The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age The Second Revolution, or the “Gilded Age”, was a period of time between 1865-1896. Coined by Mark Twain, the term “Gilded Age” meant that the era had an extreme worship of wealth and that most people were haughty, shallow, and showed off their affluence just to demonstrate their high social class. Just from that definition, it is evident as to how different social classes were affected. While the First Industrial Revolution changed every single aspect of Americans’ life, the second took those original inventions and innovations and evolved them, some of which were railroads and the expansion of the market. Some men such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller took total control of their respective market and created an enormous

Rockefeller. Both men assimilated and combined other businesses into their own. Carnegie adopted vertical integration while Rockefeller employed horizontal integration. Vertical integration is the process of buying out businesses that are involved in each and every step of the making one single product. For example, if a company sold beef, they would buy businesses that worked the farms the cows grew up on, made feed, and so on. Horizontal integration is when one major company gains control of the smaller businesses that are manufacturing the same thing as the large company. Eventually, Rockefeller owned upwards of 90% of all of the oil companies in America. Both men transformed the way the economic market ran and forever changed the way companies accumulate

As aforementioned, the only group of people excluded from the Knights of Labor were the Chinese. Even more oppressed were the blacks and the Native Americans. The blacks were stuck in a cycle of slavery known as sharecropping while the natives were consistently and brutally expelled from their rightful land. In contrast to most immigrants’ and blacks’ rights, many natives were only allowed citizenship after behaving on reservations for twenty-five years; others only needed to be in America for three years to become citizens. Blacks were consistently denied their deserved voting rights due to reading tests. Some Social Darwinists believed that it was lawful and proper for all these injustices to occur because some nations had the right to command and control “lesser people”. Even some presidents of the time would not look into the issue and avoided talk about elevated levels of racism and nativism. Minorities and the inequality they saw everyday was extraordinarily jarring and still visible