Key Concept 6.3

The "Gilded Age" witnessed new cultural and intellectual movements in tandem with political debates over economic and social policies.

I. Gilded Age politics were intimately tied to big business and focused nationally on economic issues - tariffs, currency, corporate expansion, and laissez-faire economic policy - that engendered numerous calls for reform.

• Corruption in government - especially as it related to big business - energized the public to demand increased popular control and reform of local, state, and national governments, ranging from minor changes to major overhauls of the capitalist system.
  • referendum, socialism, Interstate Commerce Act
• Increasingly prominent racist and nativist theories, along with Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson, were sued to justify violence, as well as local and national policies of discrimination and segregation.
  • American Protective Association, Chinese Exclusion Act

II. New cultural and intellectual movements both buttressed and challenged the social order of the Gilded Age.

• Cultural and intellectual arguments justified the success of those at the tope of the socioeconomic structure as both appropriate and inevitable, even as some leaders argued that the wealthy had some obligation to help the less fortunate.
  • Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Gospel of Wealth
• A number of critics challenged the dominant corporate ethic in the United States and sometimes capitalism itself, offering alternate visions of the good society through utopianism and the Social Gospel.
• Challenging their prescribed "place," women and African American activists articulated alternative visions of political, social, and economic equality.
  • Booker T. Washington, Ida Wells-Barnett, Elizabeth Cady Stanton