Gilded Age By Mark Twain Essay, Research Paper

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain for its shallowness and corruption in both American society and politics. The most consuming governmental issues at the national level were the tariff, currency, civil-service reform, and government regulation of railroads, but the prevailing sentiment in Washington was to run a limited, laissez-faire government that would foster economic growth. Thus, most actual important political activity occurred at the local level, especially in cities, where bosses built great patronage machines and were opposed by middle-class reformers, many of them women who tied their political efforts to crusades for social reform and women’s suffrage. The federal government’s hands-off attitude toward the problems of industrialization and urbanization meshed well with common social theories of the day, such as social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth. The 1890s, however, saw the federal government become more responsive to the nation’s needs, and the decade’s showdown over silver helped to reshape American politics for the twentieth century.