Reform in the Gilded Age in two minutes
- Carnegie's 1889 essay urged the rich to give away their wealth in their lifetimes, and he gave about $350 million, including some 1,700 public libraries; Rockefeller, Stanford, and Duke funded universities.
- Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner argued in 1883 that class differences reflected success in competition, while critics noted that Carnegie's company broke the Homestead union in 1892.
- Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) proposed a single tax on land, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) inspired more than 150 Nationalist clubs calling for government ownership.
- Social Gospel ministers such as Washington Gladden said Christianity should address wages and housing, and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) showed middle-class readers city poverty.
- Under Frances Willard, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union added suffrage to temperance, women's clubs formed a General Federation, and in 1890 suffrage groups merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
- By 1896 women voted in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, and Ida B. Wells led the campaign against lynching while Black women's clubs formed the National Association of Colored Women.
- On the exam: expect comparisons of conservative responses, such as the Gospel of Wealth, with reform proposals from George, Bellamy, the Social Gospel, and women's organizations.
Topic 6.11 key terms
- Utopian novel
A story set in an imagined perfect society, written to criticize the real one. Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) pictures a peaceful, orderly America in the year 2000 next to the Gilded Age he wanted to fix.
- Middle class
The growing group between the rich and the poor: salaried managers, clerks, salespeople and engineers, plus the doctors, lawyers and storekeepers who served them. After 1870, corporations, schools and colleges made it grow fast.
- Acres of Diamonds
Russell Conwell’s famous lecture, which he gave more than 6,000 times from the 1870s on. He told ordinary Americans that opportunity lay close at hand and that getting rich honestly was a Christian duty. Its message that riches reward hard work matched the age’s belief in self-improvement.
- Gospel of Wealth
Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 argument that great fortunes come from competition, which is hard on individuals but good for humanity (“the race”). He said a rich man should live plainly and give his surplus away for the public good during his own lifetime, through libraries, universities and parks. It gave the fortunes of the Gilded Age a moral duty.
- Philanthropy
Giving money to improve public life, through libraries, schools, universities, hospitals and parks. Late-1800s millionaires like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Stanford practiced it on a huge scale, and Carnegie called it a rich person’s duty.
- Charity vs. reform
Charity helps people bear a hardship, and reform changes the conditions that cause it. Critics of the Gospel of Wealth said giving could not replace fair wages or a fairer economy. Bellamy’s coach makes the point with liniment for the injured and a better road for everyone.
- Chautauqua movement
A movement for adult education and self-improvement that began at Chautauqua Lake, New York, in 1874: summer lectures and concerts, plus reading courses by mail. Other towns copied it.
- CLSC (1878)
The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle: a four-year home-reading course that gave a college-style education to people by mail. Most of its graduates were women.
- Audience (V.A.I.L.)
AP skill 2.C: ask who a source was written for. V.A.I.L. is a checklist: Venue (where it appeared), Access (who could reach it), Influence (what power its audience had), Link (how it ties to Gilded Age reform).
- Contextualization
Explaining a source or a development by the circumstances around it: the economy, politics and events of its time. Ask what was happening when it was written. (AP skill 4.B)
- Single tax
Henry George's proposal to replace all taxes with one tax on land. He argued that land gains value because of the community around it, so the community, not the owner, should collect that gain.
- Social Gospel
A Protestant reform movement that said Christians must fix social problems such as low wages, child labor and slum housing, not only save individual souls.
- Socialism
A political movement that wants the community, through government or worker control, to own the big industries instead of private owners. Debs called himself a socialist by 1897 and later ran for president as one.
- WCTU (1874)
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: a women’s organization that fought alcohol and, under Frances Willard’s “Do Everything” policy, worked for prison reform, kindergartens, labor laws and the vote.
- General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890)
A national union of local women’s clubs, founded in New York in 1890. Its motto was “Unity in Diversity.” Members pressed for libraries, kindergartens, playgrounds and other civic improvements.
- Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)
A Black journalist who investigated and published the facts about lynching. A mob destroyed her Memphis newspaper in 1892 and drove her from the South; she took her campaign to Northern and British audiences.
- NACW (1896)
The National Association of Colored Women, formed in Washington in 1896 when two Black women’s federations merged. Mary Church Terrell was its first president, and its motto was “Lifting as we climb.”
- NAWSA (1890)
The National American Woman Suffrage Association, formed in 1890 when the two rival wings of the suffrage movement, split since 1869, merged. Stanton was its first president; Susan B. Anthony took over in 1892.
- People's Party (Populists)
A third party of farmers and labor reformers. Its 1892 convention in Omaha adopted a platform that called for government ownership of the railroads, telegraph and telephone, and a graduated income tax.
- Nineteenth Amendment
Ratified in 1920. It bars the United States and every state from denying the vote "on account of sex." Many Black women in the South were still kept from the polls, by state laws and by threats.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Gospel of Wealth
1868–1898
Key terms: Acres of Diamonds, Gospel of Wealth, Philanthropy, Charity vs. reform
Above the middle seats rode the richest Americans who had ever lived.
By the 1890s the richest tenth of Americans held most of the country’s wealth. What was a fortune like that for?
Rev. Russell H. Conwell
I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich.
Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister, gave that lecture over six thousand times.
Most of the fees went to poor students. His night classes for working men became Temple University.
In 1889 Andrew Carnegie, the steel king, gave the fullest answer.
Andrew Carnegie
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
Competition, he wrote, was hard on individuals but best for “the race.” A London editor retitled it “The Gospel of Wealth.”
His rule: give it away in your lifetime, and wisely. Die rich, he warned, and the public verdict would be:
Andrew Carnegie
The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
His favorite ladder was the free public library. The first opened in 1889 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, beside his own steel mill.
About seventeen hundred in the United States. Each town supplied the land and paid for upkeep every year.
He gave away about $350 million. About $30 million was left when he died in 1919.
Three years after “Wealth,” his company broke the union at Homestead, and men died on the riverbank. Many of his workers said they would rather have had the money as wages.
In 1898 he gave Homestead a library, with a music hall and a heated swimming pool.
Rockefeller paid to found the University of Chicago. The Stanfords built a university in memory of their son.
The Dukes moved a college to Durham. An oil man gave Brooklyn the Pratt Institute.
Biddy Mason was born enslaved. She walked behind her enslaver’s wagons from Mississippi to Utah, then California. In 1856 a Los Angeles judge declared her free.
As a nurse and midwife she saved, and in 1866 bought land on Spring Street. She grew wealthy, and she gave to the poor and the jailed.
Julian West
While others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured.
Bellamy drew that before Carnegie wrote a word. Charity was liniment. The critics wanted to fix the road.
Chautauqua
1874–1894
Key terms: Chautauqua movement, CLSC (1878), Middle class, Audience (V.A.I.L.)
In August 1874, a Methodist minister, John Heyl Vincent, and an Ohio inventor, Lewis Miller, opened a summer camp. It was for Sunday-school teachers, on Chautauqua Lake, New York.
It had a scale model of the Holy Land by the water. You could walk the Jordan River before supper.
Lewis Miller's daughter Mina married Thomas Edison. So Edison's father-in-law ran a lake full of lectures.
Chautauqua grew into a summer town of lectures and concerts. Its reading course, begun in 1878, mailed a college curriculum to people who'd never see a college.
In 1882, the first class of 1,718 readers walked through a golden arch to graduate. About three in four graduates were women.
In the summer of 1894, with the Pullman strike in the papers, one question hung over the lawns. What do the rich owe everyone else?
Sumner, Carnegie, Gladden, George and Bellamy wrote for the same readers: the people in these seats. The middle class was the jury.
Progress and Poverty
1873–1897
Key terms: Contextualization, Single tax, Utopian novel, Social Gospel, Socialism
Why did millions of Americans buy books that attacked the system?
A depression in 1873. A railroad strike in 1877. Haymarket in 1886. Each hard time sent readers looking for an explanation.
In 1879 a San Francisco journalist, Henry George, named the puzzle.
Henry George
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.
His answer was a single tax on land. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York and came second. Third place went to a 28-year-old named Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1904 a stenographer, Lizzie Magie, patented a board game to show how landlords get rich. People kept copying it. One copy became Monopoly.
Bellamy's readers formed more than 150 Nationalist clubs. Their call for government-run railroads reached a farmers' party platform in 1892.
Pastors like Washington Gladden preached a Social Gospel: Christianity had to fix wages and housing as well as save souls. Cardinal James Gibbons defended the Knights of Labor.
In 1895 Eugene Debs sat in the Woodstock jail for his part in the Pullman strike.
Eugene V. Debs
The writings of Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me.
In 1896 the Black minister Reverdy Ransom backed socialism. He also named labor's color line.
Rev. Reverdy C. Ransom
The great 'labor unions' and 'brotherhoods' of this country have, by introducing the word 'white' into their constitutions, excluded the Negro from membership.
Writers went after the era too. Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 satire was called The Gilded Age. Gilded means a thin coat of gold over cheap metal.
Novelists like Howells and Stephen Crane wrote about city poverty. Jacob Riis showed readers how the other half lived in 1890. You'll meet him in Unit 7.
Farmers were about to build a party of their own. That story comes later.
Henry George ran for mayor again in 1897. He died four days before the election. A newspaper counted over a hundred thousand mourners.
Lifting as We Climb
1868–1896
Key terms: WCTU (1874), General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890), Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), NACW (1896), NAWSA (1890)
Frances Willard led America’s largest women’s organization. In her fifties she learned to ride a bicycle, and named it Gladys.
Frances E. Willard
I finally concluded that all failure was from a wobbling will rather than a wobbling wheel.
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed in 1874. Its members had watched drink eat wages and wreck homes.
But for many immigrant men, the saloon was also their club, their hiring hall and their mail drop.
Willard’s motto was “Do Everything.” Temperance led her to kindergartens, prisons, labor laws and the vote.
Frances E. Willard
I dare prophesy that twenty years from now woman will be fully panoplied in the politics and government of all English-speaking nations…
Nationally, the vote took twenty-seven years.
The New York Press Club gave Charles Dickens a dinner in 1868. It treated Jane Croly’s ticket request as a joke. She founded a women’s club instead.
By 1890 the clubs had a General Federation. Members raised money for libraries, kindergartens and playgrounds.
Dr. Edward H. Clarke
If she puts as much force into her brain education as a boy, the brain or the special apparatus will suffer.
Women went anyway. By 1900 they were more than a third of American college students.
Mary Church Terrell graduated from Oberlin in 1884, one of the first Black women to earn a college degree.
Mary Church Terrell
…when the murder of colored men is of almost daily occurrence in the South, when you have with you to night in the person of Miss Wells an exile,
Mary Church Terrell
driven from home, because she dared to raise her voice in defense of her own oppressed and persecuted people.
A mob had wrecked Wells’s Memphis newspaper that spring. Black women’s clubs carried her campaign across the country.
In 1894 Wells told British audiences that Frances Willard had excused lynch mobs. The quarrel exposed a color line inside reform.
In 1896 Black women’s clubs united as the National Association of Colored Women, with Terrell as president. Their motto: “Lifting as we climb.”
In 1872 Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester. She was arrested, tried and fined a hundred dollars.
Susan B. Anthony
May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.
Suffragists had split in 1869. In 1890 the two wings merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
The West went first. By 1896 women voted in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. In Colorado, men voted it in.
Susan B. Anthony
I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.
She was talking about the bicycle.
The Year 2000
1898 → 2000
Key terms: Middle class, People's Party (Populists), Nineteenth Amendment
Julian West slept for 113 years. Edward Bellamy got 48.
He died of tuberculosis in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, in May 1898.
The calendar kept going. Here is how his year 2000 turned out.
Music piped into the house. Shopping from home. College for millions. He got the credit card. He didn't get the end of poverty.
The new middle class shopped, climbed and gave. A growing number also climbed down to the rope, and argued about the road.
Their argument fed a farmers' revolt in the 1890s. After 1900 it fed a reform movement. In 1920, women won the vote.
What do the people on top owe the people pulling? Americans are still arguing about it.