The Gilded Age (end of the 19th century)
→ Spread of industry, the Robber Barons took advantage of the immigrants.
People could cross the country with the railroad system.
A lot of social changes: the working week went from 60 hours to 50 hours a week. People were looking for leisure activities: cinemas, sports, theaters, baseball, parks, radio etc… New fashions (with the sewing machine). People were becoming standardized.
Many questions arose about morality, about behavior.
→ What did it mean to be a good American? Someone who was hygienically clean. Public schools helped make Americans: they were free and all states passed laws to make schools compulsory. A lot of kids were speaking their native language at home but they learned English at school. At that time, the English language was the key to success in America, that’s what the government was promoting and what the people knew.
Universities like Harvard and Yale wouldn’t accept immigrants. A lot of new universities were built and the system of education was changed. It became accessible to women and to black men.
A lot of this was thanks to the donations of the Rubber Barons. Women’s colleges.
Universities for and by African Americans.
The US faced a lot of political and social changes. It led to politics that had a hands-off approach. A lot of big businessmen controlled a lot of politics.
During the Gilded Age, the Republicans controlled the Northern cities.
Democrats included the urban factory workers, immigrants, labors, southern planters, western farmers, the poor and underprivileged. They claimed to be for the common man, they said they would raise the farmers’ salaries and they also were proponents of using silver to control the currency instead of gold. They were against the blue laws (that prohibited certain behavior, like the drinking of alcohol on Sundays).
Politicians needed every single vote they could so they avoided taking strong stances on any topic because they didn’t want to offend anyone.
James Garfield was elected president but he was assassinated in 1881. Chester Arthur stepped in as President and made a lot of progress in performing the spoils system. He gave voters jobs.
Grover Cleveland was elected in 1885 (democrat).
Benjamin Harrison elected in 1889 (republican).
William McKinley elected in 1897.
America developed extremely rapidly in the last two decades of the 19th century. At that time 93% voted.
Many of the issues of the industrialization or poverty were not touched by politicians, it was too risky.
The 1890s began with an economic crisis because of investment and over speculation.
Grover Cleveland was elected in 1893 (democrat) before and after Harrison. He was faced with overseas countries that needed gold and silver backup. GB had a lot of economic problems and when British investors had problems in Britain, they went to the States; they wanted their gold.
It depleted the gold reserve in the US; it went to Britain.
The US was also spending a lot of money in pensions and on different construction projects. At the end of 1893, gold was dangerously low and many banks and businesses failed.
The industrial unemployment level had reached as much 25%. People were starving, even in the big cities like NY. It was a difficult time and this created a huge labor unrest → two problems dealing with nativism: movement to restrict immigration.
The rule farmers were working even harder. The industry ad the monopoly on railroad, shipping, steel, factories… Farmers were caught in a web of inflated prices. Even before the crises, a lot of farmers got together and created granges. These are similar with unions. There were radicals, reformers. They formed a group called the Populists. They were the working-class, the backbone of America. They were tired of having to go by business rules. They gained a lot of political plot.
(Mary Elizabeth Lease said: “What you farmers need is to raise less corn and more hell.”)
They had so many members that they made a lot of pressure on both political parties.
William McKinley 1896 (Republican): he tried to reform public business. His measures were successful, the country regained a little bit of stability and he was reelected in 1900.
The depression was thus memorable for the lessons it taught.
A lot of middle-class charitable workers realized that sober people can also succumb to a society’s economic depression and good people get in situations they can’t control. As the social work profession grew, its members spent less and less time preaching to the poor and more time investigating the reasons why people were poor: reorientation on how people thought about poverty.
There were also social transformations that changed the face of America. Education was the key to success. Government realized it was the 1st step to economic and social success.
By the 1900s, around 60% of American children were enrolled in free public schools. This is how they turned immigrants into Americans: this is the Americanization in teaching them with cleanliness thrift, patriotism and hard work. A good American was a patriot.
A lot of colleges were built for women and blacks. Some universities were forced to admit black men and women. They wanted to break free from a lot of Victorian codes of conduct. Women wanted the right to vote, equal pay and they wanted to own and control their own property. They also wanted access to higher quality jobs and they wanted to be protected from domestic violence. They did progress.
Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois were pillars in the black community. Booker T. Washington helped having access to education. WEB Dubois graduated from Harvard with PHD.
1890: 160 black Afrian Americans were attending US universities.
1900: over 600 thousand (or 6,000?) had graduated.
Even after the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, they were still discriminated. In Northern states, people were worried the impact the blacks would have.
They wanted to vote so they decided that voters should be landowners. They also charged a fee. A lot of people were not landowners. There was also a literacy test to prove they could write, which excluded a lot of African Americans, as well as whites. Grandfather clauses: if you had relatives who could vote before the Civil War, then you could vote.
Jim Crowe Laws were associated with the Southerners sates but they first appeared in Massachusetts in the 1830s: fear of sexual contact between black men and white women and the fear that things would change for white people. In order to keep blacks in their places, the terror of lynching was rampant.
→ Spread of industry, the Robber Barons took advantage of the immigrants.
People could cross the country with the railroad system.
A lot of social changes: the working week went from 60 hours to 50 hours a week. People were looking for leisure activities: cinemas, sports, theaters, baseball, parks, radio etc… New fashions (with the sewing machine). People were becoming standardized.
Many questions arose about morality, about behavior.
→ What did it mean to be a good American? Someone who was hygienically clean. Public schools helped make Americans: they were free and all states passed laws to make schools compulsory. A lot of kids were speaking their native language at home but they learned English at school. At that time, the English language was the key to success in America, that’s what the government was promoting and what the people knew.
Universities like Harvard and Yale wouldn’t accept immigrants. A lot of new universities were built and the system of education was changed. It became accessible to women and to black men.
A lot of this was thanks to the donations of the Rubber Barons. Women’s colleges.
Universities for and by African Americans.
The US faced a lot of political and social changes. It led to politics that had a hands-off approach. A lot of big businessmen controlled a lot of politics.
During the Gilded Age, the Republicans controlled the Northern cities.
Democrats included the urban factory workers, immigrants, labors, southern planters, western farmers, the poor and underprivileged. They claimed to be for the common man, they said they would raise the farmers’ salaries and they also were proponents of using silver to control the currency instead of gold. They were against the blue laws (that prohibited certain behavior, like the drinking of alcohol on Sundays).
Politicians needed every single vote they could so they avoided taking strong stances on any topic because they didn’t want to offend anyone.
James Garfield was elected president but he was assassinated in 1881. Chester Arthur stepped in as President and made a lot of progress in performing the spoils system. He gave voters jobs.
Grover Cleveland was elected in 1885 (democrat).
Benjamin Harrison elected in 1889 (republican).
William McKinley elected in 1897.
America developed extremely rapidly in the last two decades of the 19th century. At that time 93% voted.
Many of the issues of the industrialization or poverty were not touched by politicians, it was too risky.
The 1890s began with an economic crisis because of investment and over speculation.
Grover Cleveland was elected in 1893 (democrat) before and after Harrison. He was faced with overseas countries that needed gold and silver backup. GB had a lot of economic problems and when British investors had problems in Britain, they went to the States; they wanted their gold.
It depleted the gold reserve in the US; it went to Britain.
The US was also spending a lot of money in pensions and on different construction projects. At the end of 1893, gold was dangerously low and many banks and businesses failed.
The industrial unemployment level had reached as much 25%. People were starving, even in the big cities like NY. It was a difficult time and this created a huge labor unrest → two problems dealing with nativism: movement to restrict immigration.
The rule farmers were working even harder. The industry ad the monopoly on railroad, shipping, steel, factories… Farmers were caught in a web of inflated prices. Even before the crises, a lot of farmers got together and created granges. These are similar with unions. There were radicals, reformers. They formed a group called the Populists. They were the working-class, the backbone of America. They were tired of having to go by business rules. They gained a lot of political plot.
(Mary Elizabeth Lease said: “What you farmers need is to raise less corn and more hell.”)
They had so many members that they made a lot of pressure on both political parties.
William McKinley 1896 (Republican): he tried to reform public business. His measures were successful, the country regained a little bit of stability and he was reelected in 1900.
The depression was thus memorable for the lessons it taught.
A lot of middle-class charitable workers realized that sober people can also succumb to a society’s economic depression and good people get in situations they can’t control. As the social work profession grew, its members spent less and less time preaching to the poor and more time investigating the reasons why people were poor: reorientation on how people thought about poverty.
There were also social transformations that changed the face of America. Education was the key to success. Government realized it was the 1st step to economic and social success.
By the 1900s, around 60% of American children were enrolled in free public schools. This is how they turned immigrants into Americans: this is the Americanization in teaching them with cleanliness thrift, patriotism and hard work. A good American was a patriot.
A lot of colleges were built for women and blacks. Some universities were forced to admit black men and women. They wanted to break free from a lot of Victorian codes of conduct. Women wanted the right to vote, equal pay and they wanted to own and control their own property. They also wanted access to higher quality jobs and they wanted to be protected from domestic violence. They did progress.
Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois were pillars in the black community. Booker T. Washington helped having access to education. WEB Dubois graduated from Harvard with PHD.
1890: 160 black Afrian Americans were attending US universities.
1900: over 600 thousand (or 6,000?) had graduated.
Even after the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, they were still discriminated. In Northern states, people were worried the impact the blacks would have.
They wanted to vote so they decided that voters should be landowners. They also charged a fee. A lot of people were not landowners. There was also a literacy test to prove they could write, which excluded a lot of African Americans, as well as whites. Grandfather clauses: if you had relatives who could vote before the Civil War, then you could vote.
Jim Crowe Laws were associated with the Southerners sates but they first appeared in Massachusetts in the 1830s: fear of sexual contact between black men and white women and the fear that things would change for white people. In order to keep blacks in their places, the terror of lynching was rampant.
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