American History: A Survey

At the end of the 19th century, the US was undergoing its biggest surge of industrial growth yet. In many ways, the Industrial Revolution paralleled other such times of technological advancement; a select few became extremely wealthy, while many endured difficult labor conditions. This revolution, though, was on a completely different scale and foreshadowed the capitalist corporate culture that came to dominate the American economic landscape.

The Industrial Revolution primarily fueled work needed for the burgeoning transportation and manufacturing industries. As railroads expanded, American inventors developed automobiles and airplanes, and large-scale factories began to churn out domestic goods for which the demand was greatest, such as steel, coal, and petroleum. A few powerful industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller came to virtually (sometimes literally) monopolize these industries and gathered unprecedented levels of wealth. They formed large corporations, a necessity to manage their vast industrial holdings. This “Gilded Age“ was marked by the rise of conspicuous consumption. Wealthy people throughout American history had lived in grand houses and bought luxury goods, but their luxury lifestyles often played out in rural seclusion, as in the original tidewater planter class in Virginia and the later plantations of the pre-Civil War South.