Gilded Age Dbq

The Gilded Age was a time in America from around the 1870’s to about 1900. It is regarded as this due to it’s known mediocrity from a political standpoint. Known for a major economic crisis, inequality between men and women, and the awful segregation put forth by the Jim Crow Laws. Referring to this stage in the life of America as the Gilded Age, it was more disappointing than anything else. It displayed how the country seemed perfect at the surface, but deep down, the country was an atrocity full of corruption. An era in the United States of America that shows such great promise, hope, and opportunity, but in turn, fell flat from expectations. The Gilded Age was ultimately thought of as an era filled with “Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators,

The ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson said that all black and white people will be separate but equal, but in reality, this was not the case ("Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)"). Whites were of course given the most elaborate and fancy equipment when in public; from schools to water fountains to bathrooms, whites were living in complete luxury compared to the increasingly struggling blacks of the time. A major flaw with the idea of segregation, was the issue of schooling. Whites were given the better schools with better teachers, while blacks had schools that were very poor and not the best teachers. Because of this, African-Americans were again being penalized just because of their race, truly showing how unequal their lives really were. Along with the segregation, blacks were subject to poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses which basically took away their rights to vote. ("Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson"). Plessy v. Ferguson was supposed to be a case in which the blacks finally secured equality to whites. Instead of this, it seemed to have taken a step back into a horrible time in which everything was separate, but nothing was

The panic of 1893 was the all time low of this time period. In the 1890’s the railroad business had reached an all time high, the onset of steel and iron, the need for oil to run these trains. All businesses were intertwined with the railroads, but soon the industry began to slow. By the end of 1893, seventy-four railroads, six hundred banks, and fifteen-thousand businesses began to shut down. With the massive shut down of businesses, unemployment sky-rocketed to nearly twenty-five percent. This depression was the worst ever in American history, up until the 1930’s. As president, Grover Cleveland did not do as much as was expected. He saw it as the business cycle, so he thought that politicians should not do anything to effect it, as it would bounce back to normal in due time. One major topic was the gold reserve dipping dangerously low. In came the heroics of J.P. Morgan who basically bailed out the government by injecting his own money into their reserve. Without these heroics, the possibilities would be endless to say what would have