What are the good things about the gilded age?

Answer 1

Gilded refers that which is golden, or appears to be golden---thus, in other words, the culture of money and its protection, so this answer emphasizes those aspects. It has a not always-readily-apparent pejorative aspect as a label. In general terms, the wealth of the nation expanded in the American Gilded Age, from around 1870-1900, broadly speaking, but the basis of severe economic inequalities were also starting to form in a new way or even more insidious ways in some categories. In part, this was due to the enormous influx of foreign immigrants who usually lived under very poor economic conditions, and often brought freedom-demanding ideas with them from Europe. (Even if they were not fleeing intellectuals, they sought the general idea of freedom away from the tyranny of European near-slavery for the working classes, especially in rural areas.)

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In the U.S., this tension in a dynamic growing labor pool was in obvious growing conflict with the upper classes who were closing off into an even more separate realm of wealth and polite manners. Partly this was to protect their special economic privileges, but also to prove that the USA had finally achieved cultural (and economic) maturity on its own, although still bowing modestly to European art and cultural standards in most instances for several decades to come. It was also the time that the 19th-century Supreme Court took on its unique role of virtually overtly protecting big business, and thus it contributed to the ideology that to be free in America meant. perhaps if only as casuistry, "all were free," including the new legal idea of the corporation which in this opportunistic view should be treated as an individual, not a company. (It thereby gained freedoms and protections as a legal entity that spared it from liability as a body over a group, such as workers in its employ. Some say this was necessary to allow companies to grow and the economy to expand while others said it was taken to an extreme and used fro cruel exploitation.)

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Also, although this was the age of Darwin and the explosively influential ideas of evolution, during which many people adapted the idea of "survival of the fittest" to the business world, there were some wealthy people who believed somewhat that they were doing good for the whole of society by creating wealth that would enrich the nation, and all the people, and were thus even fulfilling a Christian duty in that way. This could be both the truth and a self-serving hypocrisy of course, but such was the case. (Some of these people of more modest middle-class means tried to implement some of the reforms of the Progressive era early in the 20th century, but they also tended to hesitate about the readiness of the "masses" to decide things for the nation as a whole.)

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The effect for many years was that for the extended period after, from about 1885-1935, it was accepted that the Courts would almost always approve private business interests over any individual citizen or even any government attempt to improve conditions. This included safer working conditions, social security, child labor restrictions, minimum wages, and many other moderate controls on business that we take for granted now. The Courts during this time very frequently--usually-- said that the federal Government could constitutionally pass no laws on these matters, even if they were national concerns, not just a particular state. The latter was a relatively extreme extension of this legal principle by modern standards.

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Thus, the two main effects of the Gilded Age were a stiffening of economic protection of big business and banking under the umbrella of legal protection, and the encouragement of a belief, a sort of half-true "American dream" that nobody was hurt by this since anyone with ambition could become a rich man.

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(It must also be noted that following the Civil War, the problems of how to bring the South back into the national union was a major difficulty. The strong moves of northern-led Reconstructionists to quickly bring political and personal rights to the freed African-Americans was abandoned due to political compromises after a few years. Within twenty years after the war, the majority of ruling society had more or less agreed to let the South treat blacks as second class citizens, and let them pass the "Jim Crow" laws that said blacks and whites had to use separate facilities [such as schools, hotels and stores] Again, the Supreme Court took the exclusionary side, saying in 1896 that such separation was legal, as long as the facilities were "equal." Of course, this was one of many legal and social-sanctioned fictions (gildings) as in fact they were almost never of the same quality for blacks, but this indicated the way society said in its words, perhaps even its partial beliefs, that the individual had rights and great freedom. But in reality very many did not, just as was true in the economic realm.)

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Both beliefs were finally altered by the Great Depression when it was clear that the individual could NOT solve his own problems created by economic forces almost totally out of his or her control, could not depend on family or religious charity in the community, and secondly, that the Government not only could control and improve the life of the national community with its active moves, but that perhaps it even had a social and moral obligation to do so. (And later the Courts, especially after 1937, when different sorts of judges were appointed, increasingly joined in the trend of protecting citizen rights, thus finding a new and more democratically humane balance between letting the market do whatever it "naturally" wanted, and the protection of the citizens on the other hand with at least some moderate minimal protection of human rights and decency, even if this limited the upper extremes of wealth accumulation).

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But it was, after the 1930s, a revolution against the Gilded Age's effects in thinking about business and the individual that has become thoroughly made part of the American majority of thought, even if we still argue about the ideas in its details from time to time. To some degree, the argument came up again during the Reagan era, when that President attacked the government using the old terms---as something that was not the People themselves, but a force out to hurt the People and make trouble for business and free enterprise. (Many strongly suggest this is not a correct interpretation at all of the Founders' intentions, as diverse a lot as they were.)

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Yet even that rhetoric has faded somewhat from memory, and was nothing like the extremes it was a century ago, and is now much less prevalent again in the political sense of the majority of the 21st century. The 1980s and a "new Gilded Age" ethos were partly re-enacted until recently, although it would be erroneous to draw a direct parallel between the two eras.) But the changes of the 1940s through the 1970s, which may tentatively be described as generally ''progressive,'' occurred very slowly (except in the social realm which often moved faster) since those powerful 19th century Gilded Age ideas of how economic expansion and protection, especially---and social rights---should be defined had been in control of the guiding discourse on polity almost all of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, the expansion of the idea of broader citizenship took a long time to take hold in both the legal and popular imagination.

______________________TS 5.09 -- edit 12-13 TS

Answer 2

Good* innovation, sky scrapers, jobs, freedom, individualism, urbanization. Bad* corruption, social criticism, nativism, robber barons, segregation, poor living conditions