thingsgugl.blogg.se - Andrew carnegie and the rise of big business sparknotes

Monopolies brought order and efficiency, and wealth allowed philanthropy.īut perhaps even more important, oppression itself inspired creative responses that helped to build modern America. For starters, even the harshest aspects of the period possessed their more positive elements. The Gilded Age has been often portrayed as one of those dark periods in American history-a period of greed and corruption, of brutal industrial competition and harsh exploitation of labor.īut buried beneath this one-dimensional portrait is a much more complex set of facts. What is The Gilded Age About and Why Should I Care? Any version of this tale that includes only the exploitation but not the dynamism-or vice versa-is missing half the story. The Gilded Age was a dynamic age of incredible economic opportunity, just as it was a harsh era of incredible economic exploitation.

Reformers decried the way urban politicians turned corruption into a way of life-but those same crooked politicians also provided vital services to working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.

Many have also long resented the immense fortunes of personal wealth that a handful of big businessmen were able to acquire-but that wealth paid for a huge surge in philanthropy, building hundreds of libraries, schools, museums, and other public facilities still enjoyed by the American people even today.

For more than a hundred years, critics have been ripping the business strategies that allowed big industrialists to build powerful monopolies-but those much-maligned monopolies brought desperately needed order to America's immature economic system.

And every silver lining had its dark cloud. In the Gilded Age, every dark cloud had its silver lining. In other words, the highs often were the lows, and vice versa. It's not enough to say that the Gilded Age was a time of high highs and low lows: the highs and lows were actually often deeply intertwined parts of the exact same developments. It was, as Dickens might have said, the best of times and the worst of times.īut even that Dickensian understanding of the Gilded Age isn't quite right. Record numbers of citizens voted in national elections, but the politicians they voted for were often lackluster figures who turned a blind eye to the public interest.

Rockefeller revolutionized business and ushered in the modern corporate economy, but also, ironically, sometimes destroyed free-market economic competition in the process. Industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Overall national wealth increased more than fivefold, a staggering increase, but one that was accompanied by what many saw as an equally staggering disparity between the rich and the poor.

Nobody expects the uh, nullification crisis.Īnyway, during the Gilded Age, America's industrial economy exploded, generating unprecedented opportunities for individuals to build great fortunes but also leaving many farmers and workers struggling merely for survival. Progress! Industry! Invention! Bajillions of dollars! The last three decades of the 19th century are called the Gilded Age, one of the most dynamic, contentious, and volatile periods in American history.Īnd as you should have figured out by now, there have been quite a few unpredictable periods in our short history. So, when the country began to pull out of the Reconstruction Era in the mid-1870s, they were not foolin' around. Reconstruction was, in the words of a respected historian, "just a major bummer." The nation was split into two halves that hated each other, nobody had enough money, and every effort to make things better seemed to blow up in everyone's faces.