preview

Essay On The Gilded Age

Decent Essays

The gilded age was a time of poverty and unfair treatment of groups of people. The ones that laid the tracks to the place we are in now, as an industrial based country, were treated poorly. The Gilded Age was covered in corruption, filth, lies, and injustice. The heart of it all, New York City, contributed the most. With the incoming factories, boats filled with desperate immigrants, and developing technologies, nothing but the word gilded could appropriately describe this time.
Gilded is a word used to describe when a less valuable or cheap piece of metal is coated in gold to give the appearance of it being a nice object; if a person were to look underneath that gold however, they would see the cheap piece of metal. In the movie Filthy Cities- …show more content…

The example of the frozen muck was just one thing that stood out to me from this movie. Another was the living conditions of the immigrants and lower class during this time. Most lived in tenant buildings and lived with two or three other families inside that room. These apartments would now be considered a one to two person house in New York. Besides the fact that these spaces were very cramped, each floor had to share a bathroom. That means upwards of sixty people could be sharing a single bathroom. This is disgusting and extremely unhygienic. With cramped spaces comes bug infestations and illnesses. To say the least, these “homes” were breaking every health code violation that exists today. I strongly disagree with how these people were treated and expected to live. They were treated terribly at work, and came home to filthy houses. Everything about this era is a disappointment to what the United States was supposed to be. Immigrants came to America for new opportunities and instead were faced with a life that was just as miserable as the one they came from before.
To add to the disappointment of what seemed like such a perfect time era, what the American people were being fed was practically poison. In Filthy Cities, Andy Robbins takes us through the process of making sasuage from this time. Sasuage was rotten meat that could not be sold

Get Access