And when the workers went on strike over the inequities, the government sided with the owners. The mass society of the late nineteenth century had no diversity. It was a society in which the rich and powerful manipulated the existence of the politically and economically powerless mass through overwhelming mass production, mass communication, and mass distribution.

Examples (Boyer 2, 2001) Mass production transformed the way Americans lived and worked at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thanks to its role in creating mass consumer culture (mass society), it constitutes a vital part of contemporary life. It was responsible for the dehumanizing assembly-line work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as well as the physical comfort enjoyed by most people in industrialized countries. The 1926 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica formally introduced the term in an article titled "Mass production." The article appeared over Henry

Ford's name, for he is indeed recognized as the man who popularized the term and, more important, made mass production work. (Calhoun, C.W. 2006, p. 62-63) When a bomb exploded in Harmarket Square in Chicago in 1886 during a labor demonstration in support of miserably paid strikers who wanted an 8-hour day, the police blamed, without evidence, the striker's "anarchist" leaders. The dominant business creed of the Gilded Age celebrated the unabated acquisition of material wealth. It was a system that brutalized labor and dismantled the achievements of American democracy.

Enotes.com, n.d.) The last decade...

The worst depression in the nation's history prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s struck in 1893, throwing millions out of work when such things as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions were unheard of. Violent strikes against the Pullman Company in Chicago and Carnegie Steel in Homestead, Pennsylvania, seemed to signal to an anxious middle class a dawning era of bitter class conflict. Urban political machines and bosses ruled, votes were bought and sold, insiders reaped windfalls from corruption, and the desperate needs of urban residents for clean air and water, were ignored.
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Calhoun, C.W. (2006). The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the origins of modern America. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. (http://books.google.com/books?id=XrZTTCaCRAUC&printsec=frontcover) enotes.com. (n.d.). Overview: 1900's. Retrieved February 25, 2009, from Enotes.com:

http://www.enotes.com/1900-american-decades-about/introduction

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