Introducton to American History
Donbonano
1104_AmericanHistoryComb_9e_171.pptxChapter 17: Life in the Gilded Age
Introduction to American History Combined
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Learning Objectives
Explain the meaning of the term “Gilded Age” and what prompted Mark Twain to label the era as such.
Discuss the engines of economic growth during the Gilded Age.
Discuss the impact of industrialism on popular culture and social classes in American society.
Explain how Social Darwinism influenced American social and economic thought.
Discuss the social gospel and how it manifested itself in American society.
Introduction to American History Combined
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Learning Objectives (Continued)
Describe how religious communities responded to industrialism.
Summarize the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Henry George, and Edward Bellamy.
Evaluate the influence of Socialism on the American people.
Discuss the major achievements of novelists, artists, architects, and poets of the Gilded Age.
Evaluate the contributions of the Chautauqua Movement to American society.
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17.1 Economic Advancement
After Reconstruction, Americans began to focus on economic advancement.
They adopted a laissez faire approach to governing, believing that the free market and capitalism were essentially self-regulating.
Mark Twain labeled the era the Gilded Age because the prosperity of the time obscured the corruption, inequality, and exploitation of workers.
Many people justified the economic inequality through Social Darwinism—the idea that Darwin’s theory of natural selection should be applied to human social structure, thus explaining the social strata as survival of the fittest.
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17.1a The Growth of Industry
Big business dominated vast expansion of the economy.
Railroads played a key role, as did the telegraph, telephone, typewriter, and use of electricity.
Steel was mass-produced.
George B. Eastman and his Kodak Camera created a new industry.
The use of electricity contributed to industrial growth.
Innovations meant that women were much less confined to the home.
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17.1b Popular Culture
Most Americans sought cultural pleasures outside of work.
Newspapers and magazines
Escapist literature
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17.1c Recreation and Leisure
Recreation took many forms.
Theaters provided places for vaudeville and minstrel performances.
Circuses traveled to perform.
Interest in sports, especially professional baseball, grew.
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17.1d The New Rich
The Gilded Age produced massive accumulations of wealth.
Captains of industry (millionaires)
John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest, due to oil monopoly
Acute economic inequality during the Gilded Age
Wasting money as a sign of success
Vulgar and tawdry
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17.1e The Middle Class
The middle class was more representative of the American lifestyle of these years.
Professionals, shopkeepers, lower level executives comprised the middle class.
They lived in cities where the night was dangerous.
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17.1f The Worker
The living conditions of urban workers were in wretched contrast to the wealth of the new entrepreneurs.
The wretched living conditions included tenements.
Real wages increased as skilled workers earned higher wages.
A ten-hour day and six-day workweek were the norm.
Workers had little social mobility.
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17.1g The New Immigration
Unprecedented numbers of immigrants entered the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Southern and eastern Europeans
Catholic, poor, and illiterate
Chinese Exclusion, 1882
American Protective Association fought against Catholicism.
Cheap labor in cities led to slum housing.
Most cities lacked the infrastructure to accommodate such a large population growth.
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17.2a The Shock of Darwinism
On the Origin of Species
Darwin believed that human life had evolved from lower organisms.
Natural selection chose for survival those individuals that best adapted to their environment.
Humans were part of nature and had evolved from it.
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17.2b Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Herbert Spencer
The weak would fall, and the strong would leap forward.
Helping the poor was interfering with natural law.
The poor are the poor because they are inferior.
William Graham Sumner
Sumner was Spencer’s most influential American disciple.
Sumner argued that millionaires were products of natural selection.
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17.2c Laissez Faire
Government was not to interfere in the economy.
Wealth was a sign of goodness and poverty a result of laziness.
Nothing must undermine self-reliance, initiative, or ambition.
Carnegie believed it was a disgrace to die rich.
To support needy individuals was wrong.
He encouraged the rich to build libraries, improve education, and promote world peace.
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17.3a Protestantism and Darwinism
Evolution was “a way of deciphering God’s thought.”
Fundamentalists rejected evolution.
Many lacked sympathy for workers; poverty was a sin.
Henry Ward Beecher viewed poverty as the fault of the poor.
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17.3b The Social Gospel
The idea that government and other human organizations can be used to do God’s good works was promoted.
It focused on improving living conditions and “feeding God’s children” and attacked capitalism as unchristian.
Social Gospel preachers advocated civil service reform to help the poor.
A few ministers favored welfare state capitalism.
Charles Sheldon asked: “What would Jesus do?”
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17.3c The Catholic View
The position of the Catholic Church on evolution was that the hypothesis had to stop short of humans.
It minimized social problems, with little interest in reform.
The papal encyclical in 1893 condemned exploitation.
A government had a duty to bring social justice.
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17.3d Idealism
One of the most important new influences on philosophy was German idealism.
Idealists believed in the priority of the mind over matter and in the fundamental unity of the universe.
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17.3e American Pragmatism
The idea was that one decides whether an idea is true or false by seeing whether it works.
Actions should be measured by their consequences.
No idea can be rejected if it is useful to people.
William James: If an idea makes one better behaved, it is true.
Critics protested that this meant, “anything is true if it works.”
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17.3f The New Legal Theory
A revolt against formalism in law
Old theory: The law is fixed and unchanging.
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law changes as society changes.
Legal principles should be judged on their effects.
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17.4a Reform Darwinism
Lester Ward
Human intelligence could improve nature.
Individuals are shaped by social institutions, which could be controlled.
Reform Darwinism called for government planning.
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17.4b New Economists
In the 1880s, a new group of economists began to challenge laissez-faire.
Government planning could create human progress.
In 1885, they founded the American Economic Association.
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17.4c Thorstein Veblen
Veblen was an economist who derided the idea that the wealthy leisure class was the biologically fit and were a product of natural selection.
A leading academic rebel, he attacked the rich.
Wealth was created by the skill and labor of other people—not the millionaires.
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17.4d Reformers
Increasing numbers of reformers began to criticize the existing social and economic system.
Henry George and the Single Tax
Land value was because people lived on it, not because the owner did anything.
Government should tax “land values.”
Edward Bellamy—Looking Backward (1888)
Bellamy attacked excessive individualism.
Competition was “sheer madness.”
Industrialists “maim and slaughter their workers by the thousands.”
Jane Addams’ Hull House fought for social justice.
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17.4e Socialism
The Socialist Labor Party formed in 1887.
Workers should use arms and dynamite to overthrow capitalism.
In 1887 the Socialist Labor party promoted an armed revolution.
Daniel De Leon was the “socialist pope.”
Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, was a “greasy tool of Wall Street.”
1892: 22,000 votes were cast in the election.
Eugene Debs formed Socialist Party of America.
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17.5 Achievements of the Gilded Age
In spite of the cultural excesses, the intellectual and artistic developments of the Gilded Age were impressive.
1880s-1890s was one of the most intellectually fertile cultural periods in American history.
Birth of new social sciences, anthropology, and sociology occurred.
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17.5a Arts and Letters
Mark Twain became a major figure.
Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry.
Walt Whitman continued to be a major voice in poetry.
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17.5b The Chautauqua Movement
Various efforts were made to meet the demands for higher education.
The Chautauqua Movement, founded in 1874, was an educational outreach program formulated to give “the college outlook” to those who did not have a higher education.
It included economics, government, science, and literature.
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