ponder this….

The Gilded Age in American history refers to the post-Civil War and the post-Reconstruction Era from 1865-1901. The growth of industry and a wave of immigrants marked this period in American history. The Gilded Age was heavily rooted in the growth of American industrialization. The production of iron and steel rose dramatically and western resources like lumber, gold, and silver increased the demand for improved transportation. Railroad development boomed as trains moved goods from the resource-rich West to the East. Steel and oil were in great demand. All this industry produced a lot of wealth for a number of businessmen like John D. Rockefeller (in oil) and Andrew Carnegie (in steel), known as robber barons (people who got rich through ruthless business deals). The Gilded Age gets its name from the many great fortunes created during this period and the way of life this wealth supported. (wikipedia)

There were also a great increase in racial and ethnic from immigrants drawn by the promise of prosperity. Social tensions greaw as a result of a decreasing Anglo-Saxon majority, as well as a growing economic gap between rich and poor. During the Gilded Age approximately 10 million immigrants came to America looking for religious freedom and freater prosperity. The government issued 160 acre land grants to families moving to the west under the Homestead Act. This expansion to the west created a need for workers in the area to build railroads and facilitate trade. When Americans began to move west, the Native Americans resisted. Land conflicts arose, and eventually the U.S. government stipulated that the Native Americans settle in a fixed area to allow the region around them to progress and fill with American citizens. The Native Americans however, followed the buffalo, and being an inherently nomadic civilization had no interest in settling. In response the American government declared “war” on the buffalo.

During the Gilded Age, American manufacturing production surpassed the combined total of Great Britain, Germany, and France. But the country’s economic success was rooted in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution. It had been responsible for creating the vital infrastructure for the creation and transportation of goods, services, and raw materials. Railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening new areas to commercial farming, creating a truly national marketplace and inspiring a boom in coal mining and steel production. The voracious appetite for capital of the great trunk railroads facilitated the consolidation of the nation’s financial market in Wall Street. By 1900 the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few giant corporations dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meatpacking, and the manufacture of agriculture machinery. Other major components of this infrastructure were the new methods for fabricating steel: the Bessemer and the Siemens steel making processes.

Increased mechanization of industry is a major mark of the Gilded Age’s search for cheaper ways to create more product. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that worker efficiency in steel could be improved through the use of machines to make fewer motions in less time. His redesign increased the speed of factory machines and the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor. This mechanization transformed the factory floor from a collaboration of tradesmen to an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks.

In addition to booming industry, the Gilded Age also marked many advances in technology. From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued for new inventions—over ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years. Locomotive air brakes and the Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary telephone (and its precursor the telegraph) appeared during this time. With more advanced technology and bigger business came the need for greater quantities of electricity, especially in larger cities. This prompted Thomas A. Edison to construct a large integrated power plant capable of lighting multiple buildings simultaneously. Oil was also becoming an increasingly popular source of energy, inspiring many entrepreneurs to begin drilling for crude in the Americas.

The Gilded Age had many effective Presidents. Clevenland was in his second term. The Depression of 1893 hit the U.S. economy hard, forcing Cleveland to ask Wall Street mogul J. P. Morgan for a loan of more than $60 million. In 1894, more than 500 protesters in “Coxey’s Army” marched on Washington demanding cheaper money and debt relief. Despite Morgan’s loan, Cleveland was unable to put the economy back on track, and it cost him the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1896.In 1896, Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator,” after he delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech demanding free silver. Because Bryan incorporated much of the Populist platform into his own, the Populists chose to endorse him rather than their own candidate. Meanwhile, Republicans nominated Senator William McKinley from Ohio on a pro-business, anti–free silver platform. McKinley’s campaign manager, Marcus “Mark” Hanna, worked behind the scenes to convince powerful business leaders to back several key Republican candidates. As a result, McKinley won the election of 1896, effectively killing free silver and the Populist movement.(Sparknotes)

McKinley won the election of 1900 with Roosevelt as his running mate but was assassinated by an anarchist less than six months into his second term. As a result, Roosevelt took office as one of the youngest presidents in American history. Despite his youth, Roosevelt proved to be a “bully” with his Big Stick diplomacy. One of his most important policies, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declared that only the United States, not Old World powers, had the authority to interfere with Latin American affairs. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, John Hay, drafted the Open Door Notes, which asked that Japan and the European powers respect China’s territorial status and fair trade. Roosevelt went on to take over Colombia’s northernmost province, Panama, in order to secure America the right to build the Panama Canal. Toward the end of his presidency, Roosevelt also toured with the Great White Fleet, a group of U.S. Navy battleships, around the world in a symbolic display of force.(Sparknotes)

Roosevelt’s friend and handpicked successor William Howard Taft promised to carry out the rest of Roosevelt’s progressive policies if he were elected president. After winning the election of 1908, however, Taft proved to be more of a traditional conservative than most had expected. Although he continued progressive policy by prosecuting more trusts than his predecessor, in a more conservative vein than Roosevelt he signed the steep Payne-Aldrich Tariff in 1909 and fired conservationist Gifford Pinchot from the forestry division. Many Republican Progressives, including his former friend Roosevelt, denounced Taft as a traitor to the movement. When Republicans nominated Taft again in 1912, Roosevelt left the convention and entered the presidential race as the candidate for the new Progressive Republican or Bull Moose Party.(Sparknotes)