- [Narrator] The Second Industrial Revolution
in the United States
ushered in new technologies
and new ways of living and working during the Gilded Age.
Steel, electricity, and the telephone
allowed railroads to crisscross the country,
skyscrapers to rise out of cities,
factories to hum along long after sunset,
and business transactions to take place instantly
over hundreds of miles.
This was the time when the United States began
its transition from a nation of rural farmers
to a nation of city dwelling factory workers.
So, at a glance, the Gilded Age seems like a time
of radical change for the country.
But, as historians,
how can we tell just how much change
really occurred from 1865 to 1898?
One way we can do this is to track over time
what changed and what stayed the same
from the beginning of the Gilded Age to its end.
Historians call this process
examining continuity and change over time.
When we study history,
it's important to look at continuities,
or things that continued on the same as they were before,
because it's really easy to focus on how one aspect
of society really transformed
during a certain period of time
and then forget to account for the fact
that almost everything else didn't change at all,
but it would be practically impossible
to track the changes in every aspect of society.
So let's dial in on a few areas.
Since the major transformations came through
technology and business in this time period,
and those are both aspects of work,
I'm curious about how the kind of work that people did
and the way that they did it
changed over the course of the Gilded Age.
And since I know that cities grew a lot
during this time period,
let's also look at changes in living patterns.
Where people migrated to and from
and how they lived.
I'm also curious about the extent to which
these changes in work and living patterns
affected the major ideas and culture of the time.
Did people's beliefs about society change much
during the Gilded Age?
Or was the culture of the United States
at the end of the 19th century
pretty much the same as it was at the end
of the Civil War?
So let's look at the major trends
in each of these areas at the beginning and the end
of this time period
so we can try to answer the question
how much change did industrialization really bring
during the Gilded Age?
By the way, I'm not gonna go into a whole lot
of detail on these trends
because we're doing a really big overview
of the Gilded Age here.
So if you find that you're not familiar
with something that comes up,
just make a note of it and you can look it up
when you have time.
Okay, first, let's compare the changes in work
and business from 1865 to 1898.
Well in 1865, the United States was still
a primarily a nation of farmers,
although there were a good number of people
in the North and the West who worked in mills,
and mines, and on railroads.
Many African Americans had transitioned from
working as slave laborers on plantations in the South
to working as sharecroppers,
where they would work portions of plantations
in return for a pretty measly share of the profits.
In fact, most work in the United States
was segregated by race.
It was pretty uncommon for whites, African Americans,
Chinese laborers, or Mexican American laborers
to work side by side anywhere.
In terms of the way businesses were organized,
the Civil War had sowed some initial seeds
of business consolidation.
The industrial might that had helped the North
win the Civil War
made it easy for some large companies to begin
turning natural resources into infrastructure.
How did that compare to the state of work in 1898?
Well there were still plenty of farmers
and sharecroppers,
although the mechanization of agriculture
in the late 19th century
had a negative effect on many farmers,
sending them to the city looking for work.
By the end of the century
more people worked for someone else for wages
than worked for themselves for the first time
in American history.
A lot of this factory growth was driven by
new business practices like
mass production on the assembly line,
which broke complex tasks down into tiny steps
so that no one required much training
to work in a factory.
A process known as deskilling.
Women and children began working in factories as well,
but as at the beginning of the Gilded Age
work places still tended to be racially segregated
and by the end of the 19th century
businesses undergone major consolidation.
Often using monopolistic practices to dominate industries
and fix prices and wages.
In response, many workers began to organize labor unions,
but they had pretty limited success.
So overall, I would say that industrialization
led to some pretty major changes in the world of work,
although work generally remained segregated
and the process of transitioning
from farms to factories wasn't entirely complete.
During the Gilded Age there was a huge shift
towards unskilled wage work and big corporations.
Next let's look at living and migration patterns.
In 1865 only about 20% of the population lived in cities.
Most of the migrants to cities were
Irish and German immigrants coming from
Northern and Western Europe.
Most African Americans continued to live in the South
in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War
and the cities themselves had pockets
of density and poverty,
like New York City's Five Points neighborhood,
but they weren't yet incredibly crowded.
What about in 1898?
Well, the percentage of the population living in cities
nearly doubled, up to 40%.
Several cities grew to more than one million people
for the first time during the Gilded Age
and who was coming to the cities changed as well.
Political and economic trouble at home
led many Southern and Eastern Europeans to head
for the factories in American cities
and African Americans also began to
slowly trickle northward in order to escape
sharecropping and Jim Crow.
This massive influx of people meant that
cities were very dense
and many people had to crowd into tenements,
unsafe, unventilated, ramshackle apartment buildings.
In 1900, the Lower East Side of Manhattan
was the most densely populated neighborhood
in the world.
So I would say that industrialization also led
to quite the transformation
in living and migration patterns.
The factory jobs available in American cities
drew new people to them from all over the country,
and the world, and also changed the standards of living.
Last, let's map the changes and continuities
in prominent cultural ideas
over the course of the Gilded Age.
Although there are lots of different ideas
and forms of cultural expression we could talk about,
I'm gonna focus on ideas about
the economy, and race, and immigration
since those are so closely tied to the other two categories
of analysis we've got here.
Immediately after the Civil War,
there was an intense push in Congress
and in the North to ensure racial equality
for African Americans
with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments,
but there was also a very strong nativist
or anti-immigrant sentiment
among white native born Protestants
who especially objected to the immigration
of Irish Catholics.
As far as the economy went,
there were many people who argued in favor of
laissez faire economics,
that the government should engage in
little to no regulation of the market
and that was pretty much the prevailing
government approach of the day.
Alright, how does that compare to 1898?
Well unlike in the immediate post war period,
racial equality for African Americans
had been abandoned as a mainstream idea
with the rise of Jim Crow and rulings like
the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy versus Ferguson,
which approved segregation.
Nativism was also still a force in American life
and it had even intensified
thanks to the flawed racial pseudo-science
known as Social Darwinism,
which suggested that people who were in high positions
in society, both in terms of race and wealth,
belonged there because they were the fittest.
But there were a few reformers who were beginning
to question the effects of industrialization
like settlement house founder, Jane Addams
or early muckraker Jacob Riis.
So in terms of ideas and culture,
it looks like there was actually more continuity
than change over the course of the Gilded Age.
There may even have been an overall regression
in ideas about race and immigration
in this time period.
There were a few efforts to soften the pains
of industrialization and urbanization,
but they weren't yet widespread.
Let's return to our question then
and see if we can formulate a thesis statement
to address the extent to which
industrialization brought change from 1865 to 1898.
From the evidence we've gathered,
I'd say that the technological and business advancements
of the Second Industrial Revolution
brought enormous changes to the ways
that people lived and worked in the United States,
transforming the country from a rural farming nation
to an urban industrial one,
but the major ideas about immigration, race, and the economy
didn't change as much.
Segregation and nativist sentiment intensified
over the time period
and efforts to reign in the excesses
of industrial capitalism were just getting started.
The major social efforts to improve the lives and work
of this new urban population would have to wait
until the Progressive Era.