Modern America:

Colliding and Dividing Worlds

Overview
In the fifty years following the Civil War, the United States underwent a rapid and drastic transformation from a predominantly rural,
largely agricultural, and primarily isolationist nation to a country that was increasingly urban, industrialized, and interested in expanding
beyond its natural borders. This time period from roughly 1865 to 1915 was comprised of several key time periods that enabled these
massive changes: The Gilded Age, the Industrial Age, and the Progressive Era. These time periods were characterized by a multitude of
different factors that all contributed to the growth of the nation political, socially, and economically: industrialization, immigration, and
urbanization. They also exposed some of the glaring problems that demonstrated a very serious need for reform in order to prevent the
country from fracturing once again: labor exploitation, widespread political corruption, poor housing and living conditions, extreme wealth
inequality, and a lack of government regulation and oversight, among other issues. Collectively, these moments and movements laid the
foundation for the beginning of Modern America.
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The Gilded Age – Mixed Results in a Time of Great Prosperity

When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age in 1873, they gave the late nineteenth
century its popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner corruption and poverty. Twain and
Warner were not wrong about the era’s corruption, but the years between 1877 and 1900 were also some of the most momentous and
dynamic in American history. They set in motion developments that would shape the country for generations—the reunification of the South
and North, the integration of four million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion, immigration, industrialization, urbanization.
It was also a period of reform, in which many Americans sought to regulate corporations and shape the changes taking place all around them.
During this post-Civil War period, the U.S. economy grew at a fantastic rate. With the exception of a recession during the mid-1870s and the
mid-1890s, the economic growth was unprecedented. Manufacturing output increased by 180%. Railroads, an important catalyst of growth,
increased in miles by 113%. Steel production grew to over 10,000,000 tons per year by 1900. Every aspect of the American economy
expanded from traditional activities to new enterprises brought about by the huge influx of cutting-edge technological inventions.
Cities grew during this period, as people moved from rural areas and immigrants arrived from around the world to work in the ever-
expanding factories. The population of Chicago, for example, multiplied from 30,000 people in 1850, to over 1,700,000 by 1900. The
population of New York City increased during the same period from just over 500,000 to over 3,000,000. Birmingham, Alabama emerged in
1871 as a new city built upon the thriving steel industry. Electricity began to light and power the industrial cities with the patenting of the
dynamo. Skyscrapers emerged to change the landscape of the American city.
Imaginative, insightful, and enterprising businessmen brought about the economic prosperity of the period. The super-rich industrialists and
financiers such as oil man John D. Rockefeller, steelmaker Andrew Carnegie, banker J. P. Morgan, and railroad magnate Cornelius
Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family were labeled “robber barons” by the public, who felt they cheated to get their money and lorded it over
the common people. In an effort to create monopolies, corner markets, and increase profits, these men often resorted to rather corrupt tactics.
These methods included manipulating the stock market, bribing politicians and officeholders, and ruining competitors. Consumer prices rose
as the trusts held by these men came to control entire industries. Workers were also treated badly. Due to a lack of laws, oversight, and
regulation, workers were often forbidden to strike, paid very low wages, and forced to work very long hours. Working conditions in both
factories and mines were deplorable. Housing for the working class was crowded and substandard. Child labor made up over five percent of
the national labor force. These tactics and mistreatment shed light on the fierce competition and ruthlessness of this time period.
Their admirers, however, 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.
By the early twentieth century, the richest nine percent of Americans controlled 75 percent of the national wealth. The number of
millionaires increased from 390, to over 4,000. Yet, working families were forced to rely on two, three, and sometimes four incomes, just to
make ends meet. To the poor, the working class, the reformers, and the consumers, the Gilded Age was not so golden. Still, the businessmen
of the period felt justified in their actions, as the United States became the world’s leading industrial power, with the U.S. producing as much
as Germany, Great Britain, and France combined.
The growth of the American economy in the Gilded Age presented a contradiction. The standard of living for many American workers
increased. As Andrew Carnegie said in The Gospel of Wealth, “the poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries
have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had a few generations ago.” In many ways,
Carnegie was correct. The decline in prices and the cost of living meant that the industrial era offered many Americans relatively better lives
in 1900 than they had only decades before. For some Americans, there were also increased opportunities for upward mobility. For the
multitudes in the working class, however, conditions in the factories and at home remained deplorable. The difficulties they faced led many
workers to question an industrial order in which a handful of wealthy Americans built their fortunes on the backs of workers.