AP® United States History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/us-history/units/6/6-11)
Unit 6 · Topic 6.11
6.11 Reform in the Gilded Age
Gilded Age critics offered competing visions of a fairer society, from Henry George's single tax and Edward Bellamy's cooperative utopia to socialism and the Social Gospel. Women used clubs, temperance groups and settlement work to gain a public voice and push for reforms, including the vote.
Key terms
- Social Gospel
- Henry George
- Edward Bellamy
- socialism
- Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Critics of the new economy
Henry George's best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) asked why poverty grew alongside progress. He blamed landowners who grew rich as land values rose without doing any work, and proposed a 'single tax' on the value of land to replace all other taxes.
Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) imagined a man waking up in the year 2000 to find a peaceful cooperative society where the government ran industry and everyone shared its wealth. It inspired 'Nationalist' clubs across the country.
Socialists wanted workers or the government to own industries. Eugene Debs became a socialist after the Pullman Strike (1894) and later led the Socialist Party. Anarchists rejected government altogether; they were few, but events like Haymarket made them widely feared.
Agrarian reformers in the Farmers' Alliances and the Populist Party (6.13) wanted government ownership of railroads, a graduated income tax and more money in circulation.
The Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a movement within Protestant churches arguing that Christians should fix society's problems, like poverty, slums and unsafe work, not just save individual souls. Ministers such as Washington Gladden supported workers' right to organize. Charles Sheldon's novel In His Steps (1896) asked readers to consider 'What would Jesus do?' in daily life. The movement grew stronger in the early 1900s with Walter Rauschenbusch and fed directly into Progressivism.
The Salvation Army, which arrived from Britain in 1880, and many Catholic and Jewish charities also worked among the urban poor.
Women and reform
Women could not vote in most places, but they built powerful organizations. Women's clubs began as study groups and moved into civic causes like libraries, parks and public health. The General Federation of Women's Clubs formed in 1890. Black women, shut out of many white clubs, founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, led by Mary Church Terrell, under the motto 'Lifting as We Climb'.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, fought alcohol abuse, which reformers linked to domestic violence and poverty. Under Frances Willard, president from 1879, its 'Do Everything' policy expanded into prison reform, labor issues, kindergartens and women's suffrage.
Suffragists reunited their divided movement as the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869 and kept it when it became a state in 1890, and a few other Western states followed in the 1890s.
More women attended college and some entered professions or ran settlement houses (6.9). Historians often call this a widening of the 'separate sphere': women claimed public roles by arguing that they were extending their duties as mothers and moral guardians into society.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Comparing two reform visions
Short-answer practice: Explain one similarity between the ideas of Henry George and Edward Bellamy.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Recall each reformer's main idea: George's single tax; Bellamy's cooperative society.
- Step 2: Find what they share: both criticized inequality created by industrial capitalism and offered a large-scale fix.
- Step 3: Support the similarity with a detail from each.
Answer: Model answer: Both Henry George and Edward Bellamy argued that industrial capitalism had produced unfair inequality and that society needed a sweeping change, not small charity. George's Progress and Poverty proposed a single tax on land values to stop landowners from profiting without work, while Bellamy's Looking Backward imagined a future where government ran industry and shared wealth equally. Both books became best sellers, showing how widely Americans questioned the fairness of the Gilded Age economy.
Common mistakes
- Mixing up the Social Gospel and the Gospel of Wealth. Social Gospel = churches fighting poverty and injustice. Gospel of Wealth = Carnegie's case for philanthropy by the rich.
- Thinking the WCTU only cared about alcohol. Under Frances Willard it took on many reforms, including suffrage.
- Assuming women had no political role before the 19th Amendment. Clubs, the WCTU and some Western states gave many women real public influence.
On the exam
- Many reform ideas here reappear in the Progressive Era (7.4). Questions often test that continuity.
- Be ready to explain how women expanded their roles through voluntary organizations, using a specific group as evidence.
Connected topics
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Check yourself
4 questions on 6.11 Reform in the Gilded Age. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
"So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. . . .
We must make land common property."
Source: Henry George, economist and journalist, Progress and Poverty, 1879. The book sold millions of copies.
To carry out the idea in the last line, George proposed
George's concerns in the passage were shared most closely by
Source 1: "The problem of our age is the administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. . . . This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer . . . the man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer—doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves."
Source 2: "Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice is really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious man from the penalty of his vice. Nature's remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things."
Source 1: Andrew Carnegie, steel manufacturer, "Wealth," North American Review, June 1889. Source 2: William Graham Sumner, Yale professor of political and social science, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, 1883.
Which group most directly challenged the views expressed in Source 2?
"The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other . . . ."
Source: Jane Addams, cofounder of Hull House in Chicago, lecture "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," delivered in 1892 and reprinted in her book Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910).
Addams's view of poverty differed most from that of Social Darwinists in that she believed
0 of 4 answered