The Gilded AgeEssay Preview: The Gilded Age3 rating(s)Report this essayThe Gilded Age can be regarded as an age that brought a great amount of strife, yet an exponential amount of economic growth. This era in time from 1870-1900, essentially saw the rich get richer and the impoverished left in the dust, due to an escalation in the beliefs of Social Darwinism. An example of this would be the monopolies Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller had in their respective markets and the sweatshops that forced the lower class into working countless hours in atrocious conditions. The rise in industry came from the influx of immigrants to create an impoverished labor force. The impoverished labor force brought up the labor unions to defend the workers conditions in the work place. These entities effected the social, economic, and political atmospheres of the Gilded Age.
The rise in industry through a generally poor labor force that effected the social atmosphere can be seen in Document A. The document clearly shows the great percentage of men and women ages 10-65 that toiled in the labor force. Earlier women were mostly involved in domestic housework but they were introduced to the industrial US labor force alongside men. Two familiar industries to work under were the steel industry under Andrew Carnegie or the oil industry under John Rockefeller. However, those workers usually worked long, menial, 12 hour shifts. The terrible conditions in a sweatshop and the child worker shown in Document C led to the rise of labor unions and child labor laws, which regulated eight-hour a day shifts, minimum wage, and less harmful working conditions. Immigrants too, were part of the US labor force; the vast amount being Chinese. For a while they joined the force, most working on railroad construction for cheap wages,until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted. According to Document B, the opinion of the US Government was that, “Chinese laborers to this country endangers het good order of certain localities within the territory thereof..” This discrimnation against the Chinese leads to a point made by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives. In the excerpt shown in Document F, Jacob Riis discusses the various and vast amount of immigrants in the area, and not one native-born individual in the vicinity, hinting at the discrimination of immigrants.
Two industries that dominated their respective markets and benefitted the economy were the steel industry run by Andrew Carnegie, and the oil industry run by John Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie did acceptionally well in the sense that he merged relativley small steel factories in order to create an entire monopoly in the steel. He utilized the business approach of horizontal integration which allowed him to be the only one to manufacture and sell it to the populous. In Document D, Carnegie even says himself “…we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial commercial, in the hands of few.. as not only being beneficial, but essential..” hinting that the minimal competition is beneficial and essential to his total monopoly
Another good example is the industrialization of the world. The world’s greatest power is the United States, which was built principally on the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.[1] If you look at industrialization, you will see that almost all of the great industrial companies, including the leading American banks and corporations, started out using paper as their main tool of labor as well as physical labor.[2] Industrialization enabled everyone to be involved in production and the development of industry. In the process, everyone moved from a small factory and a medium-sized one to a huge mass factory and then a large middle industrial complex, with their people working with the larger mass of the people. When the working class was the center of mass, then the whole system was expanded as well. From the mid-1930s, when the first American corporations started to establish themselves, they created about 25 of the largest new American industrial enterprises. These new enterprises, which were called the “new industrial cities,” had a great industrial influence on the world economy, their capital, production and use and the environment they were founded upon, all of which brought about an enormous revolution for man.
The fact that the United States was a power with a larger industrial base, was the reason why Carnegie, the man who founded Carnegie Mellon in 1937 and which now represents some $7 billion in assets, believed that the American people needed a revolution, as well as a great revolution—a revolution against capitalistic monopoly on labor and a revolution for the prosperity of the whole world. His slogan was “The Man Who Builds Free Cities”, thus creating a major revolutionary force from the people which would make American capitalism work. The New York City workers have made it very clear that they want to transform the political system which is controlled by capital. The New York City capitalists are very clear that they want to make this a major movement, as long as they are not the ones deciding their fate, or that the government is not going to keep making the decisions for them. He said “the people will have control of how things are made and they’ll have their control,” and from the workers’ perspective, they will have a great opportunity to be one of the leaders. The people are the ones directing the process of transformation.
The most striking difference between Carnegie and Carnegieism is in his insistence that all of the world’s problems have nothing to do with them. Carnegie wants to build a huge industrial society, with everything and nothing to do with what America is doing today. He wants to make America prosperous. As he writes in Document D, Carnegie’s main political goal is to make his country better, while at the same time, he wants everyone to become a greater, more prosperous, more prosperous, and more wealthy citizen. This sounds very optimistic but the fact is that it is not. Carnegie did the revolution before you, and there was a revolution of the people before you after he left Washington as it was in 1934. The people who worked in Manhattan were the real winners of the Revolution and were the winners of the revolution and made the American people rich again. The people were the ones who controlled the financial system,