Industrialization and Social Change in 19th Century America

The Fracturing of Agrarian America and the Populist Movement

In the South during the 1870s, in response to the economic difficulties rural America experienced after the failure of agricultural collectives, the Farmers' Alliance Movement attempted to give voice to an increasingly disenfranchised sector. Most popular in the South and Midwest, the movement was even able to empower Black farmers, and for a time racial unity between Black and white farmers seemed like a real possibility. The rise of the Populist Party as an alternative to the two-party system exemplifies the extent to which agrarian workers felt alienated from the dominant political discourse of the era. For a brief period, the Populist Party seemed to offer African Americans an alternative to the growing racial segregation and efforts to disenfranchise them under the Democratic Party.

However, the Populist movement and its advocacy of "free silver" versus the gold standard ultimately failed, as did efforts to build a Southern political system based on class rather than racial alliances. "There was, it appeared, only one issue on which all the business interests could agree, and that was on the necessity of maintaining the gold standard against those who wanted to inflate the currency by coining silver" (Nasaw 142). In fact, many Populists, once they abandoned the movement, became advocates of white supremacy. The "whiteness" of poor farmers became a marker of social status, and African Americans were further subjugated as a result.

Race, Ethnicity, and the Limits of Tolerance

Despite the tensions riddling the South, the North was no oasis of racial tolerance. Although Northerners were blamed by Southerners for being carpetbaggers and for disrupting the Southern way of life during Reconstruction, the North was itself deeply divided along ethnic lines. The rise of industrialization brought a corresponding rise in nativist sentiment. Slums, poverty, and tenement living among Irish and Italian American immigrants fueled racial resentment against all groups not perceived as white, including African Americans. Immigrants like the Irish were discriminated against and viewed as European interlopers rather than as "white" — they made up the growing servant and laboring class.

The West was not immune from racism either. The demand for land to fuel the ambitions of homesteaders resulted in increasing encroachment on Native American territory. This impingement was both territorial and cultural, culminating in the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), which effectively enforced white cultural values upon Native tribes and attempted to eradicate indigenous ways of life. The Dawes Act was yet another effort to homogenize American cultural ideology under the banner of the "melting pot," but its effects were to limit the cultural development of Native Americans and to sever ties with the way of life that had sustained the tribes for generations. Native Americans became the greatest losers in the increasingly industrialized nation.

Social Darwinism and Gilded Age Capitalism

The ideology that supported discrimination was known as Social Darwinism — the belief that the survival of the fittest, both racially and economically, justified social and political inequality. The economic plight of all disenfranchised workers was seen as natural, as were policies that encouraged industrialization. "The Gilded Age millionaires' rhetorical adherence to the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest,' first articulated by Spencer and seized upon by a generation of businessmen, was not, as has been so often and so mistakenly implied, a commitment to competition. It was rather a celebration of the fruits of such competition: bigness, monopoly, and trusts" (Nasaw 144). This was a profound departure from an America conceptualized around the Jeffersonian ideal of the gentleman farmer. Largeness was celebrated, as was the decline of small farming. Businessmen became a new aristocracy in the capitalist environment of nineteenth-century America, and the very concentration of power in minority factions that the Founding Fathers feared had become reality.

Direct democracy and populism were characterized as dangerously revolutionary. "Democracy had its limits, beyond which voters and their elected representatives dared not trespass lest economic calamity befall the nation" (Nasaw 148). America was not only more divided in terms of lifestyle, race, and religion — it was also more divided by the chasm between rich and poor.

Conclusion: A Nation Transformed

America was thus in a state of upheaval from the Populist era onward, due to the changes created by industrialization. Industrialization was not simply a change in the way goods were made but also in the way people lived and conducted their private lives. In reaction to this shift, many feared that the power base of America would permanently move from rural to urban. But even in rural locations, altered demographics and demands for greater equality permanently changed the American landscape. Not everyone benefited equally — African American social mobility was far more circumscribed than that of immigrant groups — but this era created permanent alterations in the American character and social fabric.

Andrews, Thomas. Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Clement, Elizabeth Alice. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945. Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Nasaw, David. "Gilded Age Gospels." In Ruling America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.