Gilded Age Especially in California, railroad barons, including Leland Stanford and Collis P Huntington, used cutthroat tactics to dominate the most favorable routes, raising shipping rates once they had achieved control In the 1870s midwesterner John D Rockefeller created Standard Oil, gaining 90 percent control of the oil business and making a fortune even before the rise of the automobile Scots-born Andrew Carnegie had successful careers in telegraphy and railroads before turning Pittsburgh into the world’s steel capital and becoming one of the world’s richest men Carnegie gave away all his millions before he died in 1919, and Rockefeller was also an important benefactor But many of the new capitalist class were less modest As the railroad Vanderbilts and others built luxurious summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island, and Carnegie’s chief lieutenant, Henry Frick, built virtual palaces in Pittsburgh and (later) on New York’s Fifth Avenue, the gilded gap between rich and poor became more obvious The new industrialists’ gaudy parties and spending sprees were covered in breathless detail by American newspapers Meanwhile, the urban middle class was growing Industrialists created large organizations staffed by middle managers and served by engineers, lawyers, accountants, and other rising professionals But for industrial laborers, whether skilled or unskilled, prospects were bleaker GILDED AGE POLITICS Historians still disagree whether the business leaders of the Gilded Age were rapacious robber barons or admirable captains of industry In either case, those building mighty industries took full advantage of the political and social attitudes of their era to amass enormous fortunes and wield great power In a time of weak federal power, with Congress closely divided between Republicans and Democrats (although Republicans dominated the presidency), there were few legal barriers to the creation of great wealth by any means necessary Railroad interests (already owing much of their success to huge federal land grants and other valuable concessions) were particularly known for making deals, legal and illegal, with federal, state, and local officials There was no corporate income tax, no meaningful regulation of stock transactions, and no barriers to monopolistic vertical trusts Someone like Rockefeller could control every aspect of his business, from owning oil-rich properties to pumping oil out of the ground to selling Standard Oil’s distinctive red cans to retail customers Not until 1890 did Congress pass 157 the Sherman Antitrust Act, a weak but groundbreaking attempt to make the most blatantly brazen business practices punishable by fines and prison terms The era’s general lack of regulation was part of the larger ideology of laissez-faire, the idea that only an economic system free from governmental interference could build wealth, social order, and national success Dating back to the 18th-century writings of British economist Adam Smith, laissez-faire in the Gilded Age found a strong philosophical ally in the new creed of Social Darwinism Social Darwinism arose in Britain, where writer Herbert Spencer, among others, developed a sociological theory based on Charles Darwin’s pathbreaking 1859 theory of evolution Darwin’s was a biological study of the origins, development, distribution, and extinction of living organisms over many millions of years Social Darwinism, led in the United States by William Graham Sumner, a Yale University professor, applied Darwin’s discoveries and theories to the existing social and economic order Sumner and others discovered that Darwin’s laws exactly validated what was happening in industrial societies like those of the United States and Britain Inequality was a law of nature Those who succeeded were nature’s fittest; those who failed or fell behind proved that only the strongest could or should survive Helping the poor was a fool’s game “While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race,” said Carnegie “Nature’s cure for most social and political diseases is better than man’s,” declared the president of Columbia University Survival of the fittest, wrote Rockefeller, is “a law of nature and a law of God.” Social Darwinism and laissez faire worked in tandem to diminish worker power and autonomy A laborer, the era’s ideology maintained, was free to sell his (or her) services to the highest bidder, but not free to join with other workers to demand from employers or government protection and improvement of their conditions By the 1880s the U.S Supreme Court, in the name of economic liberty of contract, was regularly striking down efforts to raise wages, limit work hours, abolish sweatshops, and form unions GILDED AGE OPPONENTS People who worked for or depended on the new industrial system did not meekly resign themselves to the insecurity and cruelty of industrial labor The era was beset by strikes, riots, and political radicalization among workers even before unprecedented tides of new