The assassin who ended the life of Abraham Lincoln extinguished the light of the Republic. On April 14, 1865, after the president argued in the cabinet for generous treatment of the South, vanquished in the war between the states, he went to the theater. It was Good Friday and there was a conspiracy afoot to kill him. During the third act of the play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, actor John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical partisan of the southern cause, stole into his box and shot him in the head at close range. Lincoln never regained consciousness and died early...

The Christmas of 1900 was especially merry for America’s industrial titans, notably three wise men who had already made their New Year’s resolution for January 1901. It was, indeed, a festive occasion that drew together the resources of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, and financial tycoon John Pierpont Morgan. On December 12, two of Carnegie’s friends, Edward Simmons and Charles Stuart Smith, gave a dinner, ostensibly social, to which J. P. Morgan was invited. Its real purpose was to allow one of Carnegie’s younger executives, Charles Schwab, to entice Morgan with the idea of forming a...

At the turn of the century the most famous magician in the world was Harry Houdini, an American immigrant who specialized in great escapes. He could free himself from handcuffs, iron collars, and straitjackets. With consummate ease he emerged from prison cells and padlocked safes, from river beds and buried coffins. He captivated audiences who saw in his escapes a symbolic reenactment of their own emancipation from the Old World and their flight to the New. By his art Houdini could express their fantasies, needs, and fears. His own experiences of displacement and assimilation had equipped him perfectly.

Born Ehrich...

Throughout the Gilded Age the specters of poverty and oppression waited on the banquet of expansion and opportunity. Economist Henry George compared the want of the huddled masses with the wealth of the dominant plutocracy. In his pioneer work,Progress and Poverty(1879), he conceded that the Industrial Revolution had increased wealth and improved and distributed comfort, leisure, and refinement. But he emphasized that the lowest class was excluded from these gains. “There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.”

Between 1865 and 1900...

Whether celebrated by artists as some sort of precious flower or cursed by social critics as a kind of cancer, the American city stood at the center of civilization in the Gilded Age. It, and not man, was the glass of fashion and the mold of form. As sociologist Philip Slater explained a century later, “ ‘Civilized’ means, literally, ‘citified’, and the state of the city is an accurate index of the condition of the culture as a whole.”

In the late nineteenth century, American cities were unsurpassed for the scope of their activities, the scale of their skyscrapers, and...

Every society leaves a record of its achievements in three books: the book of its deeds, the book of its words, and the book of its art. Of these the most significant—and certainly the most enduring—will be the book of its art. This was the opinion of nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin. The art of the Gilded Age has become the principal guide to American culture in the late nineteenth century. Historian, philosopher—and, it must be admitted, snob—Henry Adams was accurate in his forecast of 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that some...

No story in the Gilded Age is more harrowing than the tragedy of American Reconstruction. It proceeded inevitably from a skein of historical contradictions. The American Revolution was achieved by radicals in the name of liberty but the institution of slavery was preserved. Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves, but to save the Union he would have freed none. The victory of the Union army over the Confederacy dispossessed the very people it had emancipated. African-American leader Frederick Douglass described the plight of freedmen. The African-American

was free from the individual master but a slave of...

Contemporary historian Henry Adams said of politics in the Gilded Age, “The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.” His verdict—“One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870–1895 and find little but damaged reputations”—remains a popular one.

That the Gilded Age leaves an impression of political stagnation is largely due to its procession of conservative presidents. By comparison with Gladstone and Disraeli in England and Bismarck in Germany, Lincoln’s successors cut poor figures as statesmen. They thought of themselves as administrators rather than as party leaders. What...

In 1890 the Bureau of the Census announced that the frontier was closed, that is, there was no longer any discernible demarcation between frontier and settlement. Across the continent, the density of non-Indian population was two persons per square mile.

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the...

How the West was supposed to be won was an American dream. How itwaswon became a myth. The tales of free and fertile soil, handsome harvests and plentiful profits on the farms that circulated in the East, obscured part of the truth. Scores of settlers were far from successful. They were isolated pioneers eking out an existence in discomfort and disillusion. They were cheated of prosperity, not only by unreliable nature, but also their own limitations and inabilities as farmers. Yet the drudgery and disappointments, the hardships and hard knocks of life out West remained hidden behind the...

The decade beginning in 1890 had a most distinct historical character. For one thing, its chronological boundaries were marked by crucial historical events. The year 1890 saw the rise of the People’s Alliance, the McKinley Tariff, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the official closing of the frontier, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. At the turn of the century, in 1901, Morgan bought out Carnegie, Robert La Follette became governor of Wisconsin, and Theodore Roosevelt became president.

The significance of these events was not lost on those who lived through them. There were several attempts to characterize the decade in terms...

Just exactly what the United States had accomplished in the Gilded Age was assessed in 1897, somewhat caustically, by Mr. Dooley:

I have seen America spread out from th’ Atlantic to th’ Pacific, with a branch office iv th’ Standard lie Comp’ny in ivry hamlet. I’ve seen th’ shackles dropped fr’m th’ slave, so’s he cud by lynched in Ohio…. An’ th’ invintions … th’ cotton-gin an’ th’ gin sour an’ th’ bicycle an’ th’ flyin’-machine an’ th’ nickel-inth’-slot machine an’ th’ Croker machine an’ th’ sody-fountain an’—crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.

This emphasis on material...