What Was The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age in the United States was an era of rapid growth in the late 19th century. The term was created by writer Mark Twain, which satirized an era of social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. The people who got us to this spot were not only the industrialist but the workers behind the scene. The reformers John Peter Altgeld and Florence Kelley worked to have the workers safe and sound. Altgeld was a leading figure of the Progressive movement, Altgeld signed workplace safety and child labor laws. He was the first Democrat to govern Illinois since the 1850’s. Kelley worked against sweatshops, eight-hour days, and children’s rights. Kelley served as the first general severity of the National Consumers League. Then in 1909 Kelley
As America began to industrialize, it began to grow and reorganize its economy. Businesses and cities got busier, also the workplace began to spur. Workers began to rise, due to the immigrants, also markets for consumer goods and services of all kind filled America. This was a large problem of the fear of overpopulation of Eastern America. The fear of overpopulation had to do with the urbanization, which towns and cities are formed to become large as more people begin living and working in it. It is said that: “Industrialization has developed modern megacities whose way of life is heterogeneous with that in the villages. Rural poverty has pushed villagers to the cities, which never were planned to accommodate immigrants.” For America industrializing was good and scary. Too many people were in one place and they needed more room for the incoming immigrants. Although this helped America become more modern and help some of the rural areas go away and have more industrialized cities. But in the back there were still rural areas of immigrants that needed
In 1990, “18 percent of the workers were kids under the age of 16 worked.” But after 1938, with the hard work of people such as Kelley and Altgeld, “kids under the age of 16 could not work in the factories.” While in a Hull House in Chicago, she worked on intensely survey around the settlement. In Florence Kelley’s Told in Child Labor Reform, it says, “She found children as young as three working in a tenement at homework (garment manufacture in homes).” As a result of these findings by Kelley, Illinois State Legislature passes the first factory law prohibiting the employment of children under the age of 14. This document is important because it was the basis for the rest of the plan to be carried out and have children stop working. The next step was to form an organization that would help this stay intact. The Child Labor was formed and; “In 1881 the first national convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) passes a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment.” This was great news for the reforms because, child labor began to decline as the labor reform movements grew and as well the labor standards began to