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The Roaring 20's has a lot of things that happened during the decade.  The 20's saw jazz and several new dances that were introduced. Many people began to listen to the radio. It was also a time that liquor was illegal and gangsters became popular. It was a time that dominated by the Republican Party. Many small businesses saw their end while bigger businesses started to boom. Several big business that took off are the automotive , aviation and electronic businesses. It also helped that many Americans started to use credit as a way to buy different things. There are several notable celebrities from this era, including Charles Lindberg, Charlie Chaplin, and Babe Ruth. The roaring 20's also saw one of the biggest economic crisis's that the worlds has ever seen. The 20's was definetly a time to remember. (2020). Retrieved 5 October 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfOR1XCMf7A

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The Roaring 20's: Crash Course US History #32

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The 1920's was a time when children worked. During this time it was legal and was an accepted practice used in America. Many  families could not afford raising a family without having their children work and be compensated for the work.  Many of the children were forced to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions . Many children also did not attend school which led to uneducated adults. This made the poverty level sky rocket as the the adults were uneducated and were unable to get good wage paying jobs.  Many children were not paid good wages. This practice continued until 1938 when the Fair Standard Labor Act was enacted. This was used to protect and regulate child labor. Child Labor in the 1920's. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from

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The 1900 census estimated almost 2 million children worked in the mills, factories, mines, fields, and stores. The 1920's were a critical time for child labor. Child labor was a major factor for exports in the United States. Children worked in factories; they spun most of the cotton and made clothes. The real problems were the unsafe conditions, the fact that they only got paid half that the adults did, and the lack of care from others. At this
point in time, people were finally starting to realize the injustice of forcing children to work in horrible conditions. The government was reluctant to change the laws for child labor due to the great profit it gave, although later laws showed to prove them wrong ("Pitting Child Safety"; "Keating Owen Child Labor Act").

The first major law against child labor was the Keating Owen Act of 1916, based on Senator Albert J. Beveridge's proposal from 1906. Senator Beveridge proposed a paper trying to stop child labor in 1906, but his idea was rejected. The Keating-Owen Act prohibited sales of any product from any factory, shop, or cannery that had workers under 14. The Keating-Owen Act also prohibited sales from any mine with workers under 16. Although the law was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson, the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court said that the law overstepped the government's to regulate interstate commerce. Another Child Labor Law was passed in 1918 as part of the Revenue Act of 1919; it was also called the Child Labor Tax Law. Later this law was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and was rejected ("Keating Owen Child Labor Act").

A constitutional amendment was soon proposed to give Congress the power to regulate child labor, although the progress of this amendment was stopped in 1920 by a campaign to discredit it. Federal protection of children was not achieved until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act. This Act was also questioned by the Supreme Court but the outcome was victorious, this act is still in force today ("Keating Owen Child Labor Act").

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The 1900 census estimated almost 2 million children worked in the mills, factories, mines, fields, and stores. The 1920's were a critical time for child labor. Child labor was a major factor for exports in the United States. Children worked in factories; they spun most of the cotton and made clothes.

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The living conditions during the gilded age were horrible. Many families lived in overcrowded tenements  or apartments. During this time not only was there overcrowding, but also trash all over the streets and most homes were unsanitary with poor drinking water and sewage issues. Many people did not receive medical care and died from diseases that could have been treated. Many people during this age did not make very good wages and lived below poverty level. History.com Editors. (2018, February 13). Gilded Age. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from

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Transcontinental Railroad

Before the Civil War, rail travel was dangerous and difficult, but after the war, George Westinghouse invented the air brake, which made braking systems more dependable and safe.

Soon, the development of Pullman sleeping cars and dining cars made rail travel comfortable and more enjoyable for passengers. It wasn't long before trains overtook other forms of long-distance travel such as the stagecoach and riding horseback.

In 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and led to rapid settlement of the western United States. It also made it much easier to transport goods over long distances from one part of the country to another.

This enormous railroad expansion resulted in rail companies and their executives receiving lavish amounts of money and land-up to 200 million acres, by some estimates-from the United States government. In many cases, politicians cut shady backroom deals and helped create railroad and shipping tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. Meanwhile, thousands of African American-many of them former slaves-were hired as Pullman porters and paid a pittance to cater to riders' every need.

Robber Barons

Railroad tycoons were just one of many types of so-called robber barons that emerged in the Gilded Age.

These men used union busting, fraud, intimidation, violence and their extensive political connections to gain an advantage over any competitors. Robber barons were relentless in their efforts to amass wealth while exploiting workers and ignoring standard business rules-and in many cases, the law itself.

They soon accumulated vast amounts of money and dominated every major industry including the railroad, oil, banking, timber, sugar, liquor, meatpacking, steel, mining, tobacco and textile industries.

Some wealthy entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Frick are often referred to as robber barons but may not exactly fit the mold. While it's true they built huge monopolies, often by crushing any small business or competitor in their way, they were also generous philanthropists who didn't always rely on political ploys to build their empires.

Some tried to improve life for their employees, donated millions to charities and nonprofits and supported their communities by providing funding for everything from libraries and hospitals to universities, public parks and zoos.

Industrial Revolution

The Gilded Age was in many ways the culmination of the Industrial Revolution, when America and much of Europe shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial one.

Millions of immigrants and struggling farmers arrived in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Chicago, looking for work and hastening the urbanization of America. By 1900, about 40 percent of Americans lived in major cities.

Most cities were unprepared for rapid population growth. Housing was limited, and tenements and slums sprung up nationwide. Heating, lighting, sanitation and medical care were poor or nonexistent, and millions died from preventable disease.

Many immigrants were unskilled and willing to work long hours for little pay. Gilded Age plutocrats considered them the perfect employees for their sweatshops, where working conditions were dangerous and workers endured long periods of unemployment, wage cuts and no benefits.

Gilded Age Homes

Homes of the Gilded Age elite were nothing short of spectacular. The wealthy considered themselves America's royalty and settled for nothing less than estates worthy of that distinction. Some of America's most famous mansions were built during the Gilded Age such as:

Biltmore, located in Asheville, North Carolina, was the family estate of George and Edith Vanderbilt. Construction started on the 250-room chateau in 1889, prior to the couple's marriage, and continued for six years. The home had 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, a dairy, a horse barn and beautiful formal and informal gardens.

The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, is another Vanderbilt mansion. It was the summer home of railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Italian-Renaissance style home has 70 rooms, a stable and a carriage house.

Rosecliff, also in Newport, was completed in 1902. The oceanfront home was contracted by Theresa Fair Oelrichs and built to resemble the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Today, it's best known as the backdrop for movie scenes in The Great Gatsby, High Society, 27 Dresses and True Lies.

Whitehall, located in Palm Beach, Florida, was the neoclassical winter retreat of oil tycoon Henry Flagler and his wife Mary. The 100,000 square foot, 75-room mansion was completed in 1902 and is now a popular museum.

Income Inequality in the Gilded Age

The industrialists of the Gilded Age lived high on the hog, but most of the working class lived below poverty level. As time went on, the income inequality between wealthy and poor became more and more glaring.

While the wealthy lived in opulent homes, dined on succulent food and showered their children with gifts, the poor were crammed into filthy tenement apartments, struggled to put a loaf of bread on the table and often accompanied their children to a sweatshop each morning where they faced a 12-hour (or longer) workday.

Some moguls used Social Darwinism to justify the inequality between the classes. The theory presumes that the fittest humans are the most successful and poor people are destitute because they're weak and lack the skills to be prosperous.

Muckrakers

Muckrakers is a term used to describe reporters who exposed corruption among politicians and the elite. They used investigative journalism and the print revolution to dig through "the muck" of the Gilded Age and report scandal and injustice.

In 1890, reporter and photographer Jacob Riis brought the horrors of New York slum life to light in his book, How the Other Half Lives, prompting New York politicians to pass legislation to improve tenement conditions.

In 1902, McClure Magazine journalist Lincoln Steffens took on city corruption when he penned the article, "Tweed Days in St. Louis." The article, which is widely considered the first muckracking magazine article, exposed how city officials deceitfully made deals with crooked businessmen to maintain power.

Another journalist, Ida Tarbell, spent years investigating the underhanded rise of oilman John D. Rockefeller. Her 19-part series, also published in McClure in 1902, led to the breakup of Rockefeller's monopoly, the Standard Oil Company.

In 1906, activist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose horrendous working conditions in the meatpacking industry. The book and ensuing public outcry led to the passing of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Labor Unions Rise

It soon became obvious that the huge disparity between the wealthy and poor couldn't last, and the working class would have to organize to improve their working and living conditions. It was also obvious this wouldn't happen without some degree of violence.

Much of the violence, however, was between the workers themselves as they struggled to agree on what they were fighting for. Some simply wanted increased wages and a better working environment, while others also wanted to keep women, immigrants and blacks out of the workforce.

Although the first labor unions occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century, they gained momentum during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increased number of unskilled and unsatisfied factory workers.

Railroad Strikes

On July 16, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company announced a 10-percent pay cut on its railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the second cut in less than eight months.

Infuriated and fed up, the workers-with the support of the locals-announced they'd prevent all trains from leaving the roundhouse until their pay was restored.

The mayor, the police and even the National Guard couldn't stop the strike. It wasn't until Federal troops arrived that one train finally left the station.

The strike spread among other railroads, sparking violence across America between the working class and local and federal authorities. At its peak, over 100,000 railroad workers were on strike. Many of the Robber Barons feared an aggressive, all-out revolution against their way of life.

Instead, the strike-later known as the Great Upheaval-ended abruptly and was labeled a dismal failure. Yet it showed America's tycoons there was strength in numbers and that organized labor had the potential to shut down entire industries and inflict major economic and political damage.

As the working class continued to use strikes and boycotts to fight for higher wages and improved working conditions, their bosses staged lock-outs and brought in replacement workers known as scabs.

They also created blacklists to prevent active union workers from becoming employed elsewhere. Even so, the working class continued to unite and press their cause and often won at least some of their demands.

Gilded Age Cities

Innovations of the Gilded Age helped usher in modern America. Urbanization and technological creativity led to many engineering advances such as bridges and canals, elevators and skyscrapers, trolley lines and subways.

The invention of electricity brought illumination to homes and businesses and created an unprecedented, thriving night life. Art and literature flourished, and the rich filled their lavish homes with expensive works of art and elaborate décor.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the world a much smaller place for both individuals and businesses. Advances in sanitation and housing, and the availability of better quality food and material goods, improved quality of life for the middle class.

But while the middle and upper classes enjoyed the allure of city life, little changed for the poor. Most still faced horrific living conditions, high crime rates and a pitiable existence.

Many escaped their drudgery by watching a vaudeville show or a spectator sport such as boxing, baseball or football, all of which enjoyed a surge during the Gilded Age.

Women in the Gilded Age

Upper-class women of the Gilded Age have been compared to dolls on display dressed in resplendent finery. They flaunted their wealth and endeavored to improve their status in society while poor and middle-class women both envied and mimicked them.

Some wealthy Gilded Age women were much more than eye candy, though, and often traded domestic life for social activism and charitable work. They felt a new degree of empowerment and fought for equality, including the right to vote through women's suffrage groups.

Some created homes for destitute immigrants while others pushed a temperance agenda, believing the source of poverty and most family troubles was alcohol. Wealthy women philanthropists of the Gilded Age include:

Louise Whitfield Carnegie, wife of Andrew Carnegie, who created Carnegie Hall and donated to the Red Cross, the Y.W.C.A., and other charities.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who helped create hotels for women and solicited funds to create the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Margaret Olivia Sage, wife of Russell Sage, who after the death of her miserly husband gave away $45 million of her $75 million inheritance to support women's causes, educational institutions and the creation of the Russell Sage Foundation for Social Betterment, which directly helped poor people.

Many women during the Gilded Age sought higher education. Others postponed marriage and took jobs such as typists or telephone switchboard operators.

Thanks to a print revolution and the accessibility of newspapers, magazines and books, women became increasingly knowledgeable, cultured, well-informed and a political force to be reckoned with.

Jane Addams

Jane Addams is arguably the best-known philanthropist of the Gilded Age. In 1889, she and Ellen Gates Star established a secular settlement house in Chicago known as Hull-House.

The neighborhood was a melting pot of struggling immigrants, and Hull-House provided everything from midwife services and basic medical care to kindergarten, day care and housing for abused women. It also offered English and citizenship classes. Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Carrie Nation

Temperance leader Carrie Nation gained notoriety during the Gilded Age for smashing up saloons with a hatchet to bring attention to her sobriety agenda. She was also a strong voice for the suffrage movement.

Nation's belief that alcohol was the root of all evil was partially due to her difficult first marriage to an alcoholic, and her work with women and children displaced or abused by over-imbibing husbands.

Convinced God had instructed her to use whatever means necessary to close bars throughout Kansas, she was often beaten, mocked and jailed but ultimately helped pave the way for the 18th Amendment (prohibiting the sale of alcohol) and the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote).

Limits to Power

Many other pivotal events happened during the Gilded Age which changed America's course and culture. As muckrakers exposed corrupt robber barons and politicians, labor unions and reformist politicians enacted laws to limit their power.

The western frontier saw violent conflicts between white settlers and the United States Army against Native Americans. The Native Americans were eventually forced off their land and onto reservations with often disastrous results. In 1890, the western frontier was declared closed.

Populist Party

As drought and depression struck rural America, farmers in the west-who vilified railroad tycoons and wanted a political voice-organized and played a key role in forming the Populist Party.

The Populists had a democratic agenda that aimed to give power back to the people and paved the way for the progressive movement, which still fights to close the gap between the wealthy and poor and champion the needy and disenfranchised.

End of the Gilded Age

In 1893, both the overextended Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company failed, which set off an economic depression unlike any seen before in America.

Banks and other businesses folded, and the stock market plunged, leaving millions unemployed, homeless and hungry. In some states, unemployment rose to almost 50 percent.

The Panic of 1893 lasted four years and left lower and even middle-class Americans fed up with political corruption and social inequality. Their frustration gave rise to the Progressive Movement which took hold when President Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901.

Although Roosevelt supported corporate America, he also felt there should be federal controls in place to keep excessive corporate greed in check and prevent individuals from making obscene amounts of money off the backs of immigrants and the lower class.

Helped by the muckrackers and the White House, the Progressive Era ushered in many reforms that helped shift away power from robber barons, such as:

trust busting

labor reform

women's suffrage

birth control

formation of trade unions

increased conservation efforts

food and medicine regulations

tax reform

civil rights

election reform

fair labor standards

By 1916, America's cities were cleaner and healthier, factories safer, governments less corrupt and many people had better housing, working hours and wages. Fewer monopolies meant more people could pursue the American Dream and start their own businesses.

When America entered World War I in 1917, the Progressive Era and any remnants of the Gilded Age effectively ended as the country's focus shifted to the realities of war. Most robber barons and their families, however, remained wealthy for generations.

Even so, many bequeathed much of their wealth, land and homes to charity and historical societies. And progressives continued their mission to close the gap between the wealthy and poor and champion the needy and disenfranchised.

Sources

Chicago Workers During the Long Gilded Age. The Newberry.
Gilded Age Reform. University of Virginia.
The Doll House: Wealth and Women in the Gilded Age. Journeys Into the Past: An Online Journal of Miami University's History Department.
The Gilded Age. Scholastic.
About Jane Addams. Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Carrie A. Nation (1846-1911). The State Historical Society of Missouri: Historic Missourians.
Lincoln Steffens Exposes "Tweed Days in St. Louis." History Matters.
The Breakers. The Preservation Society of Newport County.
The Progressive Era (1890-1920). The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project.
Biltmore Estate History. Biltmore.
Margaret Olivia Sage. Philanthropy Roundtable.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Gilded Age describes the tumultuous years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century when America saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology and when greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth.

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Child Labor/Child Welfare. (2017, October 16). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/child-welfare/

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Tenements - Farms to Factories(Industrial Revolution WebQuest). (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://sites.google.com/a/ucps.k12.nc.us/farms-to-factories/resources-by-role

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Living in the Industrial Revolution: The Living Conditions of the Workers

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Child Labor in America: Industrial Revolution

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(2020). Retrieved 5 October 2020, from https://www.youtu

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O'Donnell, E. (2018, June 15). Are We Living in the Gilded Age 2.0 ? Retrieved October 05, 2020, from

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In a region filled with the palatial homes of the rich and famous, one mansion stands out. Measuring an astonishing 38,000 square feet (plus 17,000 more on the exterior), it was crafted with the finest and most expensive materials. The interior boasts 12 bedrooms, 21 bathrooms and three kitchens, plus six bars and a 40-seat theater. The whole thing comes pre-loaded with extensive, curated collections of fine art, vintage wine and classic cars.

Was this "The Breakers" built by the Vanderbilts in the 1890s in Newport, Rhode Island? Or maybe "The Biltmore" in Asheville, North Carolina? Actually, it's a new property in Bel Air, California-fittingly called "Billionaire"-that just went on sale this summer for a cool $250 million. But beware to any billionaire buyer thinking this would put them at the top of the real-estate heap: Another Bel Air mega-mansion is slated to go on sale later this summer-for twice the price.

Welcome to the Second Gilded Age, where the opulence is unapologetic and the ranks of the hoi polloi can be seen swelling outside the gates. Scores of books and articles have been published in recent years on the topic of a new Gilded Age. Many activists and politicians invoke the phrase because they see startling parallels with the first Gilded Age, the period from roughly 1870 to 1900 marked by increased poverty, rising inequality and growing concern about corporate influence in politics.

An Age of Enthusiasm and Anxiety

What are the parallels, really? A look at the original Gilded Age reveals it as an era marked, not unlike ours, by a powerful duality. It was both the best of times and the worst of times. It was an age of both enthusiasm and anxiety.

On the enthusiasm side of the ledger, nothing loomed larger than the booming industrial economy. Between 1860 and 1900, U.S. factory output soared from $1.9 billion to $13 billion, an increase of nearly 600 percent. By 1900 the U.S. boasted the most powerful industrial economy in the world. In recent decades, America has experienced a similar economic boom, albeit one interrupted by periodic recessions. (The same was true in the Gilded Age.)

Gilded Age enthusiasm was fueled not merely by the performance of the overall economy, but also by the new technologies it produced. The signature product of the late-19th century was steel, a material that transformed American life. Steel reshaped everything from transportation (the railroad) and architecture (skyscrapers) to medicine (surgical instruments) and consumer goods (pianos). The same holds true in recent decades, only this time the key transformative product has been the silicon chip-and the digital economy it powers.

Both eras have also produced a list of innovator corporate heads who have become household names. In the 1880s and '90s, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and William K. Vanderbilt topped the list. In the early 21st century, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk stand as titans.

But if the Gilded Age was characterized by great enthusiasm, it was likewise an age marked by intense anxiety. That's because many believed that beneath all the gold and glitter one found disturbing economic, social and political trends. This notion explains why Mark Twain dubbed the era the "Gilded Age." Like a piece of gilded jewelry, it looked beautiful on the outside. But beneath the thin veneer of gold lay cold black iron.

The Flip Side: Poverty and Inequality

Even as the nation's aggregate wealth grew, so too did the number of people mired in poverty. In New York City, America's largest and wealthiest city, two-thirds of its residents lived in cramped tenement apartments, many unfit for human habitation, while tens of thousands scrounged by in the streets. In 1890, muckraking social crusader Jacob A. Riis shone a light on the era's grinding poverty with his shocking exposé, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. It's brimming with photos of people crammed cheek-to-jowl in dark, cluttered, airless quarters.

The unsettling implication of all this poverty? That America was losing its republican character and becoming more like a European nation with a population of haves and have-nots locked into fixed classes. Poet Walt Whitman captured the wider economic anxiety in a speech he delivered in 1879. For more than 20 years Whitman had written poems brimming with optimistic paeans to America and its people ("I hear America singing"), but now the great bard was worried. "If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations...then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure." Note Whitman's reference to "surface successes." He was urging his audience to look beneath the gilding to see the threat facing the nation.

Another anxiety-inducing threat: growing wealth inequality. Never before had so few people accumulated such vast wealth in so short a time span. Industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and financiers like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould amassed stupendous fortunes. By 1890, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population owned 51 percent of all wealth. The top 12 percent owned an astounding 86 percent. The lower 44 percent of U.S. population-almost half the country-owned just 1.2 percent.

Consumption Run Amok

More than the mere possession of this wealth, it was the way the super rich used it that troubled many of their fellow Americans. To begin with, they spent in ways that violated long-standing republican values of modesty and virtue. Those values dictated that, unlike the aristocrats of Europe, one live well but without palatial mansions, fancy carriages or legions of servants.

All that changed in the Gilded Age as the wealthy competed with each other to see who could build the most opulent mansion, take the longest European tour and host the most expensive ball. The supreme example of the latter was the gala hosted by Alva Vanderbilt, wife of William K. Vanderbilt, in the spring of 1883 to celebrate the opening of the their new French-chateau-style Fifth Avenue mansion, brimming with stained glass, wood carvings, paintings and massive tapestries shipped in from Europe. More than 1,000 of New York's rich and famous attended the event. Their invitations were hand-delivered by servants in full livery.

It was a costume ball and tellingly, many attendees dressed as European royalty. One partygoer sported an ensemble complete with a taxidermied cat headpiece and a skirt embellished with cattails. Alva's sister-in-law paid tribute to Thomas Edison's newfangled invention, the lightbulb, wearing a House of Worth gown emblazoned with lightning bolts (now in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York) and carrying a torch powered by batteries hidden in the dress. As guests arrived to the mansion, surging crowds of lookey-loos had to be held back by police, like fans at a red-carpet premiere.

Moneybags Lord Over Politics

Perhaps more disturbing than all the conspicuous consumption-a term coined in the late Gilded Age by sociologist Thorstein Veblen-was the public's growing awareness that with great wealth came the power to bend democracy to their will. Industrialists used their influence to lobby lawmakers to adopt policies favorable to big business and hostile to organized labor.

One of the most famous political cartoons of the era, "The Bosses of the Senate," lampooned the trend. Appearing in Puck magazine in 1889, it showed U.S. senators being lorded over and intimidated by giant industrial monopolists shaped like moneybags. They've entered the Senate gallery through the door labeled Entrance for Monopolists, while in the background a People's Entrance is boarded shut. The message is clear: Big business had hijacked American democracy, shutting out and defying the will of the people. Stories abounded of big business controlling the political process at both the state and federal level. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Pennsylvania Railroad enjoyed so much power and influence in the 1870s and '80s that it had its own office in the state Capitol building. Its chief lobbyist was known as "the 51st Senator."

And when lobbying wasn't enough, Gilded Age industrialists turned to bribery and other forms of corruption, inspiring some of the most infamous political scandals in American history. The Crédit Mobilier scandal involved massively inflated contracts related to building the transcontinental railroad. In the Whiskey Ring scandal, politicians colluded with the liquor industry to avoid paying excise taxes. Republican Party power broker Mark Hanna, himself a millionaire, said in the 1890s: "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is."

Labor and Capital in Conflict

As industrialists consolidated their power, labor unrest began to surge. Between 1880 and 1900, American workers staged nearly 37,000 strikes-including some of the largest and most famous in U.S. history. These include the first nationwide railroad strikes, the Great Uprising of 1877 and the Pullman Strike of 1894, both of which saw more than 100 people killed in clashes with police, state militia and federal troops. Meanwhile, thousands of local strikes protested starvation wages, long hours and unsafe conditions.

These labor actions called into question the nation's foundational belief that in America everyone, no matter how lowly their origins, could achieve upward economic mobility. In many ways, the discontent of the American worker during the Gilded Age can be seen in the establishment of Labor Day. What started out as a small hybrid protest-celebration in New York City in 1882 quickly spread across the nation, becoming a federal holiday in 1894.

Contemporary Echoes of the Gilded Age

These Gilded Age pain points have many parallels in our time. Concern over rising wealth inequality has become a major political issue, as evidenced by the popularization of the term "the one percent" to describe the super rich. Concern is growing about the influence of corporate money in politics-especially in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down a federal law banning corporations and unions from spending money in federal elections. The recent wave of teachers' strikes suggests a possible uptick in labor rumblings.

And there are additional parallels worth noting. Anti-immigrant sentiment raged in the Gilded Age. It led to the enactment of several laws to restrict immigration-or at the very least to keep out those deemed "undesirable" because they were seen as racially inferior, criminally inclined, physically or mentally deficient-or likely to end up in the poorhouse. There was even concern about terrorism in the late-19th century, a threat associated with German anarchists and Irish nationalists. We see clear evidence, both in polling data and political rhetoric, of a similar level of anti-immigration sentiment in contemporary American society.

The late 19th century also saw voter-suppression efforts waged against African Americans in the South. Terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation to keep blacks away from the polls. When that effort failed to eliminate black voting, legal schemes like the poll tax and literacy tests emerged, which successfully reduced African-American voting by 90 percent in many parts of the South. In the North in the 1870s, lawmakers in New York state tried unsuccessfully to strip voting rights from poor urban whites-a majority of them Irish and Irish American. In recent years the adoption of voter ID laws, purge of voter rolls, and limitations on early voting and the number of polling sites-not to mention sophisticated gerrymandering schemes-have elicited accusations of voter suppression, some of which have been affirmed in federal court.

And then there's political polarization. The first Gilded Age was marked by intense partisanship, gridlock and presidential elections decided by razor-thin margins. Sound familiar? Two presidential contests in the Gilded Age saw the candidate who lost the popular vote win the election by virtue of the Electoral College, just as George W. Bush and Donald Trump did in 2000 and 2016, respectively.

But the belief that we live in a Second Gilded Age raises an intriguing question. The original Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era (1900-1920), a period marked by a vast array of reforms that alleviated poverty, increased workplace safety, improved public health and education, restrained big business, adopted an income tax, granted women the right to vote and made the political process more democratic. Is1 the United States poised for a Second Progressive Era? It's entirely possible, but as any good historian will tell you, history follows no script. Nothing is inevitable.
Edward T. O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross. Author of several books, including Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age, O'Donnell also the hosts the popular American-history podcast In The Past Lane. Follow him on Twitter @InThePastLane. History Reads features the work of prominent authors and historians.

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Are We Living in the Gilded Age 2.0 ? | HISTORY

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The first Gilded Age saw massive wealth inequalities, hyperpartisanship, virulent anti-immigrant sentiment and growing concern about money in politics. Sound familiar?