Am I supposed to submit this here? I'm so confused Mr. Beller please check here
"If
you put a thin layer of gold on a pile of dog crap, it's still dog crap."
So says esteemed American historian David Beller, and it's hard to deny the
profound wisdom of his statement. He was, of course, referring to America's
"Gilded Age," or the post-Reconstruction years from the 1870s to the
1900s. They were years of inequality and reform, of innovation and expansion,
of change and of chaos.
Following
the Civil War, the Johnson, Grant, and Hayes administrations attempted to both
restore and reform the war-torn Southern states as they prepared to rejoin the
Union. These conflicting goals met with varying degrees of success and
fundamentally changed the region's economy, government, and social structure. By
the time President Hayes withdrew the last Federal troops from the South in 1877,
Reconstruction had given way to a larger and arguably even more significant era
of change: the Gilded Age.
Whereas
Reconstruction was the struggle of one region to reintegrate itself into the
post-Civil War United States, the Gilded Age changed the character of the
entire country. New technologies like the Alexander Graham Bell's telegraph and
the improvement of existing ones like the railroad brought the country together
like never before. Industry boomed, and people from all walks of life flocked
to cities to write their own chapters in America's economic history. As the
states became increasingly interconnected, their populations and economies grew
at an astounding rate. Immigrants poured in from all over Europe, changing the
ethnic and social landscapes of the states in which they settled.
Of
course, population structure was not the only thing drastically changed during
this period. From educational reform to civil rights crusades and everything in
between, the Gilded Age is known as an age of sweeping changes to nearly every
aspect of American life. America began to take its place in the world as a true
economic and military power even as it struggled with the problems of its own
success. In the words of English writer Sean Dennis Cashman, “Society was
obsessed with invention, industrialization, incorporation, immigration, and,
later, imperialism. It was indulgent of commercial speculation, social
ostentation, and political prevarication but was indifferent to the special
needs of immigrants and Indians and intolerant of African-Americans, labor
unions, and political dissidents.”[1]
The
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution legally guaranteed the
same basic rights to all citizens, regardless of race. Yet as the cannonfire
from Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia still echoed, Nathan Bedford Forrest's
Ku Klux Klan donned white hoods and rode through the South in the name of white
supremacy. Though technically victorious in their fight for equality, civil
rights advocates realized just how much work they still had ahead of them after
the nightmare of Reconstruction.
By
all accounts, life during and after the Gilded Age was better than life before it
for the overwhelming majority of African-Americans. No longer bound by slavery,
many blacks were able to start new lives on their own farms or in the
ever-growing cities of the North. More careers than ever before were opened up
to African-Americans; some, like former slave Frederick Douglass, entered into
the world of politics, serving the United States in a variety of roles from mayor
to foreign ambassador. In 1872, blacks everywhere participated in their first
Presidential election, helping the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant to an easy
victory. Literacy rates skyrocketed under John F. Slater's educational reforms,
and the black population doubled as a result of an exponentially higher quality
of life across the board.
For
every two steps forward, however, America took one step back away from true
racial equality. With legal slavery abolished, whites turned to tenant farming
and sharecropping as methods of turning blacks into "wage slaves." Thousands
of men and women across the South remained bound to white masters, unable to
pay their way out of the debt incurred by these practices. African American
politicians, meanwhile, were only able to gain support in areas with a high
proportion of black voters. Voting rights posed another major concern for
African-Americans. The Fifteenth Amendment secured for men of all races the
right to vote, but it was unable to guarantee whether or not this right was
actually a reality. The Amendment was frequently
circumvented through stringent voting requirements and unreasonably difficult
qualification tests which made it nearly impossible for many blacks to vote
while allowing whites to exercise the same privileges they had always enjoyed.
It
is telling that organizations like the White League outlasted the Freedmen's
Bureau. Violence against blacks did not end with the death of the notorious Ku
Klux Klan, with blood being shed in such places as Colfax, Louisiana, where
members of the League "opened fire on [a group of] defenseless negroes"
before declaring that "we have accomplished what we came to do... Get on
your horses and let's go."[2] Dreams
of racial harmony were further dashed by the landmark court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized the
creation of "separate but equal" public facilities for blacks and
whites. The Jim Crow laws made the very idea of equality unattainable. Despite the
indisputable progress made towards the creation of a unified American people,
the Gilded Age highlighted the differences between races, not the similarities.
The obstacles faced by women during
the Gilded Age, though nowhere near as physically threatening as those faced by
African-Americans during the same period, were significant. They had many of
the same goals: securing the right to vote, gaining equal legal rights, and
establishing legitimacy areas traditionally dominated by white men (i.e. politics,
academics, art and literature). Interestingly, some of the most notable
proponents of black rights in the late Reconstruction era were women. Unable to
voice their concerns at the ballot box, women like Sojourner Truth and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton became fierce advocates for the equal treatment of
whites and blacks.
The
Seneca Falls Convention as early as 1848 proved that women possessed both the
capability to organize themselves into a movement and a desire for increased
autonomy in American society. They did not gain suffrage until the Nineteenth
Amendment was ratified in 1920 (over fifty years after blacks were given the
right to vote) but were still able to make their own contributions to American
society as they moved towards equality. They were especially captivated by the
Gilded Age emphasis on learning, using education as a means of empowerment.
Some even attended and graduated from major universities and graduate schools; many
more, however, fell victim to the common belief that secondary education was
for men and were lucky to even attend inferior "women's colleges."
Mainly
as a response to this disparity in education, women formed groups like the
Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Similar social clubs gave women a
means of bettering their own lives as well as the lives of those around them.
Women's suffrage, the prohibition of alcohol, the war against poverty, and
educational reform are just some of the issues the Union campaigned for during
this era. As mentioned previously, these clubs also served to empower women,
who were able to redefine their roles in American society. Renowned poet Emily
Dickinson and activist Ida B. Wells are just two of these "new women"
born of Gilded Age spirit. Jane Addams, founder of the much-celebrated Hull
House for Chicago's poor, retrospectively summarized her own thoughts regarding
women's new roles in industrial America, saying that "as society grows
more complicated it, is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of
responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to
preserve the home in its entirety."[3]
Advancements
in industrial technology created a need for labor that women were happy to
meet. Women accounted for nearly one in six workers by the turn of the century,
a remarkable sign of the impact industry had on everyday life within America.
It is important to note, however, that women still faced discrimination in the
workplace. They were often given undesirable factory jobs or limited to the
same jobs they had always worked, almost always being paid less than men doing
the same work.
Conventional
wisdom held that a woman's place was in the home. As written by Stacey A. Cordery,
"she was the model wife and mother, and her highest calling was to bear
and raise children." By the late 19th century, she had grown restless.
Rejecting the notion that her role was confined within the family, she pursued
higher learning and social reform. The woman of the Gilded Age, though still
considered inferior to her husband or her brother, was the first American woman
to fundamentally change the world around her.
It is perhaps one of the most
pleasant coincidences in American history that the Statue of Liberty was dedicated
as the rate of American immigration truly began to soar. Immigrants from countless
European nations were welcomed to their new home by the triumphant outstretched
arm of Lady Liberty in New York's harbor. A "new generation" of
American immigrants arose, comprised of Jews, Italians, Croats, Slovaks,
Greeks, Poles. They brought with them their cultures, their religions, and their
prejudices. As their numbers grew, they changed the faces of their respective
communities, creating "Little Italys" and "Chinatowns" in
major cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
Like the English, Irish, and Germans
before them, these new immigrants came to the United States primarily in search
of work. Many arrived onto American shores in search of freedom only to be
welcomed into the dark, dangerous life of a factory worker. Their lives were
almost certainly better than the ones they had left behind, but many immigrants
still suffered from extreme poverty and malnourishment. It is impossible to
imagine just how difficult their lives would have been without the efforts of
urban crusaders like Jane Addams, whose aforementioned Hull House was an
invaluable resource to immigrants who made their home in Chicago.
Not quite as lucky were the Chinese
immigrants of this era. Largely brought to the United States as laborers for
the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese quite basically performed work that
was considered "below" white men. They served as a cheap and
effective source of labor, perhaps too
cheap and effective for America's liking. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act equated
Chinese immigrants with criminals, vagabonds, and other "defective
undesirables" as all were completely denied entry into America's golden
land of freedom. The so-called nativist movement certainly did not make life
any easier for any new immigrants during the Gilded Age, but it's hard to
dispute that the Chinese saw the worst of their abuses.
"America," wrote Jewish
immigrant playwright Israel Zangwill in The
Melting Pot," is God's crucible, the great melting pot, where all the
races of Europe are melting and re-forming! ... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen
and Englishmen, Jews and Russians- into the Crucible with you all! God is
making the American!"[4] His
words are perhaps truer than he realized as he wrote them. As these immigrants
were thrown into the fire that was Gilded Age America, some were burned and
some were deemed unpleasant to taste, but still others became key ingredients
in the pièce de résistance known as the United States.
For all its advancements, its
innovations, and its growth, the Gilded Age revealed several problems in the
life of the average American. The African was forced to confront the harsh
reality that legal equality and functional equality were by no means
interchangeable. The woman got her first taste of independence but always fell
agonizingly short of achieving equality. Lastly, the immigrant escaped the
hardships of his old home only to meet a whole new array of challenges in his
new urban home. Each advancement was met with an equally significant challenge,
preventing truly positive growth during the period. The question remains, were
the hardships endured by Gilded Age-era Americans really worth the benefits
they produced? Or were they simply a "pile of gold-plated dog crap?"
