What were the defining characteristics of the Gilded Age?
1 Answer
Corporatism, Few regulations, widening social inequalities and Industrialization
Explanation:
The Gilded Age is the time when Industrialiation, Capitalism and trusts triumphed. The gap between the poor and the rich widened to unprecedented proportions which explains the expression "Gilded Age" coined by Mark Twain with his eponymous novel since only the "surface" is gilded.
After the Civil War, the Rural South was ravaged and agriculture was supplanted. Issues such as Child Labor emerged. Great technical progress was made possible with the construction of the Transcontinental railroads which linked the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The 1890 Sherman Law tried to put and end to the hegemony of the trusts embodied by the Robber Barons, the owners of the trusts( Carnegie and Schwab for steel, Mellon and Rockefeller for oil, Astor in estate, Harriman and Vanderbilt in railways and JP Morgan in Banking) but no major attempt was done before the Progressive Era and the emblematic Theodore Roosevelt(1901-1909).
