- [Voiceover] Hello David.
- [Voiceover] Hello Kim.
- [Voiceover] So I brought you here
to talk about the Gilded Age,
which is one of my favorite eras
of American history.
- [Voiceover] Because everything was great
and covered in gold?
- [Voiceover] No, because it is the only era
of American history I can think of
that has a sarcastic name.
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] What's to be sarcastic about?
What's happening between,
so I see it's from 1865 to 1898
which is the end of the Civil War,
and then what happens in 1898?
- [Voiceover] It's basically everyone woke up
one morning and were like
"oh we're done with the Gilded Age,
now it's time for the Progressive Era".
- [Voiceover] Hooray, Spanish-American wartimes!
- [Voiceover] More first the
Spanish-American War.
So the Gilded Age is kind of this period
of really intense industrialization
and kind of focusing on America's development
as an industrial and business power.
It's very inward looking,
whereas after the Spanish-American war
the United States takes a bigger role
on the world's stage.
The sarcastic part of the Gilded Age
is that this was a term coined
by Mark Twain
of all people,
in 1890.
And he wrote a book called "The Gilded Age",
and what Twain was trying to say
was that the United States in this period
wasn't experiencing a golden age,
an era of prosperity and happiness,
but rather a Gilded Age.
- [Voiceover] Oh so just like a thin layer
of gold on top,
disguising the cheap tin beneath?
- [Voiceover] Exactly.
- [Voiceover] Oh snap, Mark Twain.
(laughter)
So what's going on in this era
that earns this nickname?
What is the appearance of
fancy,
lovely gold
that just turns out
to be tacky and miserable?
- [Voiceover] Well I think what people
are talking about under the title
of Gilded Age is that
it's this time when immense wealth
is accumulated by a number of individuals.
Many of whom still have
their names on things today.
Like Andrew Carnegie,
of Carnegie Mellon University,
or Carnegie Hall.
J.P. Morgan,
who was a banking magnet.
We still have J.P. Morgan
as a financial institution today.
And I would say John D. Rockefeller is another.
He was a founder of standard oil,
so he was an oil baron.
Of Rockefeller Center, right.
So these are the individuals
who got enormously wealthy
in the Gilded Age.
And they got wealthy by being the captians
of these new expanding industries.
- [Voiceover] Titans of industry.
- [Voiceover] The titans of industry.
So steel,
and banking,
and oil.
But they got rich partly
through political corruption.
So one of the less than savory parts
of the Gilded Age is that.
A lot of this was done through
political kickbacks,
bribing of officials,
bribing of the vice president
of the United States.
- [Voiceover] Woah woah woah, what?
They bribed the vice president?
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] That was a scandal that
dogged the presidency of
Ulysses S. Grant
- [Voiceover] Oh man.
- [Voiceover] Credit Mobilier
was a construction company
that had less than savory ties
to some people very high up in government.
So these fortunes of people
like Carnegie and Morgan
were built partly on political corruption,
and partly on the backs
of waves
of immigrant laborers.
- [Voiceover] Like my ancestors.
And so during this time period
in the eastern part of Europe,
in the southern part of Europe,
there were political eruptions,
there were just general poverty
especially in Italy.
In Russia there were a number of pogroms,
which sent Russian Jews out of Russia
and they came to the United States.
And they came from very bad situations,
so what they came to was a little bit better
but it wasn't much better.
- [Voiceover] Which is how they all ended up
living in this one apartment
in lower Manhattan,
as you've detailed
in this Jacob Riis photograph.
- [Voiceover] Right.
Okay so, Jacob Riss was
a photographer in the 1890's.
And he went around the lower east side
of Manhattan,
basically just photographing
what he called "How the Other Half Lives".
By the other half he meant immigrants,
the poor who were living in the
lower east side of Manhattan.
Which, at that time,
was the most dense
section of humanity on Earth.
And you can see here that
this is a photograph from a tenement
that he took a picture of.
- [Voiceover] And what is a tenement?
- [Voiceover] So tenements were these
apartment dwellings
which kind of sprang up,
often in the backyards
of other normal buildings.
But they were sort of hastily constructed,
they had many rooms in them,
they weren't up to fire code.
I'm not even sure there was a fire code.
Most of the rooms didn't have windows
or electric lighting,
or ventilation.
- [Voiceover] Sounds like a great place to live.
(laughter)
But does it have curb appeal, Kim?
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] There is some pictures
that can show you no,
most of them were next
to giant rotting heaps of garbage.
- [Voiceover] Oh boy.
- [Voiceover] One of my favorite things
about the story of Jacob Riis
is that he was a pioneer
in the field of photography
because he used flash photography.
So you know,
you've seen in old movies
those flashbulbs that go off, right?
Cause that was the only way
he could get these apartments
- [Voiceover] Cause there was
no lighting in them.
- [Voiceover] There was no lighting in them.
so you couldn't take a picture
of them without light.
So he brought his flash camera
and he regularly set things on fire.
- [Voiceover] Oh no.
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] In these apartments
as he was trying to document
what life was like.
- [Voiceover] Oh that's awful.
- [Voiceover] So this is a photograph by Riis
called "Five Cents a Spot",
and so you paid five cents a night
to live in this apartment.
And so if you count here,
there's one,
two,
three,
four,
five,
six,
I think this is somebody else's legs,
seven, did I get everybody?
There might be somebody else hiding over here.
Seven men sharing this room,
and they're just doing the best they can.
- [Voiceover] Right.
- [Voiceover] And you compare that with this,
which is John D. Rockefeller's mansion
in New York.
It's called
and I'm gonna butcher this
"Kykuit".
So the real question of the Gilded Age
is how is it
that some people get so wealthy,
while some people are incredibly poor?
- [Voiceover] Sure.
- [Voiceover] And whose responsibility is that?
At one point,
J.P. Morgan decides he is going
to buy out Andrew Carnegie.
He buys him out for more than
four hundred million dollars,
he loans money to the U.S. government.
So he is the single biggest creditor
to the U.S. government.
At that point who has more power,
the federal government,
or J.P. Morgan?
- [Voiceover] So we're really talking
about the clash of two
great and terrible energies, right?
Like this immense wealth,
and this immense deprivation.
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] How do they play out?
- [Voiceover] We'll get to that
in some more videos.