🔍
Chapter 1 | The Gilded Age | American Experience | PBS - YouTube
Channel: unknown
[7]
♪ ♪
[16]
(kids shouting)
[18]
NARRATOR: A vicious cold snap hit New York
[20]
in the first week
of February 1897,
[24]
but nothing could slow
the preparations
[26]
for the impending revelry.
[30]
The city's wealthiest citizens
were readying themselves
[33]
for one of the most anticipated
balls in the nation's history--
[37]
an extravagant exclamation point
[40]
on what would come to be known
[41]
as the Gilded Age.
[44]
REBECCA EDWARDS: During the Gilded Age,
[45]
Americans feel quite certainly
that they are the vanguard
[49]
of civilization and progress.
[52]
This is an enormous period
[54]
of opportunity,
and possibility, and hope.
[57]
NARRATOR:
No group felt more confident
[59]
about the future than the guests
who would gather
[62]
for the party at the luxurious
Waldorf Hotel.
[67]
The evening's total price tag,
according to newspaper reports,
[71]
was enough to feed nearly a
thousand working-class families
[75]
for a full year.
[76]
♪ ♪
[78]
Defenders noted
that the ball stood
[80]
to benefit the entire city.
[83]
Critics begged to differ.
[87]
"With all the people,"
warned one minister,
[90]
"who have to lie awake nights
contriving
[92]
"to spend their time and their
money, and all the others
[95]
"who lie awake wondering
how they may get food,
[99]
there is danger in the air."
[102]
It was a fractious time in which
a sense of desperation
[109]
amidst growing wealth
was emerging.
[115]
EDWARD O'DONNELL: Increasingly workers
begin to say,
[117]
"If I as, as a member
of this society
[119]
"lack the ability to pay my
bills, and to feed my family
[122]
"then I am not a free citizen
of a healthy republic.
[126]
"I'm something, something else,
[128]
something that the Founding
Fathers would not recognize."
[130]
(whistle blows)
[132]
RICHARD JOHN: The magnitude of the late
19th-century transformation
[135]
of American society
is hard to exaggerate.
[140]
It was as if you woke up
in one country
[143]
and you went to bed in another.
[144]
♪ ♪
[147]
NARRATOR:
Thirty years after the Civil War,
[149]
America had transformed
[151]
into an economic powerhouse,
[154]
but the transformation had
created stark new divides
[158]
in wealth, standing,
and opportunity.
[163]
STEVE FRASER: It's shocking for people to see a country developing before them
[167]
that is increasingly
clearly divided
[169]
into the haves and have-nots.
[172]
NELL IRVIN PAINTER:
Gilded is not golden.
[176]
Gilded has the sense of a patina
covering something else.
[183]
It's the shiny exterior
and the rot underneath.
[189]
NARRATOR: By the time New York's elite
gathered at Waldorf ballroom,
[193]
the richest 4,000 families
in the country,
[197]
less than one percent
of all Americans,
[199]
had scooped up nearly
as much treasure
[202]
as the other 11.6 million
families combined.
[207]
"We are the rich,"
one partygoer remarked.
[211]
"We own America;
we got it, God knows how,
[215]
"but we intend to keep it
if we can."
[219]
There is this fight
[220]
over what is America's
collective self-identity.
[223]
Who are we?
[226]
Are we two nations,
the poor and the wealthy,
[230]
or are we one nation where
[233]
everybody has a chance
to succeed?
[238]
♪ ♪
[253]
DAVID NASAW: When this nation comes out of the Civil War,
[255]
we are still a nation divided
by regions.
[264]
There's very little
national market.
[267]
If you need a pair of shoes,
[269]
you don't get it from a factory
a hundred miles away.
[272]
You get it from
the local shoemaker.
[276]
(birds squawking)
[277]
PAINTER:
Life was much, much more local,
[281]
much more what was going on
right around you,
[285]
what your neighbors were doing,
what your friends were doing,
[287]
what your enemies were doing,
and how you were doing
[291]
on a day-to-day basis.
[294]
H.W. BRANDS:
America had been founded,
[296]
its political system
had been founded,
[298]
for a country of farmers,
[301]
but it was becoming a nation
of industrialists.
[303]
It was becoming a nation
of urban workers.
[305]
It was becoming a nation
of cities.
[307]
(train chugging)
[314]
Railroads knit the entire
country together
[317]
in a way that hadn't existed
before.
[320]
So now merchants, manufacturers,
industrialists
[324]
can think nationally.
[325]
You don't have to think simply
in terms of your local market.
[328]
If you have a good idea,
[329]
if you have a good procedure
for producing something,
[332]
you can think of selling your
goods all over the country.
[335]
(train clacking on tracks)
[339]
NARRATOR: By the early 1880s the nation's
largest corporation,
[343]
the Pennsylvania Railroad,
[345]
carried more than
two million tons
[347]
of industrial and consumer goods
every year.
[352]
Steel left mills in Pittsburgh
[354]
for destinations
around the country;
[357]
so too did refined oil
from Cleveland,
[360]
factory-made furniture
from Cincinnati,
[363]
and harvesters from Chicago.
[365]
(train steam hissing)
[368]
Railroads moved coal from
Wyoming, timber from Oregon,
[372]
silver from Nevada and Colorado,
and copper from Montana.
[377]
♪ ♪
[386]
Tens of thousands of young men
and women from farm families
[390]
could hop on the train to go
where the jobs were:
[393]
the newly industrializing
cities.
[400]
Former slaves and their children
joined the urban migration,
[404]
bound for new opportunities
in Memphis, Atlanta, Richmond,
[409]
or as far north as Philadelphia
and New York.
[416]
The hope is for equality, and
for first-class citizenship,
[421]
and to be a part of
what is happening
[424]
in terms of progress and change.
[429]
They're trying to make
the democracy
[430]
and the country work for them.
[435]
FRASER: Progress is part
of the American credo
[437]
and has been almost from
the beginning of the nation.
[440]
Americans prided themselves
[442]
on their inventiveness,
their ingenuity,
[446]
their entrepreneurial
get-up-and-go.
[450]
GIDDINGS: Progress is thought of
as inevitable.
[453]
It's divinely inspired.
[456]
There's a pastor who talked
[458]
about these
technological innovations
[460]
as God's tools to make
a more perfect society.
[465]
♪ ♪
[467]
And so it becomes almost
a spiritual idea,
[470]
this industrial spirit.
[477]
(birds chirping)
[480]
♪ ♪
[482]
(horse hooves clomping)
[484]
NARRATOR: One of the most innovative
entrepreneurs of the day
[487]
was Andrew Carnegie.
[490]
He owned a stable
full of fine-blooded horses
[493]
and enjoyed taking long rides
through Central Park.
[496]
(horse whinnies)
[498]
♪ ♪
[503]
In the spring of 1881 he was a
man in the saddle in all ways,
[508]
having just consolidated
[509]
his growing manufacturing
enterprises
[511]
under a single banner:
Carnegie Brothers & Company.
[517]
Some days Carnegie would ride
out of the park
[520]
and head north on upper
Broadway.
[523]
Other days he would ride
all the way to the High Bridge,
[526]
where traffic loosened and
he could open up to a gallop
[529]
along the banks
of the Harlem River.
[534]
In the few hours he was out
riding through New York
[537]
his blast furnaces 300 miles
to the west
[540]
produced more than
60 tons of steel,
[543]
and earned him about as much
[545]
as the average American
made in a year.
[550]
This remarkable and novel fact
made 45-year-old Andrew Carnegie
[555]
the emblem of a new kind
of American dream.
[557]
♪ ♪
[560]
Like John D. Rockefeller
in the oil refining business
[564]
and Cornelius Vanderbilt
in railroads,
[567]
Carnegie was riding a wave
of industrialization --
[571]
using new technology
and mass production
[573]
to secure enormous
personal wealth.
[578]
NASAW: What's important to realize
is that these men,
[582]
they have visions.
[584]
Carnegie, Rockefeller,
the railroad barons --
[588]
they don't invent anything.
[590]
They're managers.
[593]
JACKSON LEARS: Carnegie is one of the few
American millionaires
[597]
of this era or any other
[598]
who can genuinely call himself
a self-made man.
[601]
He really does come
from humble origins.
Most Recent Videos:
You can go back to the homepage right here: Homepage