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 …show more content…
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 …show more content…
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
In the book How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Jacob describes in his book on the systems of tenants of housing had failed due to greed and neglecting wealthier people. Also he shows that a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behavior from the poor and it also shows that they lack of owning a proper home. It mostly focuses on slum conditions of the lower East side of Manhattan, where many immigrants like Jews, Italians, Chinese, Germans, and Irish were packed in tenements. Many of them had no windows, no ventilation, and tried to prevent overcrowding, crime, diseases, filth and most of all poverty. He also exposes the kind of conditions poor people live in.
Their “large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself. ”(Riis 63-64) With Jacob Riis’s descriptive choice of words you could essentially vision the tenants that were many lived in the city. Crammed in spaces where two families could comfortably live in, ten families would live there instead.
Gilded age 1878-1889 was the age of fast growth of industry and immigrants in America history. The production of steel and iron rose radically than other time. In contrast, the Western resources increased such as silver,lumber, and gold. As well as the transportation also improved. Railroad develop and move goods from resources rich west to east.
The Gilded Age which is the time period 30 years after the civil war, is when the economy went through a period of intense growth. The railroad industry was considered the start of the economic growth during the civil war. Many Businessmen of the period, such as Andrew Carnegie the controller of the steel industry, Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who were successful in the railroad industry, John D. Rockefeller who dominated the oil industry, and J.P Morgan who was very successful in the banking industry, they were often criticized for having monopolies and treating their workers poorly. Many Businessmen practiced the philosophy of Social Darwinism is when only the strong survive based Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Robber Baron was an industrialist during the Gilded Age who was powerful and wealthy Businessmen, he became wealthy by treating his workers terribly and other questionable and unethical tactics.
It was during this time that racism was still very prevalent in American culture. In the chapter “The Color Line In New York,” Riis writes how some tenements were made specifically for blacks, and how as tenants they are treated much more harshly, in terms of rent and living space provided. In another review written by Edward T. O’Donnell; he also believes that for his time Riis was more tolerant than most of the individuals during this time; and that if put in their context, both Riis’s writing and pictures provide historians with information that cannot be given up because the language used by the author is unappealing to
Many Americans came to idealize these businessmen such as Rockefeller, Morgan, Gould, and Ford just to name a few. They were aggressive competitors and was out for personal financial success and power in the oil, banking, and railroad industries. Some of these big shots were honest regarding their business transaction as others took their power to bribe and pull fast ones over on people to maintain their wealth and power. The good and the bad had a lot of influence over government. (usa) “Gilded Age” also suggests a fascination with gold itself and with the wealth and power that gold symbolizes.”
The Gilded Age was a “term coined in the 1873 to critique an era of political corruption and economic inequality that stretched to 1900” as the book says, but what was the Gilded Age really? The Gilded Age was a time of era where we will always remember of the accomplishments of thousands of Americans, but it was also a gap between the rich and the poor. The Gilded Age had many important growth for the economy, which is industrialization, railroads, inventions, monopolies, Laissez-faire policies, labor unions, urbanization, settlement of the West, and the rise of the Populist. The Gilded Age was a time of social change and economic growth. “During the Gilded Age, 1876-1900, Congress was known for being rowdy and inefficient” said from sageamericanhistory.net.
The Gilded Age was an age of rapid economic growth. Railroads, factories, and mines were slowly popping up across the country, creating a variety of new opportunities for entrepreneurs and laborers alike. These new inventions and opportunities created “...an unprecedented accumulation of wealth” (GML, 601). But the transition of America from a small farming based nation to a powerful industrial one created a huge rift between social classes. Most people were either filthy rich or dirt poor, with workers being the latter.
During the times of the Gilded age the labor issues that were occurring were terrible. The amount of labor violence at hand continued to increase, while workers were taken advantage of in numerous ways. They were forced to work for extremely long hours a day with barely any pay, not only were their hours strenuous but work would also take place in very dangerous working conditions. Because of the horrific treatment workers would often organize unions which only made employers even more determined to retaliate. Thus causing workers and industrialists to be at constant conflict, whether it be the fight over control, or just the nonstop strikes and
Around the last decade of the ninetieth century, a Danish immigrant called Jacob Riis immersed himself in the dwellings of the oppressed class in New York City. He aimed to expose the living conditions of these people, in addition to narrate their conducts and how they responded to their environment. Riis firmly judged the tenements in which these outliers lived, as the nurturers of evilness and demolishers of human life. According to Riis, the root problems that aggravated the living in the tenements were predominantly the callous landlords, the absence of sanitary environments, and distance of the outsiders to the American values.
The term “Gilded Age” was criticised in the 19th century from the setbacks the economy faced because tribalism was being
Jessica HillisMr. GillardAP US History5 January 2007Essay 16: Gilded AgeThroughout history, certain periods of time have been given certain names based on thehappenings that occurred. Many have called the period of 1865 to 1901 the “Gilded Age”, be-cause it was “shiny and pretty” on the outside but it was “rough and ugly” underneath. The term“Gilded Age” was actually coined by Mark Twain who satired the Gilded Age with a GoldenAge.
The Gilded Age lasted from 1870 to World War 1, “1900s.” The Gilded Age was a period of fast economic development, but also much social struggle. Mark Twain in the late nineteenth century founded the “Gilded” Age, which means covered with gold on the outside, but not really golden on the inside, for example, tin. This period of time was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In other words, the outside looked beautiful, but the inside looked old and trashy.
The Gilded Age was to describe America in the late nineteenth century. The outside of the US seemed glamorous and splendid alongside industrial development and massive economic growth. However, the dark sides were hidden beneath it. In my perspective, I believe we are living in the 2nd Gilded age.
The Spurious Era In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the United States saw rapid industrialization and population growth. All over the world, people longed for wealth and happiness just like America saw, so many of them decided to take risks and come to America. But once they got here they found that it was not so great after all. This period was later termed as “The Gilded Age.” I completely agree with the name because of the false image that the immigrants were receiving, the false sense of wealth that middle-class citizens felt, and the fierce robber barons of the economy.