Changes in the Gilded Age

My name is Susan Curtis.

I am professor emeritus of History and American Studies at Purdue University.

And this is a series of lectures about reform in the Gilded Age.

Okay, the Gilded Age was a moment of extraordinary and spectacular change.

We think of the beginning of the Gilded Age at the end of the Civil War,

which was itself a moment of great trauma for the nation

in the last decades of the 19th century that we consider the Gilded Age.

We saw some spectacular achievements in the United States.

We saw the two coasts connected by rail.

So we have all of a sudden national markets

and national markets that connected to international markets.

There were efforts to connect the entire nation

with modes of communication that had never existed before.

Before the Gilded Age.

When people left their families to seek their fortunes far from home,

they actually had to consider the fact they may never see their families again.

So, uh,

these spectacular achievements included a national

network of transportation and communication.

There also were new developments in the way Americans made things, Uh,

thanks to industrial developments on the eve of

the Civil War which actually had given,

uh, the union some advantage over the South.

Most of the factories that produced goods on a large scale existed in the North.

All of those changes were accelerated, which meant that by the civil war,

which meant that goods could be produced in large quantity

for relatively small prices.

Industrialisation, of course,

involved breaking the process of production down into its constituent parts.

And instead of having a single crafts person make an object from beginning to end,

different workers were assigned to produce that part of the process.

And as a result, what it would have taken a craftsman to, uh, you know,

days or weeks to produce a factory could produce in one day.

This was amazing.

This meant that goods were available at inexpensive prices for many people

because of the concentration of many of these

new sites of production in large cities.

We saw an amazing growth of Metropolis is in the United States,

this congregation of people thrown together for business reasons,

for economic reasons, for work reasons,

and we find that these places built up brand new public and

private structures that dwarfed the traditional markers of

community church spires and maybe the town hall.

So all of a sudden people were living in this spectacular new way.

There were new technologies in the Gilded Age.

We saw the introduction of the combustion engine,

which produced power for not only for, uh production, but also for transportation.

We saw the introduction of telephones and international cables,

which meant that people could speak to one another across long distances.

And we eventually saw toward the end

of the century the introduction of electrical systems

that provided power that was safer and cleaner for people who lived in cities.

And, of course, we see the rise of captains of industry,

these men of large vision who introduced

such massive scales of transportation and production.

They lived in ways that many Americans never imagined.

They would live in mansions and in luxury.

And most important,

they wielded great power because of the systems and the vision that they had.

So when you consider this era as one of growth and change and material production,

the improvement of people's lives, you should be asking yourself,

Why did this system need to be reformed? What was wrong with this?

How in the world could people object to more objects being made, uh,

inexpensively to the growth of impressive new cities and to

new modes of production and the production of power.

And that's one of the challenges.

Um, not everybody, of course, benefited from, um,

the changes that were introduced in the late 19th century.