Impact Of Race In The Gilded Age

The rapid growth of the economy in the United States the Gilded Age generated a lot of wealth. The growth of the railroads, telegraph and later telephone lines stretching across the country created new opportunities for entrepreneurs and the people looking for work; and gave cheaper goods to consumers.

Greed can be a powerful motivating force, evident through the positive impact it had on Industrialization in America during the Gilded Age. During this time new inventions became plentiful, but where there were new inventions there also had to be new businesses to back these inventions up and allow them to be successful. Wealthy business owners were able to help in this regard. They already had the capacity to help facilitate the creation of these new inventions, but it did not stop there. This is where greed came in. Greed is the intense and selfish desire for wealth, and it was this that empowered the rich during this time to expand upon their already successful businesses to become even more rich and powerful than they were before. This led to a surge of businesses in the country, and it was all due to greed. It was this desire for more that led to an increase in productivity in the country that helped with the spread of technology throughout it which made it more enticing for immigrants coming to America.

The Gilded Age is defined as the time between the Civil War and World War I, during which the United States population grew quickly and the economy prospered greatly. However, it is also known to be cluttered with political corruption and corporate financial misleadings, in which the rich grew very wealthy and the poor were basically peasants. The economic growth of the nation was highly influenced by the availability of land and technological innovations promised through multiple acts passed throughout the time period, and, as a result, there were many negative changes in the social standing of minorities.

Throughout the course of the Gilded Age, several influential figures rose impacting the economy, political factors, and culture of the United States. One of the most important figures of this time period was Frances Willard, born in New York in 1839. She held several important positions, exceeding as an educator, a women’s suffragist, and a co-founder of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The fact that Frances Willard held these positions indicates that she contributed to the improvement of the United States, specifically by educating Women, fighting for Women’s rights, and fighting for prohibition. These key roles were complementary to the issues associated with the United States at the time. For example, a significantly low percentage of the population attended college after completing high school. Most of the people that attended college at the time were men. Women were typically held to Victorian standards by society’s expectation of them to stay home to raise children, making it uncommon for them to attend college. In terms of alcohol, Christian churches completely disagreed with and despised the consumption of liquor, leading to the establishment of temperance reform. Frances Willard was the most influential figure of the Gilded Age because of her work through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union that contributed towards the ratification of the 18th and 19th amendment, prohibiting the consumption or production of alcohol and

During the time of construction, the First Transcontinental Railroad not only unified America, but unified the world through the lens of American Exceptionalism. Subsequently, American Exceptionalism is the idea that the United States is unique among all other nations of the world through the idea of democracy and liberty. The construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad brought workers from all over the globe, uniting them in order to achieve a common goal: transforming the world. Out of the 10,000 total workers constructing the First Transcontinental Railroad, nearly two-thirds of them were Chinese, and many more were Irish. This idea of American Exceptionalism and the idea of prosperity in the United States is one of the main reasons that the First Transcontinental Railroad brought many immigrants from around the world to the United States during the mid 1800s. Conclusively, the idea of being unique among other nations through freedom, liberty, and democracy is what drove immigrants to come to the United States in order to

Furthermore, there were many opportunities that the U.S itself presented to Chinese immigrants that were very desirable. For example the United States presented different variety of jobs. Such as Chinese gold miners, this was very exquisitely beneficial to them, because most of the Chinese’s reason for migrating to the United State was because at that time gold was discovered their. The Chinese did not only mind for gold other jobs were also included like, cooks, storekeepers, launderers, railroad workers, and household servants. And the two main jobs that you can find the most variety of numbers of Chinese were miners and railroad workers. In fact of the railroad jobs, for them it was a decent paying job. It was a pretty good amount of number of Chinese immigrants that were railroad workers; it was approximately ten thousand of them. And as I stated before the pay was pretty decent, the average railroad payroll for Chinese immigrants was about thirty five dollars a month. But their pay check would soon decrease during the day. Because the cost of food was about fifteen to eighteen dollars, so basically a Chinese railroad worker would make twenty dollars a month. Even though through the good payments the two main well paying jobs the Chinese had were very dangerous in many conditions. For instance, when they usually work in mines

Black Americans faced several harmful social, economic, and political conditions in the United States of America during the Gilded Age. One of the unfair social conditions they faced was segregation. For example, in Florida, Kentucky, and Mississippi, the Jim Crow Laws required separate schools for white children and children of color. In Georgia, blacks barbers were not allowed to serve white women or girls. In Virginia, theaters that attended by white and black people had to separate the two races into different sections of the theater. Many argued that the two races were separate but equal, however that could not be further from the truth. Separate does not equal equality. There was a racial pyramid in the country with white people at the

The Gilded Age was characterized by rapid industrialization, reconstruction, ruthless pursuit of profit, government, corruption, and vulgarity (Cashman 1). After the Civil War, America was beginning to regroup as a nation. There were many other changes developing in the country. Industrialization was taking over the formerly agricultural country. The nation’s government was also in great conflict (Foner 20). Many changes occurred during the Gilded Age. These changes affected farmers, labor, business, and politics.

The Gilded Age was a very special time for our nation that took place from the 1870s to around 1900. During this time, economic growth was at a rapid increase, politics were corrupted yet had high turnouts, and urbanization flourished. Every aspect of the life of an American changed drastically throughout this time of the Gilded Age. The entire era was focused on the enormous changes that each aspect of America was going through. As this is brought to attention, if we are to look into the way that America is in our time of today, we can find that there are many similarities to that of the original Gilded Age. The United States of America have currently found themselves to be experiencing the second era of the Gilded Age throughout the areas of economic, politic and social transformation.

To make it worse, the Chinese’s exotic culture, language, and dress, surprised many Americans, and at that time period, to be different was considered bad. They were given dangerous and lowlife jobs even the hard working Irish didn’t want. The building of the transcontinental railroad required the use of explosives to carve a way through the Rocky Mountains and this job fell to the Chinese. Thousands of Chinese lives were lost. Another job was the laundry shops.

As class and race had some influence on The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, gender explains the character of these periods because there were several instances were manhood was threatened, which pushed males to reassert their manhood. Gender was also critical in displaying women’s active role in American society. There even were cases in which these periods sought to protect women and demonstrated the emergence of women’s new identity.

In the 1850s, many Chinese workers migrated to America by starting in the gold mines to agricultural jobs to factory work to garment industry. Chinese immigrants were instrumental in building the railroads in the West. As the Chinese laborers increased, so did the anti-Chinese sentiment among workers in the American economy. In result, passing legislation that limited future Chinese laborers in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was formed from the unsettling of economic competition. Most Chinese labors sent money back to China to support their families as well as pay of loans to those who paid for their trip to America. The pressures left them to work for whatever wages they could get. However, white laborers required higher wages.

The transcontinental railroad was built by two major companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific. The Central Pacific company worked eastbound. They faced the treacherous terrain of the Rocky Mountains, landslides, and winter snowdrifts. Central Pacific would hire Chinese immigrants. These Chinese immigrants, “... made up 85 percent of the Central Pacific workforce.” (Holt McDougal,

On May 10th, 1869, a large, blustering crowd gathered at Promontory Point, Utah. That day would mark the completion of one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 1800’s: the Pacific Railroad. After six years of grueling works, millions of dollars spent, and many battles against Native Americans fought, sea to shining sea was finally connected by two ribbons of iron. A young telegraph operator sent a message along the coast-to-coast telegraph line that accompanied the rails to the waiting America: “DONE!”. America was to be transformed by the new railroad. Masses of immigrants flocked out to the newly connected western territories in pursuit of better lives, towns cropped up over night along the route, and an agricultural empire was born as farming machinery was brought to the fertile western plains of the United States. Despite the profoundly positive impact the railroad had on the United States came at a great cost. The more than 12,000 Chinese immigrant workers of the transcontinental railroad were treated poorly throughout construction, and Native America empires in the plains lay in ruins from the battalions that battled their people and the government that annexed their lands. A query then arises; did the benefits the Pacific Railroad brought to America outweigh the unequal respect and maltreatment given to the Chinese immigrant workers and the Native American tribes? This is the question this essay will answer, as it examines the role the

In the mid 19th century, America was viewed as a hotspot for freedom and wealth. When the noise of the gold rush flooded the world, immigrants started to see America more appetizing than ever. The Chinese saw America as a place to have a fresh start and as a place of refuge because of it’s generosity, so they immigrated to the west in great numbers. There was a large Chinese population in Virginia and all along the Pacific coast. Writers Mark Twain and Maxine Hong Kingston both wrote in great detail about the Chinese Immigrants. They went into detail about the immigrants and how they came over and why. Although Twain and Kingston both wrote about the immigrants in a positive light, Twain was sympathetic of the immigrants and Kingston focused more on their image and her ancestors.