University City High School

AP United States History

Honors United States History

Mr. Brown

Articles

The New Gilded Age

The Politics of Reform

Roosevelt and the Square Deal

World War I  

The Gilded Age

Mark Twain called the late 19th century the "Gilded Age." By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America's formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers were transformed into an urban society dominated by industrial corporations. An era of intense partisanship, the Gilded Age was also an era of reform. The Civil Service Act sought to curb government corruption by requiring applicants for certain governmental jobs to take a competitive examination. The Interstate Commerce Act sought to end discrimination by railroads against small shippers and the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed business monopolies. These were turbulent years that saw labor violence, rising racial tension, militancy among farmers, and discontent among the unemployed. Burdened by heavy debts and falling farm prices, many farmers joined the Populist Party, which called for an increase in the amount of money in circulation, government assistance to help farmers repay loans, tariff reductions, and a graduated income tax. The 1880s and 1890s were years of turbulence. Disputes erupted over labor relations, currency, tariffs, patronage, and railroads. The most momentous political conflict of the late 19th century was the farmers' revolt. Drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Farmers responded by organizing Granges, Farmers' Alliances, and the Populist Party. In the election of 1896, the Populists and the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan’s decisive defeat inaugurated a period of Republican ascendancy, in which Republicans controlled the presidency for 24 of the next 32 years. 

1. Farmers Alliance

2. National Granges

3. Granger Laws

4. Munn v. Illinois

5. Wabash Cases

6. People's Party

7. Omaha Platform

8. William Jennings Bryan

9. Free Silver

10. "Cross of Gold" speech

11. 1896 election

12. William McKinley

13. "new Manifest Destiny"

14. American interventions in Mexico

15. The De Lome Letter

16. General Wyler's re-concentration policy

17. The U.S.S. Maine

18. Treaty of Paris 1898

19. The Spanish-American War

20. The Philippine–American War

21. Emilio Aguinaldo

21. Anti-Imperialist League

23. Open Door Policy

24. Annexation of Hawaii

25. Queen Liliuokalani

26. Alfred Thayher Mahan

27. Theodore Roosevelt

28. Rough Riders

29. Open Door Notes

30. Boxer Rebelliuon

Between the Civil War and World War I, the modern American economy emerged. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the 20th century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain. Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the 20th century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations. Around the turn of the 20th century, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population's ethnic and religious composition. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, the new immigrants came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish and two-thirds of them settled in cities. In this chapter you will learn about the new immigrants and the anti-immigrant reaction.

1. What factors drove America's industrial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? 

2. Who were some of the businessmen and industrial titans of the late nineteenth century, and what did they contribute to America's industrial growth? 

3.What changes took place in corporate organization in the late nineteenth century, and how did these changes affect the nation's economy?

4. How did Social Darwinism attempt to justify the social consequences of industrial capitalism?

Around the turn of the twentieth century, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population's ethnic and religious composition. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, the “new immigrants” came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish and two-thirds of them settled in cities. In this chapter you will learn about the new immigrants and the anti-immigrant reaction. Also in this chapter traces the changing nature of the American city in the late 19th century, the expansion of cities horizontally and vertically, the problems caused by urban growth, the depiction of cities in art and literature, and the emergence of new forms of urban entertainment.

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