Well, hey there, and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now, we've been going through Unit 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and considering the Gilded Age from all kinds of different angles. And in this video, we're going to consider the various reform movements that sprang up during this time. So, if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, and I know you are, then let's get to it.
So, in this video, we're basically trying to do... one thing, and that's to explain how different reform movements responded to the rise of industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
So when I say industrial capitalism, here's what I mean. Now if you've been with me in these last videos, you'll remember that America was undergoing a massive change in the way it produced goods to be sold. Like, back in the old days, artisans and skilled laborers crafted items by hand to be sold on a small scale.
But during this period, factories sprang forth from the ground like Athena from Zeus's head, and within these factories, factories, tens of thousands of unskilled laborers worked machines day in and day out, mass-producing goods to be sold on a national and international scale. And one of the economic realities that allowed them to grow so quickly was the prevalence of laissez-faire capitalism. And this just means that the American government intervened very rarely in economic operations of businesses, and so without many regulations, these businesses flourished. And when I say these businesses flourished, what I really mean is that most of the wealth they generated stayed in the hands of the elite upper class. For those working in the factories, it was a different story altogether.
Like, their wages in many cases were only barely enough to survive. And add to that the exceedingly dangerous working conditions, and then add to that the 12-14 hour days that meant you went to work in the dark and returned home in the dark, and then all of a sudden you've got a whole sector of society who are eking out a miserable existence. And so in light of all this, artists and critics, which included agrarians and utopians and socialists and advocates of the social gospel, they all rose up and demanded reform. And let me introduce you to some of their causes now. Henry George, who was a politician and an economist, thought it was downright foolish that so much wealth could be generated by a nation while at the same time so many of its citizens lived in abject poverty.
His solution was called the single tax on land, and according to his estimates, those elite folks who owned large tracts of land were gaining disproportionate income. proportionate amounts of wealth based on the increasing value of that land, and therefore they simply needed to be taxed more to even the playing field between them and the working class. Okay, let's switch over to utopians. A good example of an artist using utopian art to challenge industrial capitalism was Edward Bellamy. He wrote a novel in 1888 called Looking Backward in which a man goes to sleep in 1887 only to wake up in 2000 and find that America had been transformed into a socialist utopia where capitalism had been crushed and everyone's needs were met.
Yeah, I'd say you got that one just about wrong. Anyway, speaking of socialism, that ancient enemy of capitalism, this ideology really gained some traction during this time. And look, I'm not trying to advocate for socialism here, but it's easy to understand why people gravitated toward this ideology.
According to the dictates of socialism, all the means of production in a society should be owned and regulated by the community and benefit everyone more or less equally. And looking around at the state of society in the late 19th century, it is understandable why some people might think capitalism had failed. Anyway, socialism picked up some steam during this period, but it never really grabbed hold of American citizens like it did to Europeans. Still, our buddy Eugene V. Debs, who if you'll remember was the head of a significant union we talked about in another video, joined with a few others and started the Socialist Party of America in 1901. He ran for president on this party's ticket, but they didn't do so well and they basically petered out after this. Others who opposed industrial capitalism did so under the banner of the Social Gospel.
Christians in America had always believed that repentance and reform ought to be applied to one's own soul, but here the focus grew wider. The advocates of the Social Gospel believed that Christian principles ought to be applied not just to oneself, but to cure the ills of society as well. And in that vein, throughout the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, many Protestant preachers crusaded for social justice for the urban poor.
And they especially set their sights on the middle class and urged them to take up the mantle of solving urban poverty as their Christian destiny. So the point of all of this is that there were a lot of folks who tried different methods to resist the kind of society that industrial capitalism created. Now during the same time, there was another reform movement brewing, but it had less to do with capitalism than everything I just said. Women especially took up the cause of reform during this period, and they did so for various causes.
In the last video, I introduced you to Jane Addams, who established settlement houses to help immigrants assimilate to American culture. But also there was a big push for women's suffrage during this time, which is to say, women's right to vote. In 1890, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NASA, which worked tirelessly to secure the franchise for women.
Now, I'll have to come back to that in the next unit because their work won't bear constitutional fruit until 1920. But during this period, women also took up the cause of temperance, which is the fight against the consumption of alcohol. Now, make no mistake, Drunkenness was a real problem among urban male factory workers during this period, and that was a large cause of the growing impoverishment of the working classes. And so to combat this, women formed the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1874. They crusaded for total abstinence from alcohol, and apparently it was a popular message because they had something like 500,000 members on their rolls by 1898. Now, this organization, along with others like the Anti-Saloon League, worked largely through peaceful means like protest and trying to lobby Congress to pass laws.
But there was a moral more radical strand of women who refuse to wait for the painfully slow gears of Congress to turn. And maybe the best example I can think of is Carrie Nation. She said of herself that she was a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like.
And apparently Jesus didn't like alcohol, because what Carrie Nation was known for was her hatchet, which she carried into saloons and hacked at liquor barrels until they spilled their contents onto the floor. And she was probably the only one who could get away with that. Like all the men are sitting around at the bar going, I mean, what do we do?
Like, can we? Can we fight a woman? Can we fight a woman?
While they're having their little debate, Nation is just hacking away. Like, I love it. Okay, that's what you need to know about Unit 6 Topic 11 of the AP US History curriculum. Now, if you're feeling in the mood to reform your grades, then click here and grab a review packet, which will help you get an A in your class and a 5 on your exam in May.
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