By SUSAN KURNIT DeWitt Clinton High School
The time is the latter half of the 19th century. The North had won the Civil War and America was rapidly changing. We were moving from a farming nation to a manufacturing nation. It was like a chain reaction. One invention after another transformed America from hand power to machine power. This transformation was known as the Industrial Revolution. Machines not only increased manufacturing output, but they increased agricultural output as well, making it possible for fewer farmers to produce more food. The government was offering cheap land to farm in the western frontier. However that didn�t stop the booming industrial revolution. Manpower for the machines came by boat from Europe. Immigration increased from 2.3 million in the 1860�s to 8.8 million in the 1900�s. The Republican Party controlled the presidency from 1861 to 1885. Their policies were clearly in favor of promoting the Industrial Revolution by raising tariffs to protect our manufactured goods and by supporting a transcontinental railroad, and river and harbor improvements, all of which would help manufacturing by making it easier to transport finished goods to other parts of the country and other parts of the world.
As industry grew, a need arose for increased capital to keep building mills, factories and railroads. This gave birth to new forms of businesses. Very often these new business organizations wanted to eliminate competition and dominate a particular niche of the economy. Monopolies, conglomerates, trusts, and holding companies were various ways of organizing businesses in their attempts to control a particular industry. Usually at the helm of these giants were pioneers in their fields. They took chances by investing large sums of money in these new business ventures in the hopes of making enormous profits. These men were known as entrepreneurs. Very often their enormous wealth came at the expense of others. This period was known as the �Gilded Age�, a term coined by Mark Twain to describe a period when society looked rich and prosperous but if you went beneath the surface, many problems existed. The amount of millionaires in the country increased greatly during this period, but so did the gap between the rich and the poor. The rich lived better than ever while urban workers suffered from unsanitary and crowded living conditions as well as dangerous workplaces. While these entrepreneurs accumulated great personal fortunes they were also philanthropists. They donated huge sums of money to charities.
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The Gilded Age
More Information on the Golden Age of Industry