The Gilded Age: Railroads, Robber Barons and the Rust Under the Gold

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

By 1880, an average white 10-year-old boy in the United States was shorter and had a lower life expectancy than his great grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War. That contradiction sits at the center of the Gilded Age, the name Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined in their 1873 novel to mock a society painting gold over cheap metal. This episode traces how the transcontinental railroad of 1869 cut the trip from New York to San Francisco from six months to six days, created a single national market, and forced the invention of time zones, middle management, and the company pension.

The same decades produced Carnegie's and Rockefeller's vertically integrated monopolies, tenement slums, and the highest industrial accident rate of any developed nation. Real wages rose 40 percent, yet the top 1 percent owned 51 percent of all property while the bottom 40 percent held nothing. The story moves through the Pullman strike of 1894, the forgettable presidents, the abandonment of Reconstruction, Tammany Hall's ward bosses, and the swindle that left Ulysses S. Grant destitute, before asking whether the era ever really ended.

• Railroads invented standardized time zones to stop schedule overlaps from causing head-on collisions, and built the first corporate ladders, complete with pensions.
• Between 1865 and 1898 coal production rose 800 percent, and the Patent Office issued half a million patents between 1860 and 1890.
• Standard Oil dropped prices below cost in a single region to bankrupt independent refiners, bought them for pennies on the dollar, then raised prices again.
• In 1889 alone, out of roughly 700,000 railroad workers, 20,000 were severely injured and nearly 2,000 were killed, with no workers' compensation for their families.
• George Pullman cut wages 25 percent but refused to lower rent in his company town, and the federal government sent the military to break the resulting strike.