Gilded Age (1 janv. 1876 – 1 janv. 1892)

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In the 1880s, radical farmers’ groups and the Knights of Labor provided a powerful challenge to industrialization (Chapter 16). At the same time, groups such as the WCTU (Chapter 17) and urban settlements (Chapter 18) laid the groundwork for later progressive reform work, especially among women. Though they had different goals, these groups confronted similar dilemmas upon entering politics. Should they work through existing political parties? Create new ones? Or generate pressure from the outside? Reformers tried all these strategies.


Electoral Politics After Reconstruction
The end of Reconstruction ushered in a period of close political conflict, with neither of the major parties holding a secure national majority. Republicans and Democrats traded control of the Senate three times between 1880 and 1894, and the House majority five times. Causes of this tight competition included northerners’ disillusionment with Republican policies and the resurgence of southern Democrats, who regained a strong base in Congress. Dizzying population growth also changed the size and shape of the House of Representatives. In 1875, it counted 243 seats; two decades later, that had risen to 356. Between 1889 and 1896, entry of seven new western states — Montana, North and South Dakota, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah — contributed to political uncertainty.


Heated competition and the legacies of the Civil War evoked strong party loyalties from millions of Americans. Union veterans donned their uniforms to march in Republican parades, while ex-Confederate Democrats did the same in the South. When politicians appealed to war loyalties, critics ridiculed them for “waving the bloody shirt”: whipping up old animosities that ought to be set aside. For those who had fought or lost beloved family members in the conflict, however — as well as those struggling for African American rights — war issues remained crucial. Many voters also had strong views on economic policies, especially Republicans’ high protective tariffs. Proportionately more voters turned out in presidential elections from 1876 to 1892 than at any other time in American history.

Presidents of this era had limited room to maneuver in a period of narrow victories, when the opposing party often held one or both houses of Congress. Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison both won in the electoral college — allocated by state — but lost the popular vote. In 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland won only 29,214 more votes than his opponent, James Blaine, while almost half a million voters rejected both major candidates (Map 19.1). With key states decided by razor-thin margins, both Republicans and Democrats engaged in vote buying and other forms of fraud. The fierce struggle for advantage also prompted innovations in political campaigning (see “Thinking Like a Historian”).

Some historians have characterized this period as a Gilded Age, when politics was corrupt and stagnant. The term Gilded Age, borrowed from the title of an 1873 novel cowritten by Mark Twain, suggested that America had achieved a glittery outer coating of prosperity, but underneath suffered from moral decay. Economically, the term Gilded Age seems apt: as we have seen in previous chapters, a handful of men made spectacular fortunes, and their triumphs belied a rising crisis of poverty, pollution, and erosion of workers’ rights. But political leaders were not blind to these problems, and the political scene was hardly idle or indifferent. Rather, Americans bitterly disagreed about what to do. Nonetheless, as early as the 1880s, Congress passed important new federal measures to clean up corruption and rein in corporate power. That decade deserves to be considered an early stage in the emerging Progressive Era (see “Comparing Interpretations”).

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