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The period in United States history following the Civil War and Reconstruction, lasting from the late 1860s to 1896, is referred to as the “Gilded Age.” This term was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, published in 1873. The term refers to the gilding of a cheaper metal with a thin layer of gold. Many critics complained that the era was marked by ostentatious display, crass manners, corruption, and shoddy ethics.
Historians view the Gilded Age as a period of rapid economic, technological, political, and social transformation. This transformation forged a modern, national industrial society out of what had been small regional communities. By the end of the Gilded Age, the United States was at the top end of the world’s leading industrial nations. In the Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age, the United States became a world power. In the process, there was much dislocation, including the destruction of the Plains Indians, hardening discrimination against African Americans, and environmental degradation. Two extended nationwide economic depressions followed the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893.
Economic and Political Innovations
The Gilded Age saw impressive economic growth and the unprecedented expansion of major cities. Chicago’s population increased tenfold from 1870 to 1900, for example. Technological innovations of the time included the telephone, skyscraper, refrigerator, car, linotype machine, electric lightbulb, typewriter, and electric motor, as well as advances in chromolithography, steel production, and many other industries. These inventions provided the bases for modern consumerism and industrial productivity.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double those of Germany or France, and 50 percent higher than those of Britain. The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations.
The super-rich industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry H. Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family, and the prominent Astor family were labeled as “robber barons” by the public, who felt they cheated to get their money and lorded it over the common people. Their admirers argued that they were “captains of industry” who built the core America industrial economy and also the nonprofit sector through acts of philanthropy. For instance, Andrew Carnegie donated more than 90 percent of his fortune and said that philanthropy was an upper-class duty—the “Gospel of Wealth.” Private money endowed thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, and charities. John D. Rockefeller donated more than $500 million to various charities, slightly more than half his entire net worth. Nevertheless, many business leaders were influenced by Herbert Spencer ‘s theory of Social Darwinism, which justified laissez-faire capitalism, ruthless competition, and social stratification.
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