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Thursday, February 12, 2015

Gilded Age Essay I guess

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?"



[1] Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: Third Edition (New York: NYU Press, 1993)
[2] Manie White Johnson, The Colfax Riot of April, 1873 (circa 1920)
[3] Jane Addams, Why Women Should Vote (Ladies' Home Journal, 1910)
[4] Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908)

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