America’s Gilded Age Simply by having different people with different interests such as is required for a nation to exist, a variety of conditions and situations separating the people is imminent. Often some are successful while others are not causing a view that the people are not all equal. Particularly in a governmental and economic system so competitive as America, this leads to contrasting interests, which in turn develop into a cycle. This consists of a rotation of periods for public development and those private interests. The cycles change due to a consensus of the people that the time has come for it. Each individual is a part of the larger society, which is maintained and directed by the government. “Society’s purpose was man’s betterment.” The government helped to ensure this through its role of fairly distributing the resources that were available in the economy. This can be accomplished by making laws and regulations, which allow each and every citizen to achieve a minimum standard of decent living, competency. Once the government has resolved all major issues and the general outlook has improved enough for the government to reduce its level of activity, a period of private interest when the people try to resolve their own issues comes about. The late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, The Gilded age in America, was one of these periods of private interest. This era began after the election of 1876 of a president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who decided that the government should allow the country to flourish on it’s own. The widening gap between the wealth of the upper and lower classes created a dichotomy that can be explained by the pattern of the cycles in which this occurs in private interest. The ideology of mobility was also present to help assist the people at the bottom. The age of industry though was propelling society as technology’s presence was ever increasing. The...
