For most people life was not about becoming literate, and clean, and good-natured in the Gilded Age. Rather, a vicious cycle of government handouts, and corporate abuses of the masses, fore-casted social decline. A people’s willingness to work speaks volumes of their morale. In the early decades of the past century Jacob Riis recounts that peoples morale was low and some wondered if life was worth living. He tells of the evils of alcohol, which served as the resort for many a male in society (159). Low morale comes from two things, not getting what you think you deserve, or getting what you think you didn’t earn. In the first instance is injustice; in the second is a population dependent upon the state. From 1877 to World War II, it could be said that America became more democratic, if one considers the great achievements of invention, business, and finance, by various people and groups. Although democracy means more than capitalism, it means the right for all to live in a free society, governed by principles of reciprocity, and respect.
The meaning of democracy, is what the word literally means, “rule by the people”. If the population is growing more depraved, and indifferent to human life, life in general becomes more of a search for food, than for moral purity, or uprightness of character. It should be the role of the government to educate the youth in a society, where they fail to do this; they fail to make that society truly democratic. They neglect to provide the power-means available to children to make good, reasonable, honest decisions; they fail also to achieve their own sole end, of prosperity, and life and freedom for all. If one considered the masses and their sense of achieving the American dream or in exercising their political freedom, America’s democracy was beginning to feel the birth pains of capitalism.
As is graphically depicted in Riis’s book, tenements were filthy and depraved, both due to those who owned the buildings and those who lived in them. Riis tells of a tenement owner who tried to improve his buildings, but in the process became, ‘a firm believer in the total depravity of man’. “It is a dreary old truth that those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to do it.” Not only were the people living in the tenements depraved, but many of the tenement owners were depraved as well. When something needed fixing they figured fixing it would not solve the problem, so they drank the insurance money in social gatherings (Riis 202, 203).
The presence of progressivism was not the solution to social ills in the early 20th century, but rather the recognition of those ills, and the attempt to bring public awareness to them. A degraded proletariat, run down public housing, and illiteracy ruled the day. The intense poverty, which kept sweatshops open, and child labor active, allowed for unsanitary living conditions. Riis gives great descriptions of how ugly life in the city was. Because of the rise of big business, competition was largely squelched; therefore individuals had little hope of starting their own. Teddy Roosevelt was right to label the socialist party for what they were, in my words, gossips, and troublemakers (muckrakers). The last thing we needed as a nation was a socialist telling us where we come up short. This is hypocrisy, that those who promote such an end as socialism produced, would then criticize the sanitation of various businesses or the houses their government programs supplied. While thinking they are helping the poor, they are actually crippling them for life, for lack of initiative, and lack of education, and lack of competition, without which would allow all men time to drink.
Industrialization and prescience of war kept America mostly isolated from the rest of the world, and in this time many changes would take place affecting commerce, organized labor, and the proletariat. These changes would take the form of monopolies, large factory based industries, and a diminished sense of independence. Ownership and control of business was mostly in the hands of various wealthy bureaucrats. Namely John D. Rockefeller, who through unseemly means out bargained people, and crushed rivals, not allowing the capitalist principle of competition to operate for the masses, but bringing to a head, his philanthropic ideals (Tindall 814-16). Society may have been better in the long run for the lives of such great men, but the common man could not expect to achieve such things, given the nature of the system. No system could raise everyone to Rockefeller’s status. Thus democracy should not be defined by what he or others did. Rather it should be defined in the wake of what he did, he mobilized the economy in many ways that government was not capable of doing, and presented us with new options. Democracy is rarely seen in the means of man’s attempts to free himself; rather it is seen in the after thought of benevolence and good will.
“Liberal historians interpreted American history as a series of conflicts between the forces of good (fighting for greater democracy and a more nearly equal distribution of wealth) and the opposing forces of conservatism (fighting to maintain the status quo)” (Porter 5). Capitalism in society and socialism in politics effectively stagnated economic competition in the early 1900’s. Democracy was ones right to receive welfare, and any attempt to thwart that end failed. Yet the system was producing dependencies of the state, and needed reform. The problem was with the government and the people involved in it. People are the rule, and when they make themselves the end of that power nothing is produced. Fortunately in the evil of war, America found her international identity, as a super power, and broke from the past ideals of isolationism, without which we would have drowned in an ocean of complacency.