions.
9.How did big business seek protection from state control during the Gilded Age?
10.What economic, political and social reforms did farmers seek during the Gilded Age? What organizations arose to fight for those reforms?