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Essay on
The Gilded Age" by Twain and Warner
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain for its shallowness and corruption in both American society and politics. The most consuming governmental issues at the national level were the tariff, currency, civil-service reform, and government regulation of railroads, but the prevailing sentiment in Washington was to run a limited, laissez-faire government that would foster economic growth. Thus, most actual important political activity occurred at the local level, especially in cities, where bosses built great patronage machines and were opposed by middle-class reformers, many of them women who tied their political efforts to crusades for social reform and women's suffrage. The federal government's hands-off attitude toward the problems of industrialization and urbanization meshed well with common social theories of the day, such as social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth. The 1890s, however, saw the federal government become more responsive to the nation's needs, and the decade's showdown over silver helped to reshape American politics for the twentieth century.
The era in American history from the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) to the turn of the century is known as the "Gilded Age". The name was given to the period by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who poked fun at the period for its rampant corruption. Although perhaps the least popularly known of all eras of American history, the Gilded Age was extremely important in the formation of modern America. It was a time of dynamic change in various areas, including politics, business, labor unions, race relations, intellectual history, the role of women, foreign affairs, technology, etc. These changes were linked in various ways, but it is difficult to present them as part of a single cohesive narrative.
During the Gilded Age, large, national corporations became the dominant fact of the business world. The rise of the modern corporation....
