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Social Inequality in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
The Gilded Age was one of the United States’ most prosperous eras. Between 1870 and the early 20th century, the country amassed wealth at a meteoric rate. The nation seemed headed in a path of economic stability, with everyone welcome to tag along, but this was a fallacy. The Gilded Age was glorious on the surface but full of rot underneath. It bled into the Progressive Era that aimed to correct the wrongs of the Gilded Age with arguably considerable success. It was a period of heightened social activism. In this paper, I look at the social injustices suffered by minority communities in these eras, how they sought to solve them, and the coverage of these critical periods of American history in the textbooks.
Social Inequalities Experienced by Minority Groups
One of the hallmarks of the Gilded Age was widespread inequality. This form of injustice broadly took two forms; social and economic (Cashman, 293). With the rise of corporations that offered jobs for everyone willing to work, streaming millions of immigrants from Europe and the Far East was a welcome sight; or so it was supposed to be. It led to the advent of the deplorable state of workers in the republic. The number of workers was more than the jobs, and mass unemployment followed. The majority of the migrant population was unskilled, and the lack of factory jobs meant no income.
Getting a job was not glorious, maybe just the lesser evil at best. Workers in these companies run by overly shrewd businessmen who held productivity above all else were paid meager wages for their troubles. They had to endure dangerous working conditions without compensation for injuries incurred while on the job. This, coupled with the high rent charged by landlords, made the cost of living for the immigrants fresh off the boat. So high was this cost that most immigrants were forced to live in crowded and sanitary and crime-riddled tenement yards, all in pursuit of the American Dream.
Most of the social injustice during the Gilded Age was propagated by trusts and companies running monopolies and the ‘robber barons’ who wanted to effect full-scale capitalism. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and JPMorgan are among them. To say that wealth distribution in the US was uneven will be a significant understatement. Four thousand families, which formed 1% of the population, controlled as much wealth as 11.6 million. The financial moguls that made their fortunes in various sectors of the economy insisted on production at whatever cost, a cost borne mainly by the working man. The stories, such as one of Carnegie releasing a small army on his workers, are quite scary.
Efforts to Address the Inequalities
With the Progressive Era came reforms; people were teaming up to end the social injustice they had been under for so long. The populist movement of Agrarian reforms, the antitrust movements, and the progressive movement of urban social reformers came up. It became evident that the only way to be hard was not by individual action but by a coalesced effort to seek rights and fair treatment (Cole, 297). Many policies to curtail inequality were formed and voiced. The guideline’s problem was that no infrastructure or groundwork was laid to make them politically feasible and practical.
Loewen’s Assessment of the Coverage of these Inequalities in Textbooks
Loewen is quite critical of how textbooks today and in the past have presented the issue of class. It is evident in Lies my Teacher Told Me. He says there is a general absence of class analysis in American History textbooks. It is almost impossible not to present class bias negatively; to avoid this and the controversy that would follow, textbooks give blandly positive accounts of history, sometimes not as it happened. This is a conscious effort to propagate the notion of the American dream.
Immigration which has been a crucial part of the nation’s journey since independence from Great Britain is given an unfair and shallow chunk of the history textbooks. They handle the topic in numbers, expressing statistics and non-descriptive information on the immigrants. Their issues in their voyages to America and their new life on the continent take a back seat. The only immigrants whose lives we get to know about are those that rose to fame by some act. The same is true for African Americans and does nothing but further cement the rags-to-riches narrative, which, while motivating, finds itself blaming the poor man for his poverty.
Loewen also implies that class bias in textbooks has been used as a tool to keep the rich getting their pockets deeper as they ‘deserve’ it and for the working class to accept their position in society. In a bid to discredit class bias, textbooks bring it out as meaningless old disputes unworthy of remembrance (Loewen, 137). Even the bills that strengthen the rich man’s position are downplayed at the expense of the poor. In chapter 7, Loewen blames society for class bias in textbooks. Until recently, authors were labeled as Marxists for featuring class issues in their books. With today’s society looking ever so close to being a second gilded age, textbooks should be at the front of ensuring that social inequality does not recur.
Progressive-era policies contributed to the deterioration of blacks, migrants, and workers. Instead of reducing monopoly and inequality, the state created a super monopoly and elevated the struggle for privilege and rent-seeking as a principle. Not everything is described truthfully in textbooks about how life was organized at that time. Therefore, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, modern textbooks must contain accurate information to avoid the mistakes of the past.
Works Cited
Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age. NYU Press, 1993.
Cole, Peter. Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era. Philadelphia University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. The New Press, 2008.
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