The Gilded Age
Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age
The belief that white, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon Americans were biologically superior to other groups fueled many social and political trends of the Gilded Age. Overview Social Darwinism is a term scholars use to describe the practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, and society. Many Social Darwinists embraced laissez-faire capitalism and racism. They believed that government should not interfere in the "survival of the fittest" by helping the poor, and promoted the idea that some races are biologically superior to others. The ideas of Social Darwinism pervaded many aspects of American society in the Gilded Age, including policies that affected immigration, imperialism, and public health.
America moves to the city
The industrial boom of the late nineteenth century led Americans and immigrants from the world over to leave farming life and head to the city. Overview Americans increasingly moved into cities over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a movement motivated in large measure by industrialization. Eleven million people migrated from rural to urban areas between 1870 and 1920, and a majority of the twenty-five million immigrants who came to the United States in these same years moved into the nation's cities. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in US history.
Social Darwinism, immigration, and imperialism
The pernicious beliefs of Social Darwinism also shaped Americans' relationship with peoples of other nations. As a massive number of immigrants came to the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution, white, Anglo-Saxon Americans viewed these newcomers—who differed from earlier immigrants in that they were less likely to speak English and more likely to be Catholic or Jewish rather than Protestant—with disdain. Many whites believed that these new immigrants, who hailed from Eastern or Southern Europe, were racially inferior and consequently "less evolved" than immigrants from England, Ireland, or Germany.^5 5 start superscript, 5, end superscript Similarly, Social Darwinism was used as a justification for American imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, as many adherents of imperialism argued that it was the duty of white Americans to bring civilization to "backwards" peoples. During and after World War II, the arguments of Social Darwinists and eugenicists lost popularity in the United States due to their association with Nazi racial propaganda. Modern biological science has completely discredited the theory of Social Darwinism.
Labor battles in the Gilded Age
As the United States became a major industrial power, conflict between workers and factory owners intensified. Read about the Homestead Strike and the Pullman Strike, two of the most famous labor battles in American history. Overview As the United States' industrial economy grew in the late 1800s, conflict between workers and factory owners became increasingly frequent and sometimes led to violence. The Homestead Strike occurred at the Carnegie Steel Company's Homestead Steel Works in 1892. The strike culminated in a gun battle between unionized steelworkers and a group of men hired by the company to break the strike. The steelworkers ultimately lost the strike. The Pullman Strike of 1894 started outside Chicago at the Pullman sleeping car manufacturing company and quickly grew into a national railroad strike involving the American Railway Union, the Pullman Company, railroads across the nation, and the federal government.
Agrarian activism in the United States
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the nation's farmers began to organize to defend their interests against what they perceived to be the interests of the Eastern establishment and banking elite. As the number of landless tenant farmers rose, and as the debts of independent farmers skyrocketed due to burdensome loan terms and interest rates from banks, discontent among the nation's agrarian workers burgeoned. In 1876, the Farmer's Alliance was established in Texas with the goal of ending the crop-lien system that had thrown so many farmers into poverty. The crop-lien system operated in the cotton-growing South, among sharecroppers and tenant farmers, both white and black, who did not own the land that they worked. These workers took out loans to obtain the seed, tools, and other supplies they needed to grow the cotton. After the harvest, they were required to pay back the loans in the form of cotton crops. When cotton prices tanked, these workers were sometimes left with nothing after their crops were collected by creditors. The Farmer's Alliance was not the only organization that sprung up to defend the nation's agrarian workers. The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange, was founded in 1868 in New York to advocate on behalf of rural communities. From 1873 to 1875, local chapters of the Grange were established across the country, and membership skyrocketed. This was partly due to the Panic of 1873, a financial crisis that resulted in a number of bank failures and the bankruptcy of several of the nation's railroads. The Panic of 1873 depressed wages for workers, and the prices of agricultural products plummeted, saddling farmers with massive amounts of debt that they had little hope of paying off.
Gilded Age capitalism and the rise of unions
By the late 1800s the United States' industrial output and GDP was growing faster than that of any other country in the world. [What is GDP?] At the center of the nation's economic success was a dynamic and expansive industrial capitalism, one consequence of which was mass immigration. From 1865 to 1918, 27.5 million immigrants poured into the United States, many aspiring to the opportunities afforded by the nation's economic successes The late nineteenth century was a time when industrial capitalism was new, raw, and sometimes brutal. Between 1881 and 1900, 35,000 workers per year lost their lives in industrial and other accidents at work, and strikes were commonplace: no fewer than 100,000 workers went on strike each year. In 1892, for example, 1,298 strikes involving some 164,000 workers took place across the nation. Unions—which function to protect workers' wages, hours of labor, and working conditions—were on the rise. Strikes and strikebreaking: The Homestead Strike On June 29, 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Homestead Steelworks outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—motivated by a desire to break the union of skilled steel workers who for years had controlled elements of the workflow on the shop floor in the steel mill and slowed output—locked the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) out of the Homestead Steelworks. In response, the next day, AA members struck the plant. Photograph of Henry Clay Frick. Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Homestead Steelworks. Image courtesy Library of Congress. In the first days of the strike, Frick decided to bring in a group of strikebreakers (commonly called scabs). To get inside the steelworks, the replacement workers would have the daunting task of making their way past picketing strikers who had surrounded the steelworks. But Frick hadn't hired any old strikebreakers: he decided to hire men from the Pinkerton detective agency, who were technically dubbed "detectives" but who were actually armed men seeking to push past striking workers and forcibly reopen the steelworks. On July 6, gunfire broke out between striking workers and some of the three hundred Pinkerton detectives that Frick had hired. The Pinkerton agents, who were aboard barges being towed toward the side of the steelworks that bordered the Monongahela River, were pinned down in the barges by gunfire from the striking workers. By the next afternoon, with several having been killed on both sides, the Pinkertons raised a white flag of surrender. Five days later, however, 6,000 state militiamen who had been dispatched by the governor of Pennsylvania marched into town, surrounded the steelworks, and reopened the plant. The state government had sided with the owners. The union had been defeated.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) is one of the most important books in the annals of both science and history. In Origin and in his subsequent writing Darwin offered a revolutionary scientific theory: the process of evolution through natural selection.^1 1 start superscript, 1, end superscript In short, natural selection means that plants and animals evolve over time in nature as new species arise from spontaneous mutations at the point of reproduction and battle with other plants and animals to get food, avoid being killed, and have offspring. Darwin pointed to fossil records, among other evidence, in support of his theory.
City life
Cities in the Gilded Age were studies in contrasts. The wealthy lived in urban mansions while the poor crowded into tenement houses, apartment buildings with tiny rooms, no ventilation, and poor sanitation. Not until journalist and reformer Jacob Riis published his eye-opening photoessay How the Other Half Lives in 1890 did cities begin passing ordinances to make tenement housing safer. The Second Industrial Revolution also changed the physical composition of cities. The invention in the 1850s of the Otis elevator and Bessemer steelmaking process (an inexpensive process for the mass production of steel) created the material means for the rise of tall city buildings, some so tall they were said to scrape the sky—skyscrapers. The advent of trolleys and subways also allowed city dwellers to move about with ease on public transportation, encouraging developers to build new suburbs, allowing people to live outside the city center and commute to work. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cities were energetic centers of culture and community, rich with ethnic enclaves such as "Little Italy," places in which people of different backgrounds and world views lived and worked in close proximity. With museums and public libraries, colleges and universities, churches and synagogues, clubs and organizations, saloons and dance halls, shops and street life, cities were vibrant diverse places of both orthodoxy and heterodoxy. But America's cities could also be geographically concentrated areas of poverty, disease, and violence.
The Pullman Strike
George Pullman was an engineer who designed a popular railroad sleeping car. (Before the advent of cars and airplanes, Americans traveled long distances by rail and slept in railroad cars on the trains.) George Pullman manufactured the nation's most popular sleeping cars, and Pullman was so successful that he built a company town outside Chicago, where the 12,000 workers who built Pullman sleeping cars worked and lived. But when, in the spring of 1894, amid a general economic downturn and decline in prices nationally, Pullman cut workers' wages without also proportionally reducing rents on the company-owned houses or prices of goods sold in the company-owned stores, workers struck. The Pullman Strike, which had begun in May, spread the next month to become a nationwide railroad strike as the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called out workers on railroads across the country in sympathy with Pullman workers. In turn, the railroad companies placed bags of US Mail onto trains striking workers were refusing to move. Declaring that the American Railway Union was illegally obstructing the delivery of the United States mail, rail owners enlisted the support of US President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago, ostensibly to protect the US Mail, and an injunction was issued against the union. Debs and other strike leaders were imprisoned when they refused to abide by the court-ordered injunction and call off the strike. The injunction was upheld by the courts, and the strike was ended by late July. Again, government—this time the federal government—had sided with employers in a labor-management dispute.
The People's Party
In 1891, the People's Party, also known as the Populist Party, or Populists, was formed as a political party representing the interests of the nation's agricultural sector. The Farmer's Alliance was a major part of the Populist coalition. The People's Party nominated James B. Weaver, a former US representative from the state of Iowa, as its candidate in the 1892 presidential election. Campaigning on a platform designed to strengthen farmers and weaken the monopolistic power of big business, banks, and railroad corporations, the People's Party garnered 8.5% of the popular vote, carrying the states of Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, and Nevada. Photograph of William Jennings Bryan. William Jennings Bryan was the presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1896. Image courtesy Library of Congress. Because of the mass appeal of the Populist movement, the Democratic Party began to champion many of its policy goals. In the 1896 presidential election, the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan as its candidate, and the Populists agreed to support him. The People's Party was thus folded into the Democratic Party and began to fade from the national scene. The effect of the fusion of the Populist Party and the Democratic Party was a disaster in the South. Though there had always been conflict within the Populist movement about whether African Americans should be included, the Democratic Party in the South was unabashedly racist. Though Bryan performed strongly in the areas of greatest Populist influence, he lost the election to Republican William McKinley. The People's Party continued to function and fielded candidates in both the 1904 and 1908 presidential elections, but the heyday of the party's influence was over. Although the People's Party was formally disbanded in 1908, the Progressive movement would take up many of the goals and causes of Populism, including anti-trust legislation, greater federal regulation of private industry, and stronger support for the nation's agricultural and working classes.
American Federation of Labor
In the late 1880s, skilled workers fled the beleaguered Knights of Labor and joined the newly-formed American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL was an umbrella organization that brought together craft unions—unions of skilled workers who organized together by individual trade, such as carpenters, stonemasons, and printers. Led by Samuel Gompers, head of the Cigar Makers Union, the AFL focused on higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for its members. By 1900, the AFL had 500,000 members. Despite the agitation of the labor movement, which staged a combined 23,000 strikes between the years of 1881 and 1900, unions made relatively little progress in this era. As of 1900, only about three percent of working people belonged to a union. Not until the mid-twentieth century would organized labor become a significant force in the American economy.
The Populists
In the late nineteenth century, a new American political party sprung up to defend the interests of farmers. Overview The Populists were an agrarian-based political movement aimed at improving conditions for the country's farmers and agrarian workers. The Populist movement was preceded by the Farmer's Alliance and the Grange. The People's Party was a political party founded in 1891 by leaders of the Populist movement. It fielded a candidate in the US presidential election of 1892 and garnered 8.5% of the popular vote, which was a substantial amount of support for a third party. The Populists allied with the labor movement and were folded into the Democratic Party in 1896, though a small remnant of the People's Party continued to exist until it was formally disbanded in 1908.
The Knights of Labor
In the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor attempted to organize workers of all kinds into a union to improve working hours and conditions for laborers. Overview Labor unions arose in the nineteenth century as increasing numbers of Americans took jobs in factories, mines, and mills in the growing industrial economy. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was the first major labor organization in the United States. The Knights organized unskilled and skilled workers, campaigned for an eight hour workday, and aspired to form a cooperative society in which laborers owned the industries in which they worked. The Knights' membership collapsed following the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago. By 1886 the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an alliance of skilled workers' trade unions, was growing.
What's a union, and how does it work?
Modern labor unions arose in the United States in the 1800s as increasing numbers of Americans took jobs in the factories, mines, and mills of the growing industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution. For the first one hundred years of its history, the United States had been a nation composed mainly of small farmers, but by 1880 the American economy had shifted to industry. For the first time in the country's history, more people worked for other people for wages than for themselves as farmers or craftsmen. In these early years of industrial capitalism, government played little to no role in regulating businesses. Monopolies (single entities which control an entire industry, eliminating competition) could set prices for goods and services as high as they liked. Likewise, industries could conspire to keep workers' wages low. Wealthy business owners routinely bribed judges and members of Congress to side with them in disputes. With such enormous resources at their disposal, business owners could easily overpower any individual worker who might complain about his or her treatment. Labor unions attempt to reconcile the disparity in resources between large businesses and individual workers in order to improve the conditions of workers. Unions are organizations of workers who join together as a group to bargain with the owners of the businesses that employ them. Unions bargain with owners for higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and union recognition. A union's power lies, in part, in its ability to strike. A strike is when workers refuse to work (and prevent others from working in their place if possible), leaving factories and mills idle and costing businesses valuable production time. Unions are valuable to their members because they protect individual workers' jobs and enforce ongoing labor-management contracts. Owners, in turn, have a variety of options available to combat strikes. Owners can, for example, fire striking workers and hire new workers, or hire short-term workers for the duration of the strike (known as strikebreakers or scabs).
Social Darwinism, poverty, and eugenics
Social Darwinian language like this extended into theories of race and racism, eugenics, the claimed national superiority of one people over another, and immigration law. Many sociologists and political theorists turned to Social Darwinism to argue against government programs to aid the poor, as they believed that poverty was the result of natural inferiority, which should be bred out of the human population. Herbert Spencer gave as an example a young woman from upstate New York named Margaret, whom he described as a "gutter-child." Because government aid had kept her alive, Margaret had, as Spencer wrote, "proved to be the prolific mother" of two hundred descendants who were "idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, and prostitutes." Spencer concluded by asking, "Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation, enabled these to multiply and become an increasing curse to the society around them?"^3 3 start superscript, 3, end superscript These ideas inspired the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which sought to improve the health and intelligence of the human race by sterilizing individuals it deemed "feeble-minded" or otherwise "unfit." Eugenic sterilizations, which disproportionately targeted women, minorities, and immigrants, continued in the United States until the 1970s.^4 4
Social Darwinism
Soon, some sociologists and others were taking up words and ideas which Darwin had used to describe the biological world, and they were adopting them to their own ideas and theories about the human social world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these Social Darwinists took up the language of evolution to frame an understanding of the growing gulf between the rich and the poor as well as the many differences between cultures all over the world. The explanation they arrived at was that businessmen and others who were economically and socially successful were so because they were biologically and socially "naturally" the fittest. Conversely, they reasoned that the poor were "naturally" weak and unfit and it would be an error to allow the weak of the species to continue to breed. The believed that the dictum "survival of the fittest" (a term coined not by Charles Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer) meant that only the fittest should survive.^2 2 start superscript, 2, end superscript Unlike Darwin, these sociologists and others were not biologists. They were adapting and corrupting Darwin's language for their own social, economic, and political explanations. While Darwin's theory remains a cornerstone of modern biology to this day, the views of the Social Darwinists are no longer accepted, as they were based on an erroneous interpretation of the theory of evolution.
The Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor was a union founded in 1869. The Knights pressed for the eight-hour work day for laborers, and embraced a vision of a society in which workers, not capitalists, would own the industries in which they labored. The Knights also sought to end child labor and convict labor. The Knights of Labor was an exceptionally progressive organization for its day. Most earlier unions restricted membership to skilled laborers (those with specialized training in a craft) and to white men. Led by Terence V. Powderly, the Knights welcomed unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers into their ranks. Immigrants, African Americans and women were also welcome as members. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Knights of Labor found support among coalminers in Pennsylvania, and among railroad workers following a successful 1885 strike against the Wabash Railroad. By 1886, thanks to a number of successful strikes, the Knights claimed more than 700,000 members nationally. Print showing the leaders of the Knights of Labor. Terence Powderly is pictured at center. At the corners are imagines of loggers, miners, blacksmiths and railroad workers. Print showing the leaders of the Knights of Labor. Terence Powderly is pictured at center The Haymarket Square riot On the evening of May 4, 1886, hundreds of people gathered at a rally in support of the eight-hour work day in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Among them were a number of anarchists (radical socialists who advocated the violent overthrow of the American government). Someone—to this day, no one knows who—threw a dynamite bomb, and in the mayhem that followed seven Chicago policemen and four citizens were killed. In the aftermath, eight anarchists were charged with preaching incendiary doctrines and sentenced to long prison terms or death, though there was no evidence tying them directly to the bombing. In addition, the public came to associate the Knights with anarchism and violence. Membership in the organization collapsed. Anarchy and violence weren't the only problems the Knights faced. It also proved difficult to organize unskilled workers, as owners could easily replace them if they went on strike. Skilled workers, whose specialized knowledge gave them a leg up in bargaining with owners, began to believe that their alliance with unskilled laborers was hindering, rather than helping, their cause.
New York City in the Gilded Age
The diversity of the nation's cities was nowhere more on display than in the nation's largest city, New York. At the turn of the twentieth century New York City was the national capital of finance, industry, shipping and trade, publishing, the arts, and immigration, a magnet that drew to it much of the best and most avant-garde in art and literature. With a population of more than three million in 1900 and 4.7 million by 1910, New York was more than twice as populace than Chicago, the nation's second-ranked city, three times as large as third-ranked Philadelphia, and six to nine times as large as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland, all urban centers of immigrants. Photograph of Mulberry Street in New York City, 1900. The street is very busy, full of people and carts and vendors. Mulberry Street in New York City, c. 1900. Image courtesy Library of Congress. By 1910, New York's millionaires had built palatial mansions along much of Fifth Avenue, while, at the same time, many New Yorkers lived in poverty. The Lower East Side was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, housing tens of thousands in ill-lighted, overcrowded tenements, many without running water, flush toilets, or electricity. An 1893 observer in this section of the city wrote of the "fermenting garbage in the gutter and the smell of stale beer" and the sight of exhausted sweatshop workers toiling away, sewing clothes for the garment industry.
The federal government and the labor movement
The limits and legal rights of those who own companies and those who work in companies is an ongoing debate in American politics. As a nation equally committed to both capitalism and the rights of individuals, the United States has struggled to balance the needs of corporations and the needs of workers. As in the Homestead and Pullman strikes, government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often sided with management and against unions. But not always. In the 1902 anthracite coal strike President Teddy Roosevelt threatened coal mine owners that if they did not bargain in good faith with the coal workers' union that the federal government—would take over control of the mines. The owners quickly capitulated to his demands and the strike was settled. In the Great Depression, the federal government enacted provisions on behalf of workers and labor unions. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Labor Relations Act into law on July 5, 1935. The Wagner Act established federal guidelines for allowing unions to organize and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as a federal agency to enforce the Act's pro-labor provisions. In 1947, however, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act (still in effect today), which restricts the activities and power of labor unions.
From farm to city
Today most Americans live in cities or suburbs, but from colonial times into the early twentieth century a majority of Americans lived in the countryside and worked on farms. Only two percent of Americans live on farms or ranches today, but in 1790 ninety percent of the population did. What caused this shift? The movement of populations from rural to urban areas is called urbanization. Urbanization in the United States increased gradually in the early 1800s and then accelerated in the years after the Civil War. By 1890, twenty-eight percent of Americans lived in urban areas, and by 1920 more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. The Second Industrial Revolution and urbanization The principal force driving America's move into cities was the Second Industrial Revolution. In the United States the industrial revolution came in two waves. The first saw the rise of factories and mechanized production in the late 1700s and early 1800s and included steam-powered spinning and weaving machines, the cotton gin, steamboats, locomotives, and the telegraph. The Second Industrial Revolution took off following the Civil War with the introduction of interchangeable parts, assembly-line production, and new technologies, including the telephone, automobile, electrification of homes and businesses, and more. The businesses and factories behind the industrial revolution were located in the nation's towns and cities. Eleven million Americans migrated from the countryside to cities in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920. During these same years an additional 25 million immigrants, most from Europe, moved to the United States—one of the largest mass migrations in human history—and while some settled on farms, most moved into the nation's growing towns and cities.^2 2
