America in the Gilded Age

“What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.”
-- Mark Twain (1871)


America in the Gilded Age

By Unknown
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The last three decades of the 19th century were marked by relentless capitalism, widespread corruption, vulgar tastes, and ostentatious displays of wealth. American know-how seemed able to overcome any obstacle; industrial expansion brought prosperity for many and unimaginable wealth for a few. Yet terrible poverty held most Americans firmly in its grasp.

During the “Gilded Age,” every man was a potential Andrew Carnegie, and Americans who achieved wealth celebrated it as never before. In New York, the opera, the theatre, and lavish parties consumed the ruling class’ leisure hours. Sherry’s Restaurant hosted formal horseback dinners for the New York Riding Club. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish once threw a dinner party to honor her dog who arrived sporting a $15,000 diamond collar.

While the rich wore diamonds, many wore rags. In 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families earned less than $1200 per year; of this group, the average annual income was $380, well below the poverty line. Rural Americans and new immigrants crowded into urban areas. Tenements spread across city landscapes, teeming with crime and filth. Americans had sewing machines, phonographs, skyscrapers, and even electric lights, yet most people labored in the shadow of poverty.

Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world, despaired of the era’s materialism. He wrote that wealthy should “set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display of extravagance.” Yet Carnegie owned a castle and 40,000 acres in Scotland and a huge mansion on Fifth Avenue, known as Millionaire’s Row. Even so, this lifestyle seemed modest compared to that of his peers.

To those who worked in Carnegie’s mills and in the nation’s factories and sweatshops, the lives of the millionaires seemed immodest indeed. An economist in 1879 noted “a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.” Violent strikes and riots wracked the nation through the turn of the century. The middle class whispered fearfully of “carnivals of revenge.”

For immediate relief, the urban poor often turned to political machines. During the first years of the Gilded Age, Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall provided more services to the poor than any city government before it, although far more money went into Tweed’s own pocket. Corruption extended to the highest levels of government. During Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, the president and his cabinet were implicated in the Credit Mobilier, the Gold Conspiracy, the Whiskey Ring, and the notorious Salary Grab.

Europeans were aghast. America may have had money and factories, they felt, but it lacked sophistication. When French prime minister Georges Clemenceau visited, he said the nation had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence—without achieving any civilization between the two.

The frustrations of Gilded Age workers transformed the labor movement into a vigorous, if often violent, force. Workers saw men like Andrew Carnegie getting fabulously rich, and raged at being left behind. With their own labor the only available bargaining chip, workers frequently went on strike. The 1880’s witnessed almost ten thousand strikes and lockouts; close to 700,000 workers struck in 1886 alone.

The results were often explosive-none more than the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. When the B&O Railroad cut wages, workers staged spontaneous strikes, which spread nationwide. In Baltimore, the state militia fired on strikers, leaving 11 dead and 40 wounded. In Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie’s mentor, Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, urged that strikers be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” In Philadelphia, strikers battled local militia, burning much of the downtown area before the federal troops intervened. The wage reductions remained in place, and the War Department created the national guard to put down future disturbances.

Industrialists took a harder line against unions, but the labor movement grew. In 1877, three national unions existed; in 1880 there were eighteen. For many Americans, unionization fed a fear that “barbarians” had invaded the nation. During a Cleveland steel strike, violent confrontations led local newspapers to attack the “un-American” Polish workers as “Ignorant and degraded whelps,” “Foreign devils,” and “Communistic scoundrels [who] revel in robberies, bloodshed, and arson.”

In 1886, a national strike called for changing the standard workday from 12-hours to eight. At 12,000 companies nationwide, 340,000 workers stopped work. In Chicago police were trying to break up a large labor meeting in Haymarket Square, when a bomb exploded without warning, killing a police officer. Police fired into the crowd, killing one and wounding many more. As a result of the riot, four labor organizers were hanged.

The hangings demoralized the national labor movement and energized management. By 1890, Knights of Labor membership had plummeted by ninety percent. The 1892 battle at Carnegie’s Homestead mill became a model for stamping out strikes: hold firm and call in government troops for support.

The brutal depression of 1893-94 triggered some of the worst labor conflicts in the country’s history, including the strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. When George Pullman slashed wages and hiked rents in his company town, a national strike and boycott was called on all railways carrying Pullman cars. Railroad traffic ground to a halt as 260,000 workers struck, and battles with state and federal troops broke out in 26 states. The strike ultimately failed, its leaders imprisoned and many strikers blacklisted.

The labor movement lay in shambles, and would not rise again for nearly fifty years. Although workers would find new strength in the next century, they would never again pose the same broad challenge to the claims of capital.