Industrialization and Technological Advancements

• The creation of the railroads created the capitalist society that would define the Gilded Age

  • Impact of railroads:

    • Created the first significant concentrations of capital

    • Spawned the first massive corporations

    • United thousands of farmers and immigrants

    • Linked many towns and cities

  • Railroads’ vast capital requirements required the use of incorporation, a legal innovation that protected shareholders from losses

• Industrialization also remade much of American life outside the workplace

  • Rapidly growing industrialized cities knit together urban consumers and rural producers into a single, integrated national market

• Technological innovation accompanied economic development

  • In September 1878, Thomas Edison announced a new and ambitious line of research and development—electric power and lighting

• Economic advances, technological innovation, social and cultural evolution, and demographic changes transformed the nation

  • Industry boosted productivity

  • Railroads connected the nation, and more and more Americans labored for wages

  • New bureaucratic occupations created a vast “white collar” middle class

  • Unprecedented fortunes rewarded the owners of capital

Immigration and Urbanization

• By the turn of the twentieth century, new immigrant groups such as Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews made up a larger percentage of arrivals than the Irish and Germans

  • Industrial capitalism was the most important factor that drew immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920

    • Immigrant workers labored in large industrial complexes producing goods such as steel, textiles, and food products, replacing smaller and more local workshops

• Immigrants from specific countries—and often even specific communities—often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods

  • From these foundations they facilitated even more immigration: after staking out a claim to some corner of American life, they wrote home and encouraged others to follow them → chain migration

• While cities boomed, rural worlds languished

  • Many long for a middle path between the cities and the country, with suburban communities beginning to define themselves on the outskirts of American cities

The New South and the Problem of Race

• Many white southern business and political leaders imagined a New South that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture

  • However, economically and socially, the “New South” would still be much like the old

• Emancipation unsettled the southern social order

• When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back

  • They lashed out, resulting in not only organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation

  • White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass “Jim Crow” laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities

  • Lynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism

    • Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot

    • Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators

  • White political violence continued to follow African American political participation and labor organization, however severely circumscribed

Gender, Religion, and Culture

• Secular knowledge-seeking and Gilded Age dollars increasingly muscled out the traditional role of religion

  • As time passed, American churches increasingly adapted themselves to the new industrial order

• Urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented new opportunities to challenge traditional gender and sexual norms

• Urbanization and immigration fueled anxieties that old social mores were being subverted and that old forms of social and moral policing were increasingly inadequate

• Worries about feminization caused men to worry about their own masculinity

  • To anxious observers, industrial capitalism was withering American manhood