Gilded Age Essay Example For Students

Gilded Age Essay The term Gilded Age Essay was named for a Mark Twain book. It meant covered with gold, and was applied to this period as a whole. This was a period poorness and corruption. The Republicans and Democrats didnt really have strong opposing beliefs during this period. The Republicans supported high tariffs and sound money. The Democrats supported lower tariffs and expanded currency. Both rural and urban classes supported each party. They worked with spoils and local issues. Both parties worked to please everyone, and to attract voters. Since both parties were so close in strength, it caused the elections to be fought harder. The Republicans used the waving of the bloody shirt tactic. This meant that they brought back the past in order to avoid the real issues. They portrayed the Democrats as rebel traitors. The Republicans were against alcohol. One president was Grant during this period. He was elected into office for his past war experience. He had little knowledge of politics, and depended on his fellow politicians. Chernys focus early in the book on the role of the political parties during the time period. He does not scratch the surface, but tries to dig deep the Gilded Age of politics. Cherny also addresses social and economic changes. He said that progress merely provided a gleaming surface of the Gilded Age. Just below that golden surface, however, lay twelve-hour workdays in factories, the widespread use of child labor, and large-scale business dealings (Cherny 4). During the gilded age, parties changed their traditional ways of voting and elections. Parties were at war to gain political majority in order to have control in government decisions, so they began tactics to insure victories at the polls. Parties discouraged attendance at primaries by meeting at late hours and dangerous areas, developed bargaining tactics like logrolling (trading of influence or votes among legislators to gain passage of certain projects), and voters found it difficult to split a ticket when party organizers left no space to fill in names on the ballot. In Chernys book, Richard Jensen said that Elections were treated like battles in which the two main armies (parties) concentrated on fielding the maximum number of troops (voters) on the battlefield (polls) on election day (Cherny 12). America was supposedly a country where a man could choose freely who he wanted to represent him, but in reality parties choose the candidates. In the video The River Ran Red, the events of the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 showed the myths of America being destroyed by giants like Andrew Carnegie who tried taking away his workers economic independence. The Union wanted to keep short workdays and good working conditions. Carnegie wanted to gain control of the factory from the Union and then implement lower wages. America struggled to maintain industrial progress and also allow workers to have time outside work. The Union and talks of strike was not welcome in the world of Carnegie, and was not a change the nation was willing to accept. America portrayed a myth of economic independence and boundless opportunity during the industrial progression, when in reality a worker was controlled by executive tyrants below the gilded surface. The fourteenth amendment centralized on establishing that the federal government was more powerful than the state government, something that American citizens were not going to accept. The amendment gave blacks citizenship, which then also gave them the right to vote. Legally it gave some rights to blacks, but in reality Americans were fearful of losing political power, especially in the southern states. According to the amendment, no state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, (Fourteenth Amendment, 1868). The amendment targeted southerners, who in turn were unwilling to accept the new given rights to blacks nor the governments power over the state. Although America on the outside showed gilded signs of progress, the country was battling as political corruption, labor strikes, and southerners who continued to cling to their old ways by refusing to comply with the federal government. Political parties mocked the myth that America was a classless/democratic society. The labor union disputes dispelled the myths that America .