American Experience

A vicious cold snap hit New York

in the first week of February 1897,

but nothing could slow the preparations

for the impending revelry.

The city's wealthiest citizens were readying themselves

for one of the most anticipated balls in the nation's history...

an extravagant exclamation point

on what would come to be known

as the Gilded Age.

During the Gilded Age,

Americans feel quite certainly that they are the vanguard

of civilization and progress.

This is an enormous period

of opportunity, and possibility, and hope.

No group felt more confident

about the future than the guests who would gather

for the party at the luxurious Waldorf Hotel.

The evening's total price tag, according to newspaper reports,

was enough to feed nearly a thousand working-class families

for a full year.

Defenders noted that the ball stood

to benefit the entire city.

Critics begged to differ.

"With all the people," warned one minister,

"who have to lie awake nights contriving

"to spend their time and their money, and all the others

"who lie awake wondering how they may get food,

there is danger in the air."

It was a fractious time in which a sense of desperation

amidst growing wealth was emerging.

Increasingly workers begin to say,

"If I as, as a member of this society

"lack the ability to pay my bills, and to feed my family

"then I am not a free citizen of a healthy republic.

"I'm something, something else,

something that the Founding Fathers would not recognize."

The magnitude of the late 19th-century transformation

of American society is hard to exaggerate.

It was as if you woke up in one country

and you went to bed in another.

Thirty years after the Civil War,

America had transformed

into an economic powerhouse,

but the transformation had created stark new divides

in wealth, standing, and opportunity.

It's shocking for people to see a country developing before them

that is increasingly clearly divided

into the haves and have-nots.

Gilded is not golden.

Gilded has the sense of a patina covering something else.

It's the shiny exterior and the rot underneath.

By the time New York's elite gathered at Waldorf ballroom,

the richest 4,000 families in the country...

less than one percent of all Americans...

had scooped up nearly as much treasure

as the other 11.6 million families combined.

"We are the rich," one partygoer remarked.

"We own America; we got it, God knows how,

"but we intend to keep it if we can."

There is this fight

over what is America's collective self-identity.

Who are we?

Are we two nations, the poor and the wealthy,

or are we one nation

where everybody has a chance to succeed?

When this nation comes out of the Civil War,

we are still a nation divided by regions.

There's very little national market.

If you need a pair of shoes,

you don't get it from a factory a hundred miles away.

You get it from the local shoemaker.

Life was much, much more local,

much more what was going on right around you,

what your neighbors were doing, what your friends were doing,

what your enemies were doing, and how you were doing

on a day-to-day basis.

America had been founded,

its political system had been founded,

for a country of farmers,

but it was becoming a nation of industrialists.

It was becoming a nation of urban workers.

It was becoming a nation of cities.

Railroads knit the entire country together

in a way that hadn't existed before.

So now merchants, manufacturers, industrialists

can think nationally.

You don't have to think simply in terms of your local market.

If you have a good idea,

if you have a good procedure for producing something,

you can think of selling your goods all over the country.

By the early 1880s the nation's largest corporation,

the Pennsylvania Railroad,

carried more than two million tons

of industrial and consumer goods every year.

Steel left mills in Pittsburgh

for destinations around the country;

so too did refined oil from Cleveland,

factory-made furniture from Cincinnati,

and harvesters from Chicago.

Railroads moved coal from Wyoming, timber from Oregon,

silver from Nevada and Colorado, and copper from Montana.

Tens of thousands of young men and women from farm families

could hop on the train to go where the jobs were:

the newly industrializing cities.

Former slaves and their children joined the urban migration,

bound for new opportunities in Memphis, Atlanta, Richmond,

or as far north as Philadelphia and New York.

The hope is for equality, and for first-class citizenship,

and to be a part of what is happening

in terms of progress and change.

They're trying to make the democracy

and the country work for them.

Progress is part of the American credo

and has been almost from the beginning of the nation.

Americans prided themselves

on their inventiveness, their ingenuity,

their entrepreneurial get-up-and-go.

Progress is thought of as inevitable.

It's divinely inspired.

There's a pastor who talked

about these technological innovations

as God's tools to make a more perfect society.

And so it becomes almost a spiritual idea,

this industrial spirit.

One of the most innovative entrepreneurs of the day

was Andrew Carnegie.

He owned a stable full of fine-blooded horses

and enjoyed taking long rides through Central Park.

In the spring of 1881 he was a man in the saddle in all ways,

having just consolidated

his growing manufacturing enterprises

Carnegie Brothers & Company.

Some days Carnegie would ride out of the park

and head north on upper Broadway.

Other days he would ride all the way to the High Bridge,

where traffic loosened and he could open up to a gallop

along the banks of the Harlem River.

In the few hours he was out riding through New York

his blast furnaces 300 miles to the west

produced more than 60 tons of steel,

and earned him about as much

as the average American made in a year.

This remarkable and novel fact made 45-year-old Andrew Carnegie

the emblem of a new kind of American dream.

Like John D. Rockefeller in the oil refining business

and Cornelius Vanderbilt in railroads,

Carnegie was riding a wave of industrialization...

using new technology and mass production

to secure enormous personal wealth.

What's important to realize is that these men,

they have visions.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, the railroad barons...

they don't invent anything.

They're managers.

Carnegie is one of the few American millionaires

of this era or any other

who can genuinely call himself a self-made man.

He really does come from humble origins.

Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835

in a small town in Scotland.

His father, William, supported the family

as a respected weaver of fine clothes and linens,

until the spread of more efficient mechanized looms

began to cut into his business.

William Carnegie literally cannot provide for his family.

They were hungry, and poor,

and there's no future at this point for them.

And so they are forced to make really an incredible decision,

which is to uproot themselves from this town in Scotland

where they've lived for generations

and go to some strange place called Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Andrew Carnegie and the city of Pittsburgh came of age together.

Steam-powered machine shops and iron factories drew workingmen

to the city in the 1840s.

The first railroads arrived in the 1850s,

not long after the first telegraph wires.

There was opportunity on every coal-dusted block,

especially for a go-getter like Carnegie,

who became his family's main provider

when he was still a teenager.

Carnegie has a number of talents that get him noticed early.

He is a smooth operator,

which is a term that was used for guys

who worked for Western Union

who could tap out Morse code very smoothly.

Young Andrew rose quickly,

from telegraph operator to trusted assistant

of a powerful railroad manager to a manager himself.

But he was not content with a salary job...

no matter how good the salary.

Carnegie saw opportunity in the booming railroad industry.

Relying on connections to powerful railroad executives,

he invested in sleeper cars, iron works,

bridge building concerns,

coal mines, and oil producers.

He was not yet 30 when he resigned his position

at the Pennsylvania Railroad

to become a full-time independent capitalist.

Carnegie's skill at turning insider information

into hard cash had allowed him to amass a fortune