Monopolies During The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was a period of time in the United States where industrialization was advancing at an alarming rate and the economy was expanding quickly. However, through all of this success many people were in poverty and the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. The monopolies were the main cause of the Gilded Age and the problems that came along with it. Jacob Riis’s views were biased to an extent, because he is a product of his time and blamed the immigrants for most of the problems during the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age occurred from 1870 to 1900 and the meaning behind the name was that the country was “gilded,” that on the outside the United States looks good, just like a gilded necklace with a gold coating, but, under the coating

were below the poverty line and the living conditions were awful. The U.S. population was increasing rapidly nationwide. People were fleeing their country and coming to the U.S. more so Italians. Immigration was not the main reason for the terrible condition the U.S. was in, but it did not help either. Steamship lines promoted immigration because it was business for them and brought them money. Many of the Germans and Scandinavians that immigrated here became farmers and this was a bad thing for American farmers because immigrants work for cheaper, and that will put more out of jobs causing the americans to have more competition which caused them in the end to make even less money than before. Andrew Carnegie is a major contributor to the Gilded Age. When

Women also were able to work, yet they too had awful job conditions. During this time to make living conditions even worse in New York they would throw waste in the streets, throw the deceased in the the streets, and dump garbage in the Hudson river leading to health and economic problems. Unemployment skyrocketed at this time as well. Jacob Riis describes the housing conditions as stuffy and deathly. He also stated the dimensions of the rooms saying “The living rooms are but 10 x 12 feet; the bedrooms 6 x 7 feet” If these measurements are correct this is not even enough room for one person, yet families live in these rooms, which is inhumane because there are no windows in these apartments and tenants die from illnesses and diseases from the poor living conditions. “The tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general morality of the city up front 1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855” The landlords of these apartments overcharged the tenants who lived there and took advantage of the immigrants who lived in the apartments. Jacob Riis may have described the living conditions of the Gilded Age but he was also still a product of his time and was a racist. The way he described the problems was as if all this was happening because the Italians, Chinese, African Americans and other