No matter what time period of history you consider, the perspectives of the people living through that time vary significantly depending on such factors as social class, ethnicity, religion and culture. If you think about life in ancient Rome during the early days of the Empire, life was fairly pleasant for those in the wealthier classes. There was an advanced system of plumbing that served public baths and homes, set up through the aqueducts; if you were among the wealthy, you likely had a servant or two around the house to cook for you and keep things clean. However, if you were in the servant or slave class, you spent your entire life beholden to another person for your very subsistence. If you had been sold into service as a gladiator, your perspective would still be different, as your life would consist of training for your next match and then entering the ring, serving in the grist mill that was the cast of entertainers who would delight the fans in the Colosseum. The Gilded Age in American history, though, is a time period in which the differences in perspective among people in different ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic groups would have been among the widest in all of human history.
The Gilded Age is traditionally dated between 1877 and 1930. 1877 saw the end of one of the most turbulent social changes in human history, as all of the former slaves who had been living in Southern states received their freedom – officially in 1863, at the Emancipation Proclamation, but effectively in 1865, when the Confederacy surrendered to bring the Civil War to a close. All of a sudden, all of the former slaves went from being pieces of property to people in the eyes of the law – and most importantly, registered voters. This led to blacks winning local and statewide offices; the white establishment in the former Confederacy was outraged, and so when the Republican Party showed a willingness to bring this period of time known as Reconstruction to an end in exchange for some electoral votes, the former Confederate states jumped on board, sending Rutherford B. Hayes into the Oval Office for one largely forgettable term as President and sending the former slaves into the Kafkaesque reality known as the Jim Crow Era. Laws sprang up all over the South to take away as many of the new civil rights as possible. The fact that “many Yankees strongly believed that they were fighting a war to save the Union, not to free the ‘cursed Nigger’” (“View from the Bottom Rail,” p. 183) meant that the former slaves often found little sympathy in the North as well. Laws created separate school systems for whites and blacks; allowed hotel owners and restaurateurs to refuse service on whatever basis they deemed fit (which all too frequently centered on race); allowed the creation of poll taxes, designed to keep people who were too poor (or too black) from exercising their newfound right to vote; allowed the use of virtually impossible “literacy tests” to serve as additional stumbling blocks between people and the voting booth. A black man who gave a white woman a look that could even be considered remotely friendly could be accused of lechery; blacks were never seated on juries on the former south, so no black defendant received a trial by a jury of his peers; the list of these laws goes on and on. The so-called “freedmen” had a long time to wait before they could feel like their existence was truly free.
At the very top of the ladder, life was a completely different experience. The nineteenth century represented a radical degree of opportunity for upward mobility that has seen few peers, before or since. In the year 1800, the United States was almost completely agricultural in terms of economic activity. While it was possible to amass land over time, the exponential growth of wealth was still some time off. It was the invention of the steam engine, though, that would change the world economically. People who could string capital together could form corporations that took advantage of a wealth of new inventions. Steam engines were the driving force behind the spindles in textile mills, the needles in sewing machines. To produce steam, factory owners needed vast amounts of coal. When electricity came into vogue as a power source during the late 1800s, a need for copper appeared as well, to provide the wiring for this new miracle. In 1880, the copper industry produced 30,000 tons; in 1910, it produced 500,000 tons (Zinn, course reading). But the money that poured in to the coffers of the owners of these homes was astronomical in nature. The fortunes of such families as the Carnegies and the Mellons grew during this time period, creating financial principalities that would hold powerful sway during the twentieth century. This was a time of extreme luxury, as these families built mansions, had vacation homes, had cadres of servants.
The former slaves were far from the only people suffering from considerable indignity during the Gilded Age, though. Both before but also after the erection of the Statue of Liberty, many people in Europe saw the United States as a land of limitless opportunity. The notion known then as the American Dream was all about the fact that people who worked hard could prosper and even become wealthy in what, even in the late 1800s, was still considered a very New World. The opening of factories en masse in cities like Chicago served as a magnet for hordes of immigrants from other countries who did not speak English but had the physical strength to work in such settings as the meat packinghouses and other factories. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to describe the horrors that these families encountered when they arrived: swindlers signing them up for usurious mortgages that they would not be able to afford; foremen firing workingmen who get injured on the job; business owners using machinery that they know to be dangerous; immigrant laborers having too much pride to complain to any sort of official authority about the situation in which they lived; meat factory owners churning out food that they know to be unsafe for public consumption because of the incredible amount of waste products, garbage and toxins included in the process.
All in all, the Gilded Age was a time that members of different parts of society would remember in radically different ways. One of the most evocative symbols of the difference would be the cruise ship Titanic. The James Cameron film showed the vast differences between steerage conditions, with people crammed into tiny rooms and having to carry out their social activities below deck, in steamy, smoky spaces, and people whose cabins were closer to the main deck, who strode about in finery and ate from fine china at each meal. When the ship began to sink, it was the wealthy who found their way to the lifeboats first, while many of those in steerage were simply trapped below decks like so many drowned rats. In a way, that image is a microcosm for the social outcomes for many of the different classes in the economic maelstrom that would bring the Gilded Age to a crashing halt – the Great Depression.
Works Cited
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Dover Thrift Edition, c2001.
“The View from the Bottom Rail.” Course reading.
Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Kate Winslet, Leonardo di Caprio, Billy Zane. Twentieth
Century Fox Film Corporation, 1997.
Zinn, Howard. History is a Weapon. Course reading.
