Gilded Age Dbq Analysis

Adam Choquette Period 4 US History The Gilded Age DBQ

Emerging from the shadows of the Civil War prosperous, many ‘shoddy millionaires’ profited through schemeful enterprising, cheating the US government of millions of dollars. Unlike true patriots, such profiteers furnished union soldiers with ‘shoddy’ rather than virgin wool, and sold the United States government cardboard soles of shoes rendering many Union soldiers ill-equipped during the Civil War. In the context of capitalism, these so called titans of industry grew more and more affluent, exploiting the American worker in order to reap the fruitful rewards of exploitative, monopolistic enterprise. Consequently, the ‘Gilded Age’ ensued, its name inspired by the delicate mask of
Document B depicts a child laborer in a sewing shop. Employers often tasked children with the most arduous of duties while paying them paltry amounts, driving wages down and causing competition for the ordinary adult worker. Accordingly, movements such as the education movement fermented. Orchestrated by Horace Mann, the intent behind educating children was to keep them out of the factories and to cultivate a more informed citizenry. Likewise, the cult of domesticity emerged after women created competition for jobs driving wages lower. Just as children underwent compulsory education, women were placed upon a pedestal and granted with the special job of educating the country’s youth at home. With a new influx of immigrants in the 1880s from southeastern Europe and east Asia, nativists reacted analogous to such education reformers and proponents of the cult of domesticity in years prior. Immigrants, just like women and children, were willing to work for lower wages which inspired the nativist movement to push for acts such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) which “suspended...the coming of Chinese laborers.” This act represented the first in US history that the government regulated immigration from a particular region. Subsequent Supreme Court Case US v. Kim Wong Ark, however, affirmed the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause asserting that the act must be “construed and
This time, however, it was not the votes of immigrants but the pockets of the captains of industry which facilitated such graft. In his political cartoon “The Bosses of the Senate,” editor and cartoonist Joseph Keppler epitomizes the susceptibility of the Senate to the interests of big business trusts. In it, one can discern the intimidating faces of the large trusts overlooking their browbeaten puppets(G). A sign hangs above them proclaiming “this is a Senate of the monopolists and for the monopolists.” Because monopolists donated to politicians ensuring their election, they expected a return investment therefore intimidating them into protecting the trusts and such horizontal integration which enables their profiteering. A prime example of said monetary expenditures is the election of 1896 which fostered the emergence of the fourth party system. Marcus Hanna was the monopolist responsible for greasing McKinley’s election into the White House through his donations of $16 million. Industrial tycoons undermined the virtues of capitalism, overwhelming smaller competition by bribing railroads and the government alike. Indeed, George Rice, a competing oil company owner to Rockefeller's Standard Oil described how Rockefeller colluded with railroad companies which offered Standard Oil lower rates to transport his oil (J).