CHAPTER 16 America’s Gilded Age, 1870–1890
This chapter concentrates on the history of America’s Gilded Age, industrial revolution, and settlement of the West in the late nine-
teenth century. The chapter emphasizes that as the majority of Americans became wageworkers, the traditional dream of economic
independence became obsolete. During the Gilded Age, it became difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to view wage labor as a
temporary stop on the road to becoming an independent proprietor or farmer. The industrial revolution depended on the exploitation of
the working class but brought tremendous urban growth and created a national market. It also made captains of industry very rich.
Farming was transformed, too, and the settlement of the West before and after the Civil War brought Mormons in Utah in increasing
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Statue of Liberty
A. Although the Civil War was over, the country in the late 1800s was racked by violence, not only by white supremacists in
the South, but widespread labor conflict, warfare against Native Americans in the West, and political assassinations.
II. The Second Industrial Revolution
A. The Industrial Economy
1. By 1913, the United States produced one–third of the world’s industrial output.
3. Growth of cities was vital for financing industrialization.
a. Great Lakes region
i. Pittsburgh
ii. Chicago
B. Railroads and the National Market
1. The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the second industrial revolution.
2. The growing population formed an ever-expanding market for the mass production, mass distribution, and mass
marketing of goods.
C. The Spirit of Innovation
1. Scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation spurred growth.
D. Competition and Consolidation
2. Businesses engaged in ruthless competition.
3. To avoid cutthroat competition, more and more corporations battled to control entire industries.
E. The Rise of Andrew Carnegie
1. The railroad pioneered modern techniques of business organization.
2. Andrew Carnegie worked for Scott at Pennsylvania Railroad.
3. By the 1890s, Carnegie dominated the steel industry.
4. Carnegie’s life reflected his desire to succeed and his desire to give back to society.
F. The Triumph of John D. Rockefeller
1. John D. Rockefeller dominated the oil industry.
2. Captains of industry versus robber barons
G. Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age
2. For most workers, economic insecurity remained a basic fact of life.
4. Women were part of the working class.
H. Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing Wealth and Poverty
2. Many of the wealthiest Americans consciously pursued an aristocratic lifestyle.
3. The working class lived in desperate conditions.
II. Freedom in the Gilded Age
A. The Social Problem
2. Many Americans sensed that something had gone wrong in the nation’s social development.
B. Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy
2. Gilded Age reformers feared that with lower-class groups seeking to use government to advance their own interests,
democracy was becoming a threat to individual liberty and to the rights of property.
C. Social Darwinism in America
1. Charles Darwin put forth the theory of evolution, whereby plant and animal species best suited to their environments took
the place of those less able to adapt.
3. Failure to advance in society was widely thought to indicate a lack of character.
4. The Social Darwinist William G. Sumner believed that freedom required frank acceptance of inequality.
D. Liberty of Contract
1. Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the workplace.
2. The demands by workers that government should help them struck liberals as an example of how the misuse of political
power posed a threat to liberty.
E. The Courts and Freedom
1. The courts viewed state regulation of business as an insult to free labor.
2. The courts generally sided with business enterprises that complained of a loss of economic freedom.
III. Labor and the Republic
A. “The Overwhelming Labor Question”
B. The Knights of Labor and the “Conditions Essential to Liberty”
1. The Knights of Labor organized all workers to improve social conditions.
2. Labor raised the question of whether meaningful freedom could exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality.
C. Middle-Class Reformers
1. Alarmed by fear of class warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered numerous plans
for change.
D. Progress and Poverty
E. The Cooperative Commonwealth
1. Lawrence Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth was the first book to popularize socialist ideas for an American
F. Bellamy’s Utopia
1. Freedom, Edward Bellamy insisted, was a social condition resting on interdependence, not on autonomy.
G. Protestants and Moral Reform
1. A “Christian lobby” of mainstream Protestants sought political answers to the moral dilemmas they observed as a result of
labor strife and urbanization.
2. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and others moved from “moral suasion” to a campaign for federal legislation
outlawing the consumption of alcohol.
H. A Social Gospel
1. Walter Rauschenbusch insisted that freedom and spiritual self-development required an equalization of wealth and power
and that unbridled competition mocked the Christian ideal of brotherhood.
I. The Haymarket Affair
1. On May 1, 1886, some 350,000 workers in cities across the country demonstrated for an eight-hour day.
2. A riot ensued after a bomb killed a policeman on May 4.
J. Labor and Politics
1. Henry George ran for mayor of New York in 1886 on a labor ticket.
2. The events of 1886 suggested that labor might be on the verge of establishing itself as a permanent political force.
IV. The Transformation of the West
A. A Diverse Region
1. The political and economic incorporation of the American West was part of a global process.
2. The federal government acquired Indian land by war and treaties, administered land sales, and distributed land to farmers,
B. Farming on the Middle Border
1. More land came into cultivation during the thirty years after the Civil War than during the previous two and a half centuries of
American history.
2. Farming was difficult and much of the burden fell to women.
C. Bonanza Farms
1. John Wesley Powell warned that the region’s arid land required large-scale irrigation projects and communal farming as
practiced by Mexican settlers.
2. Small farmers became increasingly oriented to national and international markets.
D. The Cowboy and the Corporate West
1. Cowboys became symbols of a life of freedom on the open range.
2. By the mid-1880s, farmers enclosed more and more of the open range and moved cattle operations close to rail
connections.
E. The Chinese Presence
1. After the Civil War, Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the American West as families.
3. Immigrants kept in touch with relatives and events in China through letters and magazines from home.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes an article from the American Missionary by Saum Song
Bo, a Chinese immigrant to the U.S. in 1885, calling for equal treatment under the law.
F. Conflict on the Mormon Frontier
2. The forceful removal of the obstructive territorial governor Brigham Young ushered in a period of tension between
Mormon families, natives, and settlers.
4. With the Mormon ban on polygamy, Utah was able to acquire statehood and end its resistance against the federal
government.
G. The Subjugation of the Plains Indians
1. The incorporation of the West into the national economy spelled the doom of the Plains Indians and their world.
3. Numbering 30 million in 1800, buffalo were nearly extinct due to hunting and army campaigns by 1890.
H. “Let Me Be a Free Man”
(1879) calling for freedom and equal rights for Native American people.
4. The Comanche empire fell in the 1870s.
I. Remaking Indian Life
1. In 1871, Congress eliminated the treaty system that dated back to the Revolutionary era.
a. Forced assimilation
J. The Dawes Act
1. The crucial step in attacking tribalism came in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Act.
K. Indian Citizenship
1. Many nineteenth-century laws offered citizenship to Indians if they gave up tribal identity and assimilated into American
society, but not many Indians were willing to do so.
3. By 1900, roughly 53,000 Indians had become American citizens by accepting land allotments under the Dawes Act.
4. In 1924 Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans but their right to vote was still contested.
L. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
2. On December 29, 1890, soldiers opened fire on Ghost Dancers encamped on Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota,
M. Settler Societies and Global Wests
1. The conquest of the American West was part of a global process.
3. In settler societies such as Australia, native peoples were subjected to cultural reconstruction similar to policies in the
N. Myth, Reality, and the Wild West
1. Despite the presence of farms, mines, and cities, a new image of the West emerged after the Civil War—one of a lawless
“Wild” ruled by cowboys and Indians.
3. Popular entertainment imagined the West as a place of adventure, uncorrupted by civilization.
4. The real West included farm families, labor conflict, the federal government, and racial and ethnic diversity.
V. Politics in a Gilded Age
A. The Corruption of Politics
1. The era from 1870 to 1890 is the only period of American history commonly known by a derogatory name: the Gilded
Age.
2. Americans during the Gilded Age saw their nation as an island of political democracy in a world still dominated by
undemocratic governments.
3. Political corruption was rife.
5. Corruption existed at the national level, too.
a. Crédit Mobilier
B. The Politics of Dead Center
1. Every Republican candidate for president from 1868 to 1900 had fought in the Union army.
a. Union soldiers’ pensions
3. The parties were closely divided and national elections very close.
5. In some ways, American democracy in the Gilded Age seemed remarkably healthy.
C. Government and the Economy
1. The nation’s political structure proved ill-equipped to deal with the problems created by the economy’s rapid growth.
2. Republican economic policies strongly favored the interests of eastern industrialists and bankers.
D. Reform Legislation
1. The Civil Service Act of 1883 created a merit system for federal employees.
3. Passed in 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act banned practices that restrained free trade, but it was also used to prohibit
unions.
E. Political Conflict in the States
1. State governments expanded their responsibilities to the public.
3. Farmers responded to railroad policies by organizing the Grange.
4. Some states passed eight-hour-day laws.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• What were the causes of the depression in the United States between 1873 to 1897. How did labor respond?
• How does the emergence of the Ghost Dance reflect the experiences of the Indians? What was the significance of Wounded
Knee?
• Explain the reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s rulings in regard to industry. How was the Court defining freedom?
• How did the nature of work and the composition of the workforce change during the Gilded Age?
• What factors contributed to the rise of the labor movement in the nineteenth century?
• How did agriculture change in the late nineteenth century?
• Considering the experiences of Mormons and of the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, how did America, as a nation, handle
religious freedom in this time period?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Andrew Carnegie
Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison
California
California as I Saw It
Encyclopedia of the Great Plains—Bonanza Farms
The Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1870–1912
History of the American West, 1860–1920
Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains
John D. Rockefeller
The West
Wounded Knee
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Bachin, Robin F. Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Lands: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Calhoun, Charles W. “Benjamin Harrison.” American Presidents series. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2005.
Campbell, Ballard, ed. The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.
Chandler, Alfred D. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Foster, Gaines. Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002.
45–60.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Group Discussion Activity: The Business of Innovation, Thomas A. Edison
Inventor Thomas A. Edison combined his scientific competence and engineering capabilities with a particular aptitude for business. In the end, it
2. Group Research and Debate Activity
Russell Sage, “A Grave Danger to the Community” (From the North American Review 534, May 1901).
At the height of the merger wave in American industry, three tycoons of American finance and former robber barons argued vigorously in
the pages of the North American Review about the significance of the unprecedented increase in new holding companies that controlled ex-
traordinary amounts of capital. A sharp criticism of this new business organization came from Russell Sage, a New York financier, politician,
and member of Congress before the Civil War (Whig Party). He had served as the director of the Union Pacific (Transcontinental) Railroad
Russell Sage’s Criticism
http://www.unz.org/Pub/NorthAmericanRev-1901may-00641
Ask students to research the life and business activities of Russell Sage. Does their assessment of his critique of the merger wave change as a re-
sult? Ask them to speculate why a robber baron of such notoriety might take such a stand in opposition to the financial empires.
In class, ask the following discussion questions:
Group Debate:
Divide the class into three groups and assign each group essays by Russell Sage, James Hill, or Charles Flint. Then stage a debate among the three.
Allow the groups time to form a perspective regarding the individual. Which group has the best economic strategy? Which group can recruit the
most from its rivals? What dominant opinion emerges in the class?
Russell Sage