The industrialists of the Gilded Age lived high on the hog, but most of the working class lived below poverty level. As time went on, the income inequality between wealthy and poor became more and more glaring. While the wealthy lived in opulent homes, dined on succulent food and showered their children with gifts, the poor were crammed into filthy tenement apartments, struggled to put a loaf of bread on the table and often accompanied their children to a sweatshop each morning where they faced a hour or longer workday.
Some moguls used Social Darwinism to justify the inequality between the classes. Satirical cartoon in 'Judge' about a journalist named Muckraker and his campaign against trusts and capitalists, circa Muckrakers is a term used to describe reporters who exposed corruption among politicians and the elite. In , reporter and photographer Jacob Riis brought the horrors of New York slum life to light in his book, How the Other Half Lives , prompting New York politicians to pass legislation to improve tenement conditions.
Another journalist, Ida Tarbell , spent years investigating the underhanded rise of oilman John D. In , activist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose horrendous working conditions in the meatpacking industry.
Much of the violence, however, was between the workers themselves as they struggled to agree on what they were fighting for. Some simply wanted increased wages and a better working environment, while others also wanted to keep women, immigrants and blacks out of the workforce. Although the first labor unions occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increased number of unskilled and unsatisfied factory workers.
On July 16, , the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company announced a percent pay cut on its railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia , the second cut in less than eight months. 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 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.
Socially, the period was marked by large-scale immigration from Germany and Scandinavia to the industrial centers and to western farmlands, the deepening of religious organizations, the rapid growth of high schools, and the emergence of a managerial and professional middle class. In terms of immigration, after , the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened. The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came individuals from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as from French Canada.
During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased.
Conservative, white Democratic governments in the South passed Jim Crow legislation, creating a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Blacks were separated in schools and hospitals, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public transportation systems.
They often were barred from certain stores, or forbidden to use lunchrooms, restrooms, and fitting rooms. Because they could not vote, they could not serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system. One problem with buying local, though, is choice—winter salads suffer.
Another is price. He depends on scale and scope production in agribusiness to keep food prices low. One of the things I think is unusual about your writing is that it blends history—which can be a dry pursuit—with real rhetorical spark and style.
Could you talk about your writing process? How important is wordsmithing to you as you write? How would you describe your style? History tends to be written—because of academic pressures—in a polished, professional monotone. I like a little more drama. At certain moments, intensification, foreshadowing, or dramatic juxtaposition.
Little touches matter in a long book. Our late Atlantic colleague, Peter Davison, once told me that for a writer to use the verb "to be" is laziness. Ever since, I have tried to find better—livelier—verbs. I do not believe I use "very" or "astonishing" in the book—a record. For drama, you also need representative characters. My characters include Tom Scott , president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest corporation in the world in the s, and a "political capitalist"—a purchaser of politicians retail and wholesale.
Even in an era when, as Henry D. Lloyd wrote in The Atlantic , "Standard Oil did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature, except refine it," Scott stood out. Rockefeller out of business helped to precipitate the railroad strike of , with its bloody climax in the streets and alleys of Pittsburgh swept by Gatling guns.
Was it darker than you thought it would be when you set out to write it? Betrayal is among the most embittering experiences in life. I sought to infuse some of the emotion of such personal experiences into my account of the age. Some reviewers have said, "My God, this is so gloomy!
The "Gilded Age" —that rubric obscures the moral facts: betrayal of emancipation, betrayal of democracy, betrayal of free labor. The book ends with our imperialist grab-up of the Philippines, a betrayal of our revolutionary birthright.
White Americans did that and tolerated that. And if a great leader—a Lincolnesque leader—a century after Gettysburg had not sounded the call for "a new birth of freedom. Because it was the seed-time of today—government for the corporation—and I wanted to find out where we went wrong and why.
In the textbooks and to a certain extent in American memory, this is the Age of Enterprise—of free-market capitalism, etcetera. Nothing could be further from the truth. Americans need less consolation from history and more truth, especially about juridical racism and the conflict between corporate power and democracy—my themes. The robber barons and their glamorous careers?
I think so. This year, a big biography of Carnegie was published. A couple of years ago, there was an page biography of Morgan by Jean Strouse. In , there was a big biography of Rockefeller. There was recently a big biography of Henry Ford —seemingly the th biography. A biography of Andrew Mellon was just published. Reviewers say, "This biography of Carnegie gives us the age.
So I wrote the book to show a more representative face, to retell what usually is told as an economic story as a moral one. Flower commented, "In America, the people support the government. It is not the province of the government to support the people. Could you talk about how the expectations for the government have changed since the Gilded Age? Maximalist government for the corporations and minimalist government for the people—that was the rule in the age of betrayal.
The leader who changed that was William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential nominee in , and, at thirty-six, the youngest ever. Breaking with the sterile anti-statism of his party, Bryan said that government should be active on behalf of the people.
Government should act to protect the people against private power, through anti-trust. Bryan is often rendered as a backward-looking pastoralist. But in fact, he began modern politics, because he introduced the populist impulse into the Democratic party—the idea that government should support the people. It was always something that Southern Democrats were uncomfortable with, because they saw where it led.
Government would start acting for the black people, as it eventually did.
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