Essay about Change and Continuity in the Guilded Age

After the civil war, up until the early 1900s, the need for a larger workforce grew as industrialization expanded. Samuel Slater brought the industrial revolution from England, and even since then, there were people trying to get better working conditions. Due to the growth in population by immigrants and expansion of industrialization, the working conditions became worse and worse, causing workers to suffer. Many people fought to solve this problem and changed many American’s lives for the better.

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, America was dominated by change. Expansion, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism swept the nation from coast to coast affecting every class, race and religion. The United States economy changed dramatically, as the country transformed from a rural agricultural nation to an urban industrial giant, the leading manufacturing country in the world. As this economic growth proliferated, Chicago was the epicenter in America. Travelers from Europe flocked to Chicago in search of opportunity. Meatpacking and steel were especially attractive for unskilled laborers from Europe.

The U.S. changed a lot of things, from the year 1770 to 1870. The population went up in an extreme wave. It went from 2,148,100 in 1770 to 38,558,371 in 1870. The population increase was caused by immigrants migrating to the US and slavery as well. They had a big affect on next century. Then Americans created roads, waterways, railroads, steam boats, and railroad cars that are kept cool.

During 1880 to 1860, The United States of America went through social, political and economic changes, which affected the North and South in different ways.

During the 19th century cities in America started growing at a very rapid rate. Each major city attracted citizens because they offered jobs and more opportunities for people to make a living. In the west, these cities were fueled by the gold rush, and in the south they were driven by tobacco and iron production. The growth in the west and the south followed a period of rapid growth in American cities in the north. There were two main reasons for this growth, industrialization and mechanization.

The United States grew at a dramatic rate between the years 1880 and 1900, within the cities. U.S. cities grew by approximately 15 million people in the two decades before 1900. Many historians claim that most of the population growth was due to the expansion of industry. It is also believed that the majority of the population explosion was immigrants that were arriving from all over the world. A good amount of people from the rural areas of America also moved to the cities during this period in the search of work. Between 1880 and 1890, it is suggested that almost 40 percent of the townships in the United States lost population because of migration.

At the culmination of the nineteenth century in the United States, industrialization was transforming cities at a lightning pace. With a flurry of immigration and expansion, urban populations were multiplying by the decade, at a rate twice the speed of the total American population. In 1860, the city of Chicago had a mere 100,000 residents but by 1890 had exploded to harbor over one million people. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe had skyrocketed over these few decades, bringing a new working class and a new backbone for the American industrial economy. This burgeoning industrial system proved to be very attractive for immigrants across the globe, drawing in

In A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson reveals that the emergence of industrial capitalism caused a numerous of effects. In an attempt to bring order, employees stopped living with their employers, ceased drinking during work hours and the social relation between employees and employers started to

One would think industrialization would bring better paying jobs and more employment opportunities, but the stories of the people who lived through the Industrial Revolution say otherwise. Workers faced long days, if not even longer days than those who worked in preindustrial times. Even though work hours were somewhat the same as preindustrial labor, the way those hours were carried out differed greatly. Laborers no longer had the comfort of working alongside and socializing with their families nor the power to control their pace of work. Workers would now be punished and penalized for doing such things. Companies would enforce punctuality and pace usually by correlating it with a worker’s pay. The less punctual and lazier you were, the more fines and the more pay decreases you would suffer. The nature of this new labor emphasized more on the importance of the company rather than the individual. Companies often had little concern when their workers suffered. If someone was incapable of performing their duties, there was always somebody else to take their place. It was unfortunate because many of these workers who were unable to perform well at their job often suffered from

Once the rebellions and strikes settled down in the nineteenth-century people could continue working and could have the ability to have major success while working. There were favorable outcomes in terms of money, workers needs, and the ability to spread the political power around so it was not be concentrated and owned by one person or company for each prospective market. While the decrease in strikes, eight-hour workdays, and compensation for some workers’ considered to have made gains in the labor workforce, it actually was the opposite. Problems still surfaced such as, the division of the workforce ethnically and racially, an increase in immigrants, and the enlargement of wealth for the important political figures and the people in command.

Life for the people in the 1840s-1860s was changing and it was changing dramatically. Western movement increased due to manifest destiny that many believed it was God's will for the american people to move coast to coast. There was some technological advancements also going on people could now send messages through morse code which was good for sending Political messages commercial messages and also emergency messages. Railroads even became a huge hit amongst the people of that time this turned Chicago into the number one commercial hub because of all these advancements city growth and wages also increased. Homes were also starting to change homes made of wood were now being replaced with brick row houses. The upper/middle class had beautiful homes and also beautiful furniture. (Article continued on

The Industrial Revolution accomplished far more than just revolutionizing the factory system. Even though industrializing managed to drastically increase efficiency of labor and intensely lower the prices of goods, it wholly transfigured the social relationship of the labor intensive working class. Dawley and Faler examine the historical effect of the workers that adopted the newfound ethics and personalities of their thriving, higher-class employers and people that used these morals to rebel against the new industrial system.

After the end of the Civil War, industrialization and urbanization blossomed and changed the nation. Instead of presidential power, men were aiming to be industrial tycoons for their wealth and power. To the people, these capitalists were regarded as either admirable “captains of industry” or corrupt “robber barons”. Even though to some people they may seem like “captains of industry”, but they were actually corrupt “robber barons” for several reasons regarding corruption, employee issues, and matters of the social classes.

The concept of the guild, or occupational group, as its modern version has sometimes been called, is one of the most distinctive features of Catholic socio-economic thought. The guild combined two of the most important points of Catholic social theory, the principle of subsidiarity, as it later became known, and a distrust of purely economic motives in the conduct of human affairs. In the workings of the medieval guilds one can see both of these principles clearly, and because of this, Catholic thought has insisted on the continuing relevance of the guild idea to even a modern economy. The great differences between medieval and modern technology and social organization are no reason to question whether the guild system, with appropriate adaptations and modifications, is not still viable for a contemporary economy, as more than one twentieth-century pope insisted. In order to understand how the guilds embodied these principles, let us look at the actual operation of the medieval guilds in their own setting.

As workers moved to cities to work in factories, and progress in medical and sanitation practices improved, urban crowding became a huge issue. Additionally, where industry was taking over production in markets that had previously been dominated by small business owners, these skilled workers, weavers and the like, were now being forced to take jobs working for capitalist ventures-- often working in the industry coinciding with their master skill, but