How Gilded Age Corruption Led to the Progressive Era
As the rich grew richer during the Gilded Age, the poor grew poorer, spurring the call for reforms.
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As the rich grew richer during the Gilded Age, the poor grew poorer, spurring the call for reforms.
Propelled by a Second Industrial Revolution, the United States arose from the ashes of the Civil War to become one of the world’s leading economic powers by the turn of the 20th century. Corporate titans such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan amassed spectacular fortunes and engaged in the most conspicuous of consumptions. Beneath this golden veneer, however, American society was tarnished by poverty and corruption, which caused this period of American history to be called the “Gilded Age,” derived from the title of an 1873 novel co-authored by Mark Twain.
You are all a lost generation. Ernest Hemingway remembered Gertrude Stein telling him in the 1920s that this remark had been the rebuke of a Parisian garage owner to a young mechanic who had not repaired her car on time.
They were all a lost generation he had said, according to Hemingway, all those young men who have been in the First World War.
However, Stein herself ascribed it to a friend, a hotelier, complaining that men had formerly become civilised in their late teens and early 20s but that the war had deprived them of that civilising phase.
Either way, the comment comes out of Paris in the 1920s and in its original usage it concerned a generation that had grown up with the optimism of the Second Industrial Revolution - that remarkable period in the late 19th and early 20th century that gave the world the radio and moving pictures, the bicycle, motorcar and aeroplane, new fabrics, chemicals and medicines. It had seemed that science and technology, democracy and reason w
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