Greed And Corruption In Mark Twain's Gilded Age

In the 1800s Mark Twain used the phrase Gilded Age to describe the time of greed and corruption despite the glittering wealth on the surface. Industrialization occurs when a nation's economic system decreases its reliance upon producing goods by hand and increases its reliance upon producing goods by machine. I found in an article online that states:( Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were the first to call the years after the Civil War the "gilded age." Struck by what they saw as the rampant greed and speculative frenzy of the marketplace, and the corruption pervading national politics, they satirized a society whose serious problems, they felt, had been veiled by a thin coating of gold. The label has stuck. Now usually applied to the period extending from the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 to the elevation of reformer Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency at the turn of the twentieth century, the term "Gilded Age" has survived because historians have found a great deal of validity in Twain's and Dudley's characterization of their own time. During those years, America's economy did grow at an extraordinary rate, generating unprecedented levels of wealth. Railroads, and soon telephone lines, stretched across the country, creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs and cheaper goods for consumers.) (http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-age/summary.html)
The prevailing political ideology of the time, campaign tactics of the 2 parties, and party patronage. The Gilded Age was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the North and West. As American wages were much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants. The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor