Big businesses were a major factor in the US both politically and economically between 1870 and 1900. During the Gilded Age, the US became a significant producer of steel and petroleum products worldwide. While agriculture would continue to employ most Americans, factories began to employ more people as industry took advantage of lax regulations and an almost unlimited labor supply. Business owners such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller also benefited from being able to buy out the competition and suppliers, thus creating monopolies and maximizing profits at the expense of consumers.
Economically, industries employed several million Americans. Without a minimum wage, these unskilled laborers were viewed as replaceable parts of a machine. Economic swings as well as fluxes in the labor market helped to drive down wages during the period—this led to labor unrest and the rise of a Progressive Party, which sought to regulate business. The American...
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consumer benefited from increases in industrial production as more Americans could buy affordable goods at their local general stores.
Industrial growth during the Gilded Age also played a role in the nation's politics. This era saw an expansion in the railroad industry; railroads were able to control the right-of-way on both sides of the tracks as an incentive to build more railroads. This meant that railroads and state and federal legislatures worked closely to ensure more railroads and less regulation for them. Industrialists also lobbied for high tariffs in order to protect their goods from foreign imports. The key economic issue of the period was tariffs with the Republican Party insisting on high tariffs and the Democratic Party encouraging lower tariffs.
Unregulated business practices led to a growing movement politically that wanted to rein in businesses and make them accountable to federal and state regulations. Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in which people could see photos of tenement dwellers in New York. People began to write editorials in which they pondered the fairness of a system that produced both millionaires and beggars. Some reformers even questioned the ethics of businesses and sought to break up monopolies and trusts that had been established in the oil and steel industries.
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