Hourly History - The Gilded Age: A History From Beginning to End

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In 1872, writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known to most people by his literary pseudonym Mark Twain, was at a dinner party where he began chatting to his neighbor, friend, and fellow novelist, Charles Dudley Warner. The two men began to discuss what they saw as the decline in standards in the United States since the Civil War. Materialism and greed seemed rampant, they agreed, politics was corrupt, and a few people were becoming extremely rich by exploiting thousands who were forced to live in poverty and work in appalling conditions. The two writers decided to collaborate on a novel which would satirize the current state of America.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today was published in 1873. It never became as popular as Mark Twains laterworks which included The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it did have the distinction of providing a name for a particular period of American historyevents in the United States from 1870 to 1900 are now generally known as the Gilded Age. The name was chosen by Twain to draw a contrast with a Golden Age. In a Golden Age, Twain contended, life is good for everyone. But in a Gilded Age, there is only a thin surface of gold over underlying base metal, a metaphor for a small number of fabulously wealthy people who grew rich by exploiting vast numbers who lived in poverty. The title of the book found resonance with many people and, even while it was still in progress, this period became widely known as the Gilded Age.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a time of enormous change. Reconstruction after the Civil War produced fundamental changes to the American way of life. Technological advancements, including the extension of the railroad system, changed peoples relationship with the very landscape of America. An industrial revolution brought affordable products for many and great wealth for a few. Conspicuous consumption became truly conspicuous for the first time while poverty remained widespread for the majority of the population. New waves of immigrants changed the very nature of American society.

In just thirty years, the United States went from the Wild West to the Wright Brothers testing their first flying machine, from being a mainly agrarian nation to one of the worlds leading industrial powers. This is the story of the Gilded Age of America.

The American Civil War between the secessionist Confederate States of the south and the Unionist States of the north raged from 1861 to 1865. When it was over, the United States was restored, though the country itself was far from united. Three-quarters of a million people died during the conflict and many cities were damaged. In the south, roads, railroads, and industrial capacity were virtually destroyed, and an economy which was had been based on the availability of slave labor was no longer viable. Many cities were damaged or even razed, and starvation and disease stalked the country, especially affecting newly emancipated slaves who had few resources to call upon.

The period following the end of the Civil War has become known as the Reconstruction Era and this period overlaps the Gilded Age. From 1865 to the middle of the 1870s, reconstruction followed two distinct strands: The political integration of the southern states into the Union and the rebuilding of infrastructure and industry in the south.

Immediately following the end of the war, the north established military administrations in many southern states until new governments which accepted the constitution of the Union, and particularly the 14th Amendment which gave freed slaves the right to vote, could be formed. Up to 15,000 former Confederate officers were temporarily barred from voting and numbers of northerners, contemptuously called carpetbaggers by many southerners, moved into the southern states accompanied by educated blacks from the north. These people helped to set up the first elected assemblies in the south, which were required to swear allegiance to the Union before they could take over power from the military authorities. By 1869, all eleven southern states had elected bodies in place, though the disenfranchised former Confederate officers wouldnt be given the vote until 1872.

The rebuilding of the infrastructure and cities of the south progressed even as political assemblies were being created. The expansion of the southern railroad system in particular was seen as an important element in restoring industry and ending isolation, and many millions of dollars in subsidies were offered for this purpose. Many southern farms and plantations which had relied on slave labor were no longer viable after the end of the war, and a process known as sharecropping became popular.

Sharecropping involved a landowner leasing out part of their land and providing housing, tools, and seeds to a farmer who was also expected to obtain food and supplies on credit from local merchants. At harvest time, the cropper kept a proportion of the crop (generally from one-third to one-half) while the remainder went to the landowner. The cropper was also expected to pay the merchant from their share. However, in bad years, the croppers share often wasnt sufficient to pay off their debt to the merchant, and this was then carried through to the next year. This left croppers, who were initially mainly black but later also white, extremely poor and often in so much debt that they could never make any money for themselves.

The situation in the north was quite different. American industrial capacity had always been centered in the northeastmore than 80% of U.S. manufacturing capacity was based in northern states, and at the outbreak of the Civil War, New York and Pennsylvania each had more industrial capacity than all the southern states combined. The population of the north was mainly concentrated in urban centers with farmers in the west providing food. During the war, the need to produce weapons and supplies for the military had encouraged even more industrialization in the northern states, and this continued after the war ended.

In the years following the end of the Civil War, the south remained mainly agrarian with many people, including emancipated slaves, living in abject poverty under the sharecropping system. In the north, the drive towards industrialization continued. However, the main focus of interest for many Americans following the Civil War was neither the south nor the north, but rather the untamed wilderness of the west.

In the 1870s, America was divided not just into northern and southern states, but into the east and the west. In the east were states that had previously comprised the Confederacy and the Union. To the west were just three states: California, Nevada, and Oregon. In between was a vast area of unincorporated and largely unsettled territories. In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed specifically to encourage migration to the west. Any American citizen could travel to the west and settle on a surveyed 160-acre lot. Provided that they remained there for a minimum of five years and built a home, they could then claim the land as their own. The intention was to encourage settlers to develop the vast, empty areas of the west. The problem was that these areas werent actually emptythey were occupied by a large number of Native American tribes whose treatment by the U.S. government forms one of the most shameful episodes of American history.