In terms of immigration, after , the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened. The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came individuals from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as from French Canada. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction.
Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased. Conservative, white Democratic governments in the South passed Jim Crow legislation, creating a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Blacks were separated in schools and hospitals, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public transportation systems. They often were barred from certain stores, or forbidden to use lunchrooms, restrooms, and fitting rooms.
Because they could not vote, they could not serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system. Blacks who were economically successful faced reprisals or sanctions. Through violence and legal restrictions, whites often prevented blacks from working as common laborers, much less as skilled artisans or in the professions.
Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black people found it extremely difficult to advance. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of , a deep depression, which lasted until and marked a major political realignment in the election of This productive but divisive era was followed by the Progressive Era.
Built in , it typifies the excesses of Gilded Age wealth. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Their legislative culmination was the Chinese Exclusion Act of , which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. Last year, President Donald Trump succeeded in imposing restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He continues, as he has since his campaign launch, to make political hay by demonizing migrants from Mexico and Central America.
These surface historical parallels seem so obvious. In the liberal historical imagination, the economic reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal years in the first half of the 20th century — primarily higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise — vanquished Gilded Age inequality.
This happy version of the story has many heroes, most of whom tend to be middle-class intellectuals and technocratic politicians: muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell who exposed robber barons, government appointees like Frances Perkins who fought to protect workers, and seemingly anti-laissez-faire presidents like Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts. Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective.
That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the s through the s. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism.
Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner. We have not been through all this before. New solutions are wanting. He is working on a new book about the socialist who created the hedge fund, and teaches Modern American History at the University of York in the UK.
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