the GILDED AGE Industry, Inequality, and Making of Modern America: AMERICAN CHRONICLES Volume V X 18761900

Mark Twain called it gilded, not golden - and he meant exactly what you think he meant.In the twenty-five years after Reconstruction collapsed, the United States built more railroad track, produced more steel, and accumulated more concentrated private wealth than any nation in history to that point. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan built industrial empires from nothing. Twelve million immigrants arrived to staff the factories those empires required. The frontier closed, the Plains nations were defeated, and a continental republic became the world's leading industrial power within a single working lifetime.The Gilded Age tells that story - and the other one happening at exactly the same time. While the wealthiest one percent accumulated a share of the nation's wealth not matched again for over a century, organized labor fought some of the bloodiest strikes in American history and lost most of them. Farmers crushed by falling prices and predatory railroad rates built the most serious third-party insurgency the country had seen since before the Civil War. And in the defeated South, with the federal government's silent acquiescence, white political leadership constructed Jim Crow: poll taxes, literacy tests, "separate but equal," and a wave of lynching terror - a comprehensive legal architecture of racial subordination built in the open, on the record, while the rest of the country built railroads instead of paying attention.This volume gives both stories equal and serious weight. It doesn't reduce Rockefeller and Carnegie to simple villains, and it doesn't let the era's industrial achievement excuse what was built, with comparable ambition and far less scrutiny, in the same twenty-five years.By 1898, the United States had run out of continent to expand into - so it started looking overseas instead.