Period 6: Industrial Capitalism and the Gilded Age, 1865–1898
Industrial order
The Gilded Age combined explosive industrial growth with political corruption. Railroads created national markets; Carnegie integrated steel, Rockefeller dominated oil through trusts, and vertical and horizontal integration lowered costs and crushed competition. Social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth justified inequality, while workers organized in the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and industrial unions. Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), and Pullman (1894) turned public opinion against radical labor.
Cities, immigrants, and the West
Immigration from southern and eastern Europe transformed cities, where political machines such as Tammany Hall traded services for votes. Reformers pushed civil service reform (Pendleton Act, 1883) and railroad regulation (Interstate Commerce Act, 1887; Sherman Antitrust Act, 1890). Farmers organized the Grange and the Populist Party, whose Omaha Platform demanded free silver, an income tax, and direct election of senators. In the West, the Dawes Act (1887) broke up tribal lands, and Wounded Knee (1890) marked the end of armed resistance. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned 'separate but equal.'
Traps: 'laissez-faire' is misleading-government provided land grants, tariffs, and troops. Populists were not only farmers, and their platform was not socialist. Plessy did not create segregation; it constitutionalized it.
Worked example: if asked why the Sherman Antitrust Act had little effect at first, note that courts used it more against unions than trusts, and its wording was vague.
Rule of thumb: industrialization created both enormous wealth and organized resistance-link economic change to political response.