Evaluation of the gilded age
...ght, they bribed members of Congress. Companies battled to build monopolies, so as to gain complete control of a market and thus complete control of prices. Profit, and the search for profit, ruled the day. After the Civil War, new technologies swept the country. The Gilded Age saw the construction of large networks of infrastructure, namely railroads, telegraph grids, and meat-packing systems; these undertakings demanded vast new resources of steel and oil. Robber Barons built up vast financial empires, often gaining monopolies in their respective places. These large enterprises, which drove American development, were made possible by the introduction of the modern corporation; but the success of these operations also vaulted the power and size of corporations far beyond anyone's original intention. In all, from 1870 to 1900, the volume of manufacturing in the US quadrupled. A key sector of the Gilded Age economy was railroads. For the first time ever, rail created a national market for goods. With the good came the bad, however. Since the government desired to connect the nation through expansion of the railroads, the government often gave the railroad companies land grants to lay track. This practice led to considerable opportunity for corruption. Leland Stanford, for instance, served as governor of California while owning Central Pacific Rail, a company to which, as governor, he oversaw innumerable land grants. Meanwhile, even as railroads exploited the government system, they also exploited the public. Farmers who used the railroads to ship cargo became incensed. These farmers flocked to a farmer's political organization called the Grange that had existed since 1866. The Grange succeeded in 1871 in pushing the state of Illinois to adopt regulatory legislation establishing maximum rates for railroads. Other Midwestern states soon followed, passing their own "Granger laws." The railroads challenged the laws, and the battles moved through the courts in what became known as the "Granger cases." In 1876, Munn v. Illinois reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of the Granger Laws. However, in the 1886 case Wabash v. Illinois, the Supreme Court concluded that the earlier decision was based on the incorrect idea that corporations had to serve the public good, and Munn v. Illinois was overturned. Despite big names of Robber Barons such as Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie (steel), Vanderbilt (rail), and Morgan (investment banking), the Gilded Age was generally a time when personality and individualism were being eradicated from corporations. Gilded Age corporations, freed by the General Incorporation Laws of 1850, strove for larger size and increased rationalization over the smaller business enterprises that existed before the Civil War. The Gilded Age was also a perio...