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The Gilded Age
There was a mandate for change in the
Gilded Age, but no agreement on what that change should be among the many
groups that made up American society.
The upper industrial class engineered a
wrenching economic transformation, accumulated staggering fortunes, and pursued
notorious private lives, upholding a set of values at odds with the middle
class, farmers, and workers. Even among themselves the upper industrial class
disagreed how best to live their lives and secure their future. Andrew Carnegie
and John D. Rockefeller, among the most successful, were, with their austere
lifestyles and doctrines of philanthropy, revolutionaries to other members of
the upper industrial class.
The middle class was split between old
style Radicals such as Albion Tourgee with notions of color blind meritocracy
and more cautious middle class reformers such as the Progressives who sought to
avoid societal turmoil and remake workers, immigrants and the industrial upper
class in their own image.
Farmers simultaneously pursued the
agrarian myth of the yeoman farmer, while living the life of the rural small
businessman.
Labor divided between those seeking a
re-structuring of society and those primarily concerned with wages and working
conditions.
Sectional and racial issues unresolved
from the time of the Civil War continued to divide.
Women increasingly questioned prescribed
gender roles.
No group could unilaterally impose its will. Instead,
each group usually had to make alliances, some of them strange and
uncomfortable, and win over at least some of the enemy in order to achieve its
goals. For example, by the end of the century, many women suffragists argued
that Anglo-Saxon women’s votes, would serve as bulwark against the influence of
foreign and black votes.
Then, as now, the very fragmentation of
America precluded revolution or the emergence of a successful radical
opposition.
General George S. Patton once said, “Compared to war,
all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” Here are four
stories about the history of the world IF wars we know about happened
differently or IF wars that never happened actually took place.
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