For all the similarities, there are many differences between the two eras. The current social services safety net, however tattered, was only a dream in the Gilded Age. Above all, the Gilded Age was one of class conflict. In the Gilded Age, the rich were regarded with suspicion or contempt. Now, says Maney, when the rich flaunt their wealth as a sign of their success, the strongest emotion they provoke is envy.
The Panic of lasted four years and left lower and even middle-class Americans fed up with political corruption and social inequality. Their frustration gave rise to the Progressive Movement which took hold when President Theodore Roosevelt took office in Although Roosevelt supported corporate America, he also felt there should be federal controls in place to keep excessive corporate greed in check and prevent individuals from making obscene amounts of money off the backs of immigrants and the lower class.
Helped by the muckrackers and the White House , the Progressive Era ushered in many reforms that helped shift away power from robber barons, such as:.
Fewer monopolies meant more people could pursue the American Dream and start their own businesses. Most robber barons and their families, however, remained wealthy for generations. Even so, many bequeathed much of their wealth, land and homes to charity and historical societies.
And progressives continued their mission to close the gap between the wealthy and poor and champion the needy and disenfranchised. The Newberry. Gilded Age Reform. University of Virginia.
The Gilded Age. About Jane Addams. Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Carrie A. Nation The Breakers. The Preservation Society of Newport County. The Progressive Era The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. Biltmore Estate History.
Margaret Olivia Sage. Philanthropy Roundtable. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In New York City—where the population doubled every decade from to —buildings that The first native New Yorkers were the Lenape, an Algonquin people who hunted, fished and farmed in the area between the Delaware and Hudson rivers.
Europeans began to explore the region at the beginning of the 16th century—among the first was Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian The Industrial Revolution, which began roughly in the second half of the s and stretched into the early s, was a period of enormous change in Europe and America.
The invention of new technologies, from mechanized looms for weaving cloth and the steam-powered locomotive to The Iron Age was a period in human history that started between B.
During the Iron Age, people across much of Europe, Asia and parts of Africa began making tools and weapons from iron and New immigrants to New York City in the late s faced grim, cramped living conditions in tenement housing that once dominated the Lower East Side.
During the 19th century, immigration steadily increased, causing New York City's population to double every decade The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools. Last year, President Donald Trump succeeded in imposing restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He continues, as he has since his campaign launch, to make political hay by demonizing migrants from Mexico and Central America.
These surface historical parallels seem so obvious. In the liberal historical imagination, the economic reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal years in the first half of the 20th century — primarily higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise — vanquished Gilded Age inequality.
This happy version of the story has many heroes, most of whom tend to be middle-class intellectuals and technocratic politicians: muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell who exposed robber barons, government appointees like Frances Perkins who fought to protect workers, and seemingly anti-laissez-faire presidents like Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts.
Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the s through the s.
The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism. Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner. We have not been through all this before.
New solutions are wanting. He is working on a new book about the socialist who created the hedge fund, and teaches Modern American History at the University of York in the UK. Follow him on Twitter: davidhuyssen. Socially, the period was marked by large-scale immigration from Germany and Scandinavia to the industrial centers and to western farmlands, the deepening of religious organizations, the rapid growth of high schools, and the emergence of a managerial and professional middle class.
In terms of immigration, after , the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened. The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came individuals from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as from French Canada.
During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased. Conservative, white Democratic governments in the South passed Jim Crow legislation, creating a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Blacks were separated in schools and hospitals, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public transportation systems.
They often were barred from certain stores, or forbidden to use lunchrooms, restrooms, and fitting rooms.
Because they could not vote, they could not serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system. Blacks who were economically successful faced reprisals or sanctions. Through violence and legal restrictions, whites often prevented blacks from working as common laborers, much less as skilled artisans or in the professions.
Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black people found it extremely difficult to advance.
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