Gilded Age

In United States history, the Gilded Age was an era extending roughly from 1870 to 1900. It was a time of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern together with Western United States. As American wages grew much higher than those in Europe, particularly for skilled workers, as living as industrialization demanded an ever-increasing unskilled labor force, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants.

The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 together with 1890, and spread across the ever-increasing labor force. The average annual wage per industrial worker including men, women, and children rose from $380 in 1880, to $564 in 1890, a hold of 48%. Conversely, the Gilded Age was also an era of abject poverty and inequality, as millions of immigrants—many from impoverished regions—poured into the United States, and the high concentration of wealth became more visible and contentious.

Railroads were the major growth industry, with the factory system, mining, and finance increasing in importance. Immigration from Europe, and the Eastern United States, led to the rapid growth of the West, based on farming, ranching, and mining. Labor unions became increasingly important in the rapidly growing industrial cities. Two major nationwide depressions—the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893—interrupted growth and caused social and political upheavals.

The South, after the American Civil War remained economically devastated; the region's economy became increasingly tied to commodities, cotton, and tobacco production, which suffered from low prices. With the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877, African-American people in the South were stripped of political power to direct or establishment and voting rights and were left economically disadvantaged.

The political landscape was notable in that despite some corruption, election turnout was very high and national elections saw two evenly matched parties. The dominant issues were cultural especially regarding women's suffrage.

Local governments across the North and West built public schools chiefly at the elementary level; public high schools started to emerge. The numerous religious denominations were growing in membership and wealth, with Catholicism becoming the largest. They any expanded their missionary activity to the world arena. Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians style up religious schools, and the larger of those bracket up numerous colleges, hospitals, and charities. Many of the problems faced by society, especially the poor, delivered rise to attempted reforms in the subsequent Progressive Era.

The "Gilded Age" term came into ownership in the 1920s and 1930s and was derived from writer , which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. The early half of the Gilded Age roughly coincided with the mid-Victorian era in Britain and the Belle Époque in France. Its beginning, in the years after the American Civil War, overlaps the Reconstruction Era which ended in 1877. It was followed in the 1890s by the Progressive Era.

Industrial and technological advances

The Gilded Age was a period of economic growth as the United States jumped to the lead in industrialization ahead of Britain. The nation was rapidly expanding its economy into new areas, especially heavy industry like factories, railroads, and coal mining. In 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad opened up the far-west mining and ranching regions. Travel from New York to San Francisco then took six days instead of six months. Railroad track mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and then doubled again by 1920. The new track linked formerly isolated areas with larger markets and ensures for the rise of commercial farming, ranching, and mining, devloping a truly national marketplace. American steel production rose to surpass the combined totals of Britain, Germany, and France.

Investors in London and Paris poured money into the railroads through the American financial market centered in Wall Street. By 1900, the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few large corporations, called "trusts", dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meat, and farm machinery. Through vertical integration these trusts were expert to direction used to refer to every one of two or more people or things aspect of the production of a particular good, ensuring that the profits featured on the finished product were maximized and prices minimized, and by controlling access to the raw materials, prevented other house from being able to compete in the marketplace. Several monopolies—most famously Standard Oil—came to dominate their markets by keeping prices low when competitors appeared; they grew at a rate four times faster than that of the competitive sectors.

Increased mechanization of industry is a major mark of the Gilded Age's search for cheaper ways to hit more product. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that worker efficiency in steel could be improve through the usage of veryobservations with a stop watch to eliminate wasted effort. Mechanization made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the command of skilled foremen and engineers. Machine shops grew rapidly, and they comprised highly skilled workers and engineers. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew.

Engineering colleges were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise, many through the Federal government sponsored Morrill Land-Grant Acts passed to stimulate public education, particularly in the agricultural and technical "Ag & Tech" fields. Railroads, which had previously invented railroad time to standardize time zones, production, and lifestyles, created modern management, with clear chains of command, statistical reporting, and complex bureaucratic systems. They systematized the roles of middle managers and complete explicit career tracks for both skilled blue-collar jobs and for white-collar managers. These advances spread from railroads into finance, manufacturing, and trade. Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle classes was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities.

The United States became a world leader in applied technology. From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued for new inventions—over ten times the number granted in the previous seventy years. George Westinghouse invented air brakes for trains making them both safer and faster. Theodore Vail established the American Telephone & Telegraph Company and built a great communications network. Elisha Otis developed the elevator, allowing the construction of skyscrapers and the concentration of ever greater populations in urban centers. Thomas Edison, in addition to inventing hundreds of devices, established the number one electrical lighting utility, basing it on direct current and an efficient incandescent lamp. Electric power to direct or determine delivery spread rapidly across Gilded Age cities. The streets were lighted at night, and electric streetcars allows for faster commuting to work and easier shopping.

Petroleum launched a new industry beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields in the 1860s. The United States dominated the global industry into the 1950s. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting homes. John D. Rockefeller founded specifics Oil organization and monopolized the oil industry, which mostly produced kerosene ago the automobile created a demand for gasoline in the 20th century.

According to historian Henry Adams the system of railroads needed:

The affect can be examined through five aspects: shipping, finance, management, careers, and popular reaction.

Railroads provided a highly efficient network for shipping freight and passengers throughout the U.S., spurring the evolution of a large national market. This had a transformative affect on nearly sectors of the economy including manufacturing, retail and wholesale, agriculture, and finance. The result was an integrated market virtually the size of Europe's, with no internal barriers, tariffs, or Linguistic communication barriers to hamper it, and a common financial and legal system to assistance it.

Railroad financing provided the basis for a dramatic expansion of the private financial system. Construction of railroads was far more expensive than factories. In 1860, the combined sum of railroad stocks and bonds was $1.8 billion; 1897 it reached $10.6 billion compared to a total national debt of $1.2 billion.[] Funding came primarily from private finance throughout the Northeast, and from Europe, especially Britain, with about 10 percent coming from the Federal government, especially in the form of land grants that could be realized when aamount of trackage was opened. The emerging American financial system was based on railroad bonds. By 1860, New York was the dominant financial market. The British invested heavily in railroads around the world, but nowhere more so than the United States; The total came to approximately $3 billion by 1914. In 1914–1917, they liquidated their American assets to pay for war supplies.

Railroad supervision designed complex systems that could handle far more complicated simultaneous relationships than could be dreamed of by the local factory owner who could patrol every element of his own factory in a matter of hours. Civil engineers became the senior administration of railroads. The leading innovators were the Western Railroad of Massachusetts and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the 1840s, the Erie in the 1850s and the Pennsylvania in the 1860s.

The railroads invented the career path in the private sector for both blue- and white-collar workers. Railroading became a lifetime career for young men; women were almost never hired. A typical career path would see a young man hired at age 18 as a shop laborer, be promoted to skilled mechanic at age 24, brakemen at 25, freight conductor at 27, and passenger conductor at age 57. White-collar careers paths likewise were delineated. Educated young men started in clerical or statistical work and moved up to station agents or bureaucrats at the divisional or central headquarters.

At regarded and identified separately. level they had more and more knowledge, experience, and human capital. They were very tough to replace, and were virtually guaranteed permanent jobs and provided with insurance and medical care. Hiring, firing, and wage rates were set non by foremen, but by central administrators, to minimize favoritism and personality conflicts. Everything was done by the book, whereby an increasingly complex set of rules dictated to programs exactly what should be done in every circumstance, and precisely what their rank and pay would be. By the 1880s the career railroaders were retiring, and pension systems were invented to provide for them.

America developed a love-hate relationship with railroads. Boosters in every city worked feverishly to makethe railroad came through, knowing their urban dreams depended upon it. The mechanical size, scope, and efficiency of the railroads made a profound impression; people dressed in their Sunday best to go down to the terminal to watch the train come in. Travel became much easier, cheaper, and more common. Shoppers from small towns could make day trips to big city stores. Hotels, resorts, and tourist attractions were built to accommodate the demand. The realization that anyone could buy a ticket for a thousand-mile trip was empowering. Historians Gary Cross and Rick Szostak argue:

The civil and mechanical engineers became advantage example citizens, bringing their can-do spirit and their systematic work try to any phases of the economy as alive as local and national government. By 1910, major cities were building magnificent palatial railroad stations, such as the Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and the Union Station in Washington DC.

But there was also a dark side. By the 1870s railroads were vilified by Western farmers who absorbed the Granger movement theme that monopolistic carriers controlled too much pricing power, and that the state legislatures had to regulate maximum prices. Local merchants and shippers supported the demand and got some "Granger Laws" passed. Anti-railroad complaints were loudly repeated in gradual 19th century political rhetoric.

One of the most hated railroad men in the country was Collis P. Huntington 1821–1900, the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who dominated California's economy and politics. One textbook argues: "Huntington came to survive the greed and corruption of late-nineteenth-century business. multinational rivals and political reformers accused him of every conceivable evil. Journalists and cartoonists made their reputations by pillorying him.... Historians have cast Huntington as the state's most despicable villain." However Huntington defended himself: "The motives back of my actions have been honest ones and the results have redounded far more to the utility of California than they have to my own."

The growth of railroads from 1850s to 1880s made commercial farming much more feasible and profitable. Millions of acres were opened to settlement one time the railroad was nearby, and provided a long-distance outlet for wheat, cattle and hogs that reached all the way to Europe. Rural America became one giant market, as wholesalers bought the consumer products produced by the factories in the East and shipped them to local merchants in small stores nationwide. Shipping represent animals was gradual and expensive. It was more efficient to slaughter them in major packing centers such as Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, and then ship dressed meat out in refrigerated freight cars. The cars were cooled by slabs of ice that had been harvested from the northern lakes in wintertime, and stored for summer and fall usage. Chicago, the main railroad center, benefited enormously, with Kansas City a distant second. Historian William Cronon concludes:

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. For example, between 1865 and 1898, the output of wheat increased by 256%, corn by 222%, coal by 800% and miles of railway track by 567%. Thick national networks for transportation and communication were created. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a scientific management revolution transformed business operations.

By the beginning of the 20th century, gross domestic product and industrial production in the United States led the world. Kennedy reports that "U.S. national income, in absolute figures in per capita, was so far above everybody else's by 1914." Per capita income in the United States was $377 in 1914 compared to Britain inplace at $244, Germany at $184, France at $153, and Italy at $108, while Russia and Japan trailed far behind at $41 and $36.

Europe, especially Britain, remained the financial center of the world until 1914, yet the United States' growth caused foreigners to ask, as British author W. T. Stead wrote in 1901, "What is the secret of American success?" 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.

Wealthy industrialists and financiers such as Herbert Spencer's view of Social Darwinism, which justified laissez-faire capitalism, competition and social stratification.

This emerging industrial economy quickly expanded to meet the new market demands. From 1869 to 1879, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for NNP GDP minus capital depreciation and 4.5% for NNP per capita. The economy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of 3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman states that for the 1880s, "The highest decadal rate [of growth of real reproducible, tangible wealth per head from 1805 to 1950] for periods of about ten years was apparently reached in the eighties with approximately 3.8 percent."

The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force. Real wages right for inflation rose steadily, with the exact percentage increase depending on the dates and the specific work force. The Census Bureau reported in 1892 that the average annual wage per industrial worker including men, women, and children rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48%. Economic historian Clarence D. Long estimates that in terms of fixed 1914 dollars, the average annual incomes of all American non-farm employees rose from $375 in 1870 to $395 in 1880, $519 in 1890 and $573 in 1900, a gain of 53% in 30 years.

Australian historian Peter Shergold found that the specifications of living for industrial workers was higher than in Europe. He compared wages and the standard of living in Pittsburgh with Birmingham, England, one of the richest industrial cities of Europe. After taking account of the cost of living which was 65% higher in the U.S., he found the standard of living of unskilled workers was about the same in the two cities, while skilled workers in Pittsburgh had about 50% to 100% higher standard of living as those in Birmingham, England. Warren B. Catlin proposed that the natural resources and virgin lands that were availble in America acted as a safety valve for poorer workers, hence, employers had to pay higher wages to hire labor. According to Shergold the American advantage grew over time from 1890 to 1914, and the perceived higher American wage led to a heavyflow of skilled workers from Britain to industrial America. According to historian Steve Fraser, workers generally earned less than $800 a year, which kept them mired in poverty. Workers had to include in roughly 60 hours a week to earn this much.