The Gilded Age

A gilded object is covered with a thin layer of gold over a cheaper material. By calling their era “gilded” rather than golden, Twain and Warner mocked a society whose dazzling wealth and technological marvels masked massive social inequities and deep-seated corruption. Historians have adopted the label for roughly the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

After the Civil War, industrial capitalism transformed the country. The transcontinental railroad and a vast rail network created national markets. Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller built giant corporations, and financiers such as J. P. Morgan consolidated them. Inventors like Thomas Edison electrified cities. Millions of immigrants, increasingly from Southern and Eastern Europe, and rural Americans moved into fast-growing industrial cities; in 1900, nearly 80 percent of Chicago’s population were immigrants or their children.

The benefits were unequal. Workers faced long hours, low pay, dangerous conditions, and periodic depressions, and their strikes were often crushed by force. Politics was marked by patronage and corruption, while the federal government largely refused to regulate business — or used its power against strikers. In the South, the end of Reconstruction gave way to sharecropping and Jim Crow; in the West, Native nations were confined to reservations.

• The fortunes and philanthropy of Carnegie and Rockefeller, and debates over whether they were “robber barons” or entrepreneurs.
• The Haymarket affair (1886), the Homestead strike (1892), and the Pullman strike (1894).
• The rise of the People’s Party and Populism among farmers.
• Mass immigration through Ellis Island — and exclusion at Angel Island.