One period of history that has always fascinated me are the years that stretched from the last quarter of the 19th century, through to the first decade of the 20th century, roughly ca. 1871-1914. In both the United States and in Europe, this was a period of political stability, social change, and industrial revolution that saw the creation of the much of the modern world as we might recognise it today. It was known by a number of names, both in Europe and America, but eventually, two particular titles for this period in history started to stand out above the rest.
In America, it became known as the ‘Gilded Age’. At the same time, the same period of history became known in Europe as ‘La Belle Epoque’, French for ‘The Beautiful Era’. Whichever title you might know it by, there’s little doubt that this was a period of history marked for its uniqueness and how it shaped the modern world.
In this posting, I’ll be looking at what the Gilded Age is. Where it came from, what it meant, how it came to be called this, and what sorts of changes occurred during this period to make it stand out in the long annals of history that made it what it would become.
Before the Gilded Age
The countries of Europe and the countries of North America were constantly at war in the 1700s and 1800s. Between the 1750s to the 1870s, they were engaged in everything from the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Opium Wars, the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War…to name but a few! For well over a century, America, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and various other countries (Mexico, China, etc) were all engaged in conflicts of various durations and intensities.
While countless millions of lives were lost during these wars, the innovations developed or improved during these conflicts would go on to improve the lives of countless other millions in the decades to come. The electric telegraph, the railroads, steam-powered ocean-going vessels, sewing machines, repeating firearms and countless other technologies or inventions which were at their infancy at the end of the 1700s or the start of the 1800s, had, by the end of this nearly century-and-a-half of violence, proven themselves to be reliable and life-changing creations for the people who came after. It was these innovations (among others) that would make the Gilded Age possible.
The Start of the Gilded Age
Exactly when the ‘Gilded Age’ started is somewhat up for debate, depending on where you live and who you ask. In the United States and North America, the Gilded Age began in 1873, after the recovery from a postwar (U.S. Civil War) depression, during the period of Reconstruction in the Deep South. In Europe, the contemporaneous Belle Epoque began in 1871, with the ending of the Franco-Prussian War. Regardless of this small difference of a couple of years, the early 1870s saw the birth of what people hoped would be a long and prosperous period of peace, social improvement, technological advancement and political stability. It would’ve been the first time in living memory that there wouldn’t have been a major conflict somewhere on the globe.
Mass Migration
One of the most immediate impacts of the ending of hostilities was the spike in immigration. Impoverished rural Irish, still suffering from the crippling repercussions of the potato blights, Italian migrants seeking new opportunities in the New World, French and German citizens looking to leave their war-torn nations, and thousands of East-European Jews from Poland, the Baltic states and Russia, seeking to flee antisemitism and increasingly aggressive pogroms, all fled to the United States and Canada during this time. Shipping companies with faster, more powerful and larger steam-powered ocean-liners were now able to provide safer, faster and more reliable service across the Atlantic, and their bread-and-butter fare-paying passenger was the humble European immigrant, millions of whom were shipped across the ocean every year to resettle in the United States.
So many migrants packed up everything they could, and paid whatever they had, to earn tickets to the factories and mills of the United States that a very extensive immigration process was set up. Prospective migrants had to go through all kinds of tests and examinations before they could even get on a ship! Were they healthy? Did they have skills? What did they plan to do when they reached America? Who would look after them when they arrived?
While America had few immigration laws at the time, it was nonetheless in everyone’s best interests to ensure that only those who would really stand a chance in the ‘States actually got a steamer ticket – there would be a lot of hassle involved if they made it all that way and couldn’t get in! Don’t forget that a return-trip across the Atlantic took at least two weeks by steamer.
The owners of the great steamship companies and the railroad companies were eager for immigrant labour. Not only did they buy tickets and fill company coffers, they could also be potential employees, increasing the size and productivity of the company. Soon, steamship companies learned that they could get a bigger slice of the immigrant trade if they made their migrant quarters more and more appealing. White Star, for example, had very expensive third-class (‘steerage’) tickets. But while the prices were high, once paid, the money for the ticket paid for everything – passage, a bed, all the facilities on the ship open to third-class passengers, and all meals, three meals a day, every day of the week until the ship arrived in America. A small price to pay for impoverished European immigrants who in many cases, were looking for any way to escape their decrepit situations.
The Second Industrial Revolution
Another major change which contributed to the creation of the Gilded Age was something called the Second Industrial Revolution.
The first Industrial Revolution started in the late 1700s and ran through to the middle of the 1800s. This created things like steam engines, the electric telegraph, improved farming techniques, steam-powered trains and faster, larger, more reliable and safer ships. This progress was interrupted by the wars of the mid-1800s, running from the 1840s to the start of the 1870s. With the ending of hostilities and a long period of peace, the Second Industrial Revolution began.
This second revolution (also called the ‘Technological Revolution’) saw the invention of a lot of the things which we take for granted today – electric lights, the telephone, the first cars, typewriters, fountain pens, wireless telecommunications, x-rays, dry-cell batteries and countless other innovations which helped to create the modern world. Every few months, some wild and fantastical new creation was being splashed across the newspapers of the world, and for the first time in history, mankind believed that they truly were living in an age of progress and modernity, a sensation not felt in previous generations.
Riding the crest of this new wave of innovation and creation was a group of men who became known as the ‘Robber Barons’. Robber Barons were outrageously wealthy and highly influential industrialists, moguls and magnates who made (what would be today) billions of dollars and pounds by investing in, or directly operating, these new industries that would make the modern world possible.
Robber barons operated everything. Steelyards, shipyards, railroad networks, oil-refineries, locomotive and carriage workshops and countless other big-business endeavours. Their names would become the stuff of legend, names still synonymous with staggering wealth and power today – names like Vanderbilt, Frick, Carnegie, Morgan, Hearst and Rockefeller.
But who were these men? How did they get so rich? What happened to them?
The Rise of the Robber Barons
The term ‘robber baron’ was coined back in 1859 in a New York Times article, to describe the underhanded, unethical and borderline illegal business practices of unscrupulous businessmen, mostly in the United States of America. These were men who saw the chance of a lifetime, who saw that money was to be made, and who jumped on the wagon early to get themselves a good seat on this bumpy journey of unimaginable progress!
Many of these men were involved in key industries of the 1800s. Railroad networks, locomotive works, shipbuilding, import-export, and two of the biggest industries – steel and oil. Without these two – none of the others would be possible. It was oil that fired every lamp, lubricated every machine, ran every engine and heated every home. It was steel, made by the new Bessemer Converter process (which could mass produce steel by blasting molten iron with oxygen and infusing it with carbon to make higher-quality steel in larger quantities), that made the manufacturing of bridges, railroad lines, steamships, trains, cars, carriages, high-rise buildings all possible.
Prior to the industrial era, steel was rare. Anyone can find iron – you just dig it out of the ground, heat it, beat it constantly to break off the impurities, and you’re left with iron, which can then be cast or worked into a new form or object. But steel (basically iron + carbon) was not fully understood until the 1800s. The addition of carbon into the iron made this new metal, and it was a metal that was sharper, stronger, harder and more versatile. In older times, steel was so scarce that only small amounts of it could be used or even manufactured, but with the discovery of how to make it cheaply and in vast quantities, the people who controlled this process (men such as Andrew Carnegie) – the modern world and everything that came with it – could be produced en masse!
The First Robber Barons
Three of the first big robber barons bore names which, even over a hundred years later, are still synonymous with obscene levels of wealth and gigantic business empires, the likes of which the world had never yet seen – Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Davison ‘J.D.’ Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.
Vanderbilt & Rockefeller
Starting as a simple ferry-boat owner, young Vanderbilt goes on to own one of the largest shipping fleets in the world by the 1850s. Because of this, Cornelius earns the nickname which he’s still known by today – ‘The Commodore’. With the coming of the Civil War, the Commodore realises that overland transport rather than water transport, will be the thing of the future. Eager to be in at the beginning, he sells off all his boats, ships and barges, and buys heavily into the new and rising industry of the railroad. By the late 1860s, he owns up to 40% of the United States’ railroad companies and major train-lines. He can make millions of dollars by controlling which trains go where, which bridges (which he also owns) they can use, and what cargo they carry and what freight-costs to charge. By controlling transport, Vanderbilt can control the wealth of a nation.
Including the wealth of a small, Ohio native in his late twenties – a man named John D. Rockefeller. A struggling oil-refiner who refines crude oil into the light-fuel of the day – kerosene – Rockefeller is eager to make his name in big business. When Vanderbilt, the most powerful and by far the most wealthy man in the entire country, is looking for a way to stay on top of his rivals, he and young Rockefeller strike a freight deal. To earn more money, Vanderbilt needs to move freight across the United States using his vast network of rail-lines. But to make money, he needs a type of freight that will never run out. Rockefeller needs a way to move his refined kerosene to markets in the East, but has no way of doing this.
When Vanderbilt meets Rockefeller, they strike a deal – Rockefeller will use Vanderbilt’s trains to move his kerosene to the places where he can sell it, thereby making money. In return, Vanderbilt will give Rockefeller cheaper freight-charges in return for the privilege of having a reliable commodity to fill his rail-cars which will never, ever run out. But if Rockefeller expects to get the low freight-charges that Vanderbilt promises him, then he has to deliver on his end of the deal – to ensure that the supply of oil to fill the boxcars never runs out. It’s a delicate balancing act – but if tweaked correctly – it would make both men stupidly, ridiculously, insanely and obscenely rich beyond their wildest imaginations!
Everyone needs kerosene. Everyone needs light. In the 1800s, kerosene oil fuels everything from domestic oil-lamps to the headlights on locomotives, the lamps of navigation-lights on ships at sea, and kerosene-fueled stoves for heating and cooking. By exploiting the Vanderbilt rail-network, Rockefeller can build a new company that comes to monopolise the American oil industry, bringing light and heat to every home in the land. Today, we call it ‘Standard Oil’.
It was deals like these and schemes like these, brokered between the ambitious businessmen of the 1860s, 70s, 80s and 90s that turned once struggling business-owners into gigantic, multimillion-dollar tycoons who could buy and sell the world! By feeding off of each other, they could rebound their ideas and wealth from tycoon to tycoon, mogul to magnate, back and forth, each person earning a profit at every turn and growing richer and richer by the day!
As Rockefeller, propelled by Vanderbilt, grows richer and more influential, he seeks to expand his monopoly even further. Vanderbilt might own a lot of track and rolling-stock, but by the 1870s, Rockefeller is producing so much oil that Vanderbilt can’t actually keep up. To expand his market, Rockefeller looks to Vanderbilt’s biggest rival to make a deal – a man named Thomas Scott.
The Rise of Andrew Carnegie
Thomas Scott is the president of the impressive Pennsylvania Railroad, the only company powerful enough to rival Vanderbilt in size. If Scott (and Rockefeller) wish to be bigger than Vanderbilt, then they know they need each other. To make more money from freight charges, and challenge the power of the House of Vanderbilt, Scott needs the oil that Rockefeller can give him. To reach more customers and make enough money to buy out his competitors, Rockefeller needs the railroad network that Scott controls. At a meeting between Scott and Rockefeller, the young oil tycoon meets another man who’s name would go down in history for the ages, a young Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie.
You might just have heard of him.
There’s a building in New York City named after him, although its name escapes me now.
The man who would go on to become one of the biggest steel tycoons in the world, Carnegie in the 1870s is an ambitious young man trying to reach the top. He wants to be like Rockefeller…so naturally, he had to meet him, just like how Rockefeller had to meet Vanderbilt to build his fortune. As Scott’s personal assistant, Carnegie accompanies his boss to this historical showdown, and the two men who would become the controllers of the two biggest industries in the United States would finally meet. The three biggest industrialists of the Gilded Age had now all shaken each others’ hands and looked into each others eyes – and what they saw was profit!
With the deal made between Rockefeller and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which Carnegie eventually becomes a manager in, there’s enormous pressure for Carnegie to expand the railroad network. The deal hinges on the agreement that Rockefeller will provide Carnegie with business if Carnegie can provide Rockefeller with transport for his product, with both men profiting along the way. For the most part, this is fine – except for one area.
The Mississippi River.
The main north-south river in the United States slices the country in half. Rail is fast, rail is cheap, rail is reliable. But rail doesn’t float on water. This would mean that for every town west of the Mississippi looking to distribute and buy Standard Oil brand kerosene for their homes, businesses and families, they have to stop the trains at the border…offload the cargo…load it onto ferries…float the oil across the river…and then load it back onto trains and then deliver the oil to the West coast. This is expensive, and slow. And that’s just one train! Imagine doing it for dozens every day! What they needed was a bridge.
The problem was that the Mississippi River is HUGE. To span such a distance, a bridge would need to be gigantic. That’s alright, they can build gigantic bridges – this is the age of industry, don’t forget. But the problem is that in order to build that big, the bridge would need a lot of supports to hold it up. Brick or masonry is heavy and can’t hold itself up. Iron is too brittle and would crack under the weight of the trains going along the top, to say nothing of the foot-traffic and carriage-traffic on top of that. And the bridge – if there is a bridge – can’t have a load of supports underneath propping it up. The more supports or ‘piers’ there are holding up the bridge, the less space there is in the river for water-traffic. Remember those famous Mississippi paddle-steamers? They need to use the river too, you know!
To build a bridge that would be strong enough and which could span the river with as few riverbed piers as possible, Andrew Carnegie decides to use a new product – Steel.
Prior to the industrial age, steel was rare. Making it was slow and imprecise and very expensive. Steel is created when iron is fused with carbon. This creates a new metal which is stronger than iron would be on its own. The problem is, to get the iron and carbon to fuse together, you need it to be extremely hot – thousands of degrees, so that you can burn off impurities and have as clean, pure an iron as possible to combine with the carbon. The more impurities in the iron, the weaker it becomes.
Carnegie meets with an Englishman named Henry Bessemer. Bessemer has been experimenting with a new method for trying to mass produce steel. By blasting oxygen through a specially-made furnace, he can raise the temperature of molten steel to insane levels, burning off the impurities and infusing the carbon into the iron, creating steel.
Lots of steel!
This new device is called a Bessemer Converter, and it is the machine that will make the mass-production of steel possible for the first time in history.
With this new process in place, Carnegie is able to pump out loads of steel. It can be made into cylinders, I-beams, nuts, bolts and rivets and anything else that he could possibly need to build a bridge. His bridge! The first bridge ever to be built of steel!
The Eads Bridge across the Mississippi – the first all-steel bridge in the world, built by Andrew Carnegie. Seen here under construction in 1870. It still stands today.
Although it goes over budget and way past deadline, the bridge is eventually finished and opened in 1874. Since no bridge has ever been built of steel before, the public doesn’t trust it. As a publicity stunt, Carnegie takes advantage of a popular superstition of the day – that elephants will not cross dangerous bridges. What does he do? He goes out and finds himself an elephant! On opening day, he sends it across the bridge. Convinced that the structure is strong enough, the citizenry of nearby St Louis, who have turned out to witness this new wonder-bridge for themselves – cross along with it.
The success of what became known as the Eads Bridge made Carnegie’s name as a steel tycoon. Soon, steel is used for all kinds of things – bridges, yes – but steel is also used to replace the older wrought-iron train-tracks, used to replace locomotive bodies, used to build buildings, used for all kinds of applications that previously used cast or wrought iron. In the same way that Rockefeller establishes the simply-named ‘Standard Oil’, Carnegie goes on to establish his own company – the Carnegie Steel Company. Later, it will be bought out by J.P. Morgan, and be known simply as U.S. Steel. By this time, Carnegie himself was so staggeringly rich that he didn’t need his steel company anymore, and was happy to sell it off and live the quiet life, devoting himself to other pursuits – more about that, later.
How did the Robber Barons Get So Rich?
The reason why robber barons became so obscenely, ridiculously rich was because they lived at a time in history when there were very few laws regulating business and trade. There were no laws against watering down stocks, no laws against enormous business trusts, no laws against strike-breaking, no unions, no laws against factory conditions, working conditions, minimum wages, occupational health and safety, and all the other things which we take for granted today as being part of ordinary working life.
Because of this lack of legislation, there was an enormous amount of freedom to be had in doing business. You could basically do anything you wanted to make as much as you wanted, and if the competition got screwed as a result – tough! They weren’t willing to do what it took and they paid the price. Too bad, sugar-cakes! The big moguls could, and did, do whatever they could think of to stay ahead of the pack, to stay above the crowd and to not only keep their heads above water – but to find themselves a boat and laze away on the top of the ocean of humanity.
A Brave New World
The combination of big business, cheap labour, new inventions, questionable business practices, going big or going home, and lots of shady, back-room dealing, was what made the Gilded Age possible. A new age of progress, business, money, social change and optimism to replace decades of warfare, uncertainty and strife.
But why is it called the ‘Gilded Age’?
Actually, the term comes from a book.
This book:
“The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”, from 1873
While you may have never heard of the book, you’ve probably heard of the author – Samuel Clemens!
…No? Seriously?
OK.
That’s probably because he’s better known by his pen-name: Mark Twain.
Twain wrote the book in the early 1873 along with neighbour and friend, Charles Dudley Warner. The book was the result of a challenge put forward to both men by their wives one evening while sharing dinner together. The result of this challenge was a novel that satirised the corrupt and questionable business practices of the post-Civil-War era, as well as highlighting the struggles of the common man during the same period. The title ‘the Gilded Age’ referred to the decorative process known as ‘gilding’ (today we’d probably call the same process ‘gold-plating’).
What is ‘Gilding’?
Gilding, or to use an older term – fire-gilding – is the process of plating a base metal (usually brass or bronze, but at times, also silver) with a layer of gold, using the chemical reaction that occurs when gold and an extremely poisonous substance – mercury – are combined. Applying this toxic mixture to the base metal and then applying a high amount of heat causes the gold – with the aid of the mercury – to fuse to the base metal, coating and plating it all over. It makes the finished object (a clock, a set of candleholders, an oil lamp, a silver cup, etc), look like it’s made of gold, when the actual structure is made of a cheaper metal. It makes the item look flashier and more desirable and exciting than it otherwise might be.
The same thing applied to the United States in the 1870s, 80s and 90s. The success and the wealth, the patronage and the products and services created and provided by the robber barons gave the United States the outward appearance of prosperity, wealth, and opportunity. The land where fortunes could be made and where silver-shod horses pulled carriages along streets paved of gold! But, just like with gilding a thin layer of gold over a base metal of brass, all this prosperity and progress was all a bit of a facade.
Yes, the wealth and power and money and prestige and everything else that went along with it were certainly real – just like how the gold is real – but the apparent wealth and prosperity – just like the gold – hid a much darker secret locked beneath.
The Social Problems of the Gilded Age
For all the money, wealth, power and influence wielded by men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Vanderbilt, Ford, Morgan and countless others, they represented the top 1% of the world. The super-rich industrialist who had built himself from the ground up and created an empire.
Propping up these captains of industry were the thousands – millions, even – of ordinary working men, women, and even children – who toiled day and night in railyards, shipyards, steel foundries, oil-refineries, offices, factories and docks. Many of these labourers and workers, pen-pushers and clerks, were ordinary American citizens. In the late 1800s though, more and more of the American workforce started being made up of immigrant labourers, chiefly the Irish, Italians, German, Polish and Russian Jews, and the Chinese. From the 1870s, they flood into America, thousands every week delivered by fast, large and reliable steamships. But just as there’s a huge surge of manpower…suddenly, there isn’t any work.
The 1850s and 1860s was the big railroad boom, both in America and in Britain and Europe. Rail-lines are built so far and so fast that there’s little consideration for what or how they’ll be used. Or even if they’ll be used at all! The result is loads of main lines, thousands of branch-lines, and tens of thousands of stations, all employing people – firemen, engineers, station-masters, porters, carriage-stewards and countless others – in jobs which suddenly don’t need them! There’s no need for people to run a railroad if there’s no people to use the railroad to begin with!
This contributes towards what became known as the ‘Long Depression’ starting in the 1870s. Even big tycoons like Carnegie and the Vanderbilts struggle. With nobody using the rails, there’s no money to be made from them. With no money to be made, there’s nobody building new rail-lines and therefore no market for Carnegie’s steel. Only Rockefeller, the man who lights up America, is still in business. But despite this, thousands of migrants arrive every week and they need jobs, and they need houses.
And that’s where Carnegie gets an idea. Instead of using steel to make rails for trains, he will use his steel to make girders and cross-braces, I-beams and rivets for structural scaffolding and framing. In his attempts to become the biggest steel tycoon in America, if not the world, he employs thousands of men, directly or indirectly, either in all the steel-plants he buys out, or by manufacturing the steel that goes onto provide employment for construction workers building office-buildings, department stores and apartment-blocks that would replace the small, cramped brick and timber shops, offices and tenement-blocks that were the mainstay of pre-Civil-War America.
Changing from railroads to construction saves the Carnegie Steel Company and makes Carnegie a wealthy, wealthy man. Rich enough to start buying up other steelworks and factories. Soon, he is the second-richest man in America…just short of a certain J.D. Rockefeller. To try and beat Rockefeller, Carnegie instructs the chairman of his board, Henry C. Frick, to ramp up production on his biggest mill, the Homestead Mill, in Pennsylvania. It’s a decision that Carnegie would come to regret.
As migrants and Americans alike seek employment, the robber barons clamp down, both on their workers and on competition. To outdo each other, the barons will do anything to stay ahead of the game. In Pennsylvania, H.C. Frick, the chairman of the board at Carnegie Steel, slashes the wages of working men in half, while doubling the working hours, instituting twelve-hour shifts. For months, the long hours, low wages, brutal treatment, accidents, injuries, and eventually, even deaths, drive the men to the edge. They strike.
To break the strike and get the mill running again, Frick hires the Pinkertons – a mercenary army that did all kinds of dirty work…for a fee, of course. Since their establishment in 1850, they’d done everything from intelligence work, detective-work, foiled assassination attempts, and even acted as presidential bodyguards. Now, Frick hires them to bust the strikers. In July, 1892, the Pinkertons march on the Homestead Mill. When negotiations break down, the Pinkertons open fire on the unarmed mill-workers, killing sixteen men and wounding nearly two dozen others. When the strike is over, thousands of men are sacked, and those which remain return to work…again, on half-wages.
The Homestead Strike explodes across the United States. Newspapers from coast to coast and around the world print stories of hardworking, defenseless labourers being mown down by paid henchmen. Frick becomes so unpopular that there’s even an assassination attempt on his life – shot twice in the head at his office at Carnegie Steel, Frick survives, but for Carnegie, the writing is on the wall. Deciding that Frick’s heavy-handed tactics are a liability, both to himself personally, and to his business-empire, Carnegie fires Frick in disgust.
Slum Clearance
The overcrowding in major American, British and European cities in the late 1800s, caused by mass migration, both to America and Britain, had become a hot topic. Buildings were so overcrowded that entire families are crammed into single rooms, sharing beds and sleeping in shifts. Aging sewer systems couldn’t cope with the influx of humanity, and the old buildings in which they lived were unsafe, crumbling fire-traps.
In England, Prince Albert, the Prince-Consort, backs philanthropic organisations to clear slums and replace them with compact but comfortable apartment-blocks as early as the 1840s and 50s. In America, a man named Jacob Riis will shock the genteel classes with the realities of the lives of the people who work for them.
Starting in the 1880s, Riis, an immigrant himself, who has successfully worked his way up from ground-level, uses the latest in photographic technology to shock the middle and upper-classes into realising that not everybody has it so good. With his assistant, Riis travels through the slums of New York City. With a camera and flash-stand, he’s able to take photos of the dark, dingy tenements without the need for any extra light. Flash photography in the 1880s is newfangled and dangerous – flash-powder is highly combustible – but the images that it produces enable Riis to capture will horrify a nation.
One of Riis’ most famous photographs.
Riis collects his images over the course of years, and tries to get newspapers and magazines to publish them, to reveal the social injustices of the day. Refusing to confront the reality of slum-life and fearing that their reputations will be tarnished if they publish such images, most major publications decline to print his photographs.
Instead, he puts on slideshow presentations for curious New Yorkers. In time, the photographs he takes will be complied into a book – “How the Other Half Lives“. Riis creates a new branch of public information. Today, we call it ‘investigative journalism’…in the 1880s, they call it ‘muckraking’ – sifting through the filth and grime, scraping back the golden sheen of the ‘Gilded Age’ to reveal the tarnished and unsightly brass, the horrors and inequities hidden underneath. Soon, muckraking journalists are uncovering all kinds of other scandals, from food adulteration to unsafe working conditions, exploitation and organised crime! A new era of fierce, probing investigative journalism will force the world to sit up and take notice of what for so long, they had tried to ignore.
What Riis starts creates massive social reform. Slums are torn down, or renovated. Companies like Carnegie Steel, eager to be seen as the good guys, help to build new apartment-blocks, new houses, new transit networks and new office-blocks. Carnegie and Rockefeller, for years, rivals fighting it out between steel and oil, start instead to try and fight it out to be seen as the most philanthropic.
The End of the Gay Nineties
By the end of the 1890s – popularly known as the ‘Gay Nineties’ – as in being joyous and full of gaiety – the world enters a whole new century. As 1901 dawns, all kinds of new inventions are improving lives everywhere. Railroad networks, steamships, telephones, the telegraph, the radio, recorded music, phonographs, automobiles, elevators, the first high-rise apartment-blocks and ‘skyscraper’ buildings are all on the rise.
And to get it all to work smoothly, electricity is the wonder-word of the new century. To have electric lights, electric telephones, electric heaters, even electric automobiles – is to prove that you’ve made it!
This is the high-point of the glamorous Gilded Age. Stylish Art Nouveau mansions are raised, elegant Victorian mansions are updated for the new century, wired, plumbed, piped and fitted out for electricity, hot running water, gas stoves and the latest in household conveniences.
Photographed here at the turn of the 20th century, Biltmore is one of the Vanderbilt Family’s gigantic Victorian-era mega-mansions, still owned by the Vanderbilts today.
The rich and famous swan across the globe in style, floating across the seas in elegant ocean-liners, or else being chauffeured around the world in gleaming, brass-fixtured motor-cars with gasoline engines, acetylene headlamps, and plush leather seats and brocaded fabric interiors…very swish!
This new age also sees changes in working conditions. Car-companies like Dodge, Ford, Rolls Royce and countless others become leaders not only of automotive innovation and styling, but also of workplace relations, with higher wages, shorter working-hours, proper shift-work conditions, and laws to protect workers’ rights. The days of robber-barons forcing their men to work for 12 or even 14 hours at a time on minimal wage are on the way out.
The New Century
Despite all the changes and advances, in everything from communications, transport, social welfare and working conditions, the American Gilded Age, and the European Belle Epoque could not last forever. The early 20th century was the last great huzzah of this kind of super, ultra-opulent living. The age of country house shooting-parties, of masters and servants, of super-crazy-rich giga-billionaires who could congratulate each other day in and day out, of being the masters of the universe.
A number of events in the early 20th century rocked the world. In 1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition – better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 – showcased the latest and greatest technologies to a paying public. In 1903, the Wright Brothers showed that manned, powered, controlled flight was possible!
San Francisco after the great earthquake in 1906. The city’s world-famous cable-streetcar network was badly affected.
In 1906, the Great Quake hits San Francisco, ripping apart what once had been the glittering jewel of the Pacific coast. The city of the Golden Gate would never be the same again. Elegant wooden townhouses, flamboyant Victorian gold-rush-era mansions, and the city’s famous cable-hauled streetcar network were all torn to pieces by the earthquake and then razed to the ground by the fire which followed.
The sinking of the Titanic, in April 1912 was the biggest event of the early 20th century, though. In one fell swoop, 1,500 people died in the space of two and a half hours, news that rocked the world.
The End of the Gilded Age
But if one event can truly be said to have killed off, or at least fatally wounded the Gilded Age, then that would have to be the Great War, in 1914. The bloodshed, death and carnage of the ‘war to end all wars’ stunned the world into silence and it would never be the same again. Following shortly after this came the devastating 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza Pandemic, which killed tens, even hundreds of millions all over the world. Combined, these two horrifying events forever cast a pall over the early 20th century and the glory days of the Gay Nineties. The postwar world of the 1920s was different and changed beyond recognition, and with it, the Gilded Age faded into the history books.
As the Gilded Age started to falter in the early 1900s, the two richest men in the world – John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie – both of them now aging tycoons in their 70s and 80s, started another rivalry. Not over land, or steel, railroads, oil, electrical power or how many more billions they could produce – but a rivalry over philanthropy!
To found, fund or support libraries, universities, schools, concert-halls, hospitals, orphanages, and to be seen to founding, funding and supporting, these two men give away to charitable and philanthropic causes, what would be in modern times – joint fortunes of tens, even hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars – sums of money so gigantic that they’d be on the verge of being incalculable.
All across the United States, libraries dedicated to Carnegie are thrown up in gleaming stone and glass. On the other hand, Rockefeller funds as many grand public works projects as he can possibly think of, to atone for the often more than questionable ways through which he earned his billions. To this day, Carnegie Hall in New York City remains one of the biggest symbols of philanthropy and high culture in the United States.
In 1919, Andrew Carnegie dies at the age of 83. Driven to do some real, lasting good for mankind through his gigantic fortune, and fighting to do anything to counter the growing list of black marks against the Carnegie name ever since the disaster of the Homestead Strike, he decides to lead by example and shame his fellow multi-millionaires and billionaires into a life of righteous philanthropy. At his death, he leaves humanity with these famous words:
“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced”
– Andrew Carnegie.
But in the end, as with everything else, even in this race, Rockefeller will come out on top. Funding medical research, education, poor-relief and countless other noble causes, Rockefeller was trying to make good on one of the most famous quotes he had ever uttered – that it was his aim to earn $100,000, and to live to the age of 100 years. And he was determined, in his advancing years, to use what little time he had left, to sign away as much of his fortune for the good of mankind as he possibly could.
While Rockefeller surpassed his first goal of $100,000 by leaps and bounds, he missed out on his second goal of living to 100, by just a handful of years, dying in 1937, at the age of 97.
J.D. Rockefeller, painted in 1917, 20 years before his death.
At the time of his death, John D Rockefeller was the richest man in America, the richest person of modern times, and by some calculations, the richest person in the history of recorded civilisation. Even today’s multi-billionaires would struggle to attain the mindblowing levels of wealth that Rockefeller had earned in his whirlwind of a lifetime.
Want to Know More?
There’s lots of amazing documentaries out there which touch on this period in history, but it was a struggle to find one which dealt specifically with the Gilded Age. For information about the famous Robber-Barons like Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Rockefeller, I can recommend the TV miniseries “The Men Who Built America”.
