The 1870s

May 6, 1875

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By America's centennial decade, the revolution had become an industrial one. The factories that mass-produced death during the Civil War began transforming the American landscape into something that would have been unrecognizable even fifty years before. Cities grew swiftly as a massive influx of immigrants filled the new factory jobs.

With the growth came corruption, such as the Tweed scandal in New York City, and overcrowded conditions such as those that led to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which nearly destroyed the whole city. 

Still, so many fortunes were made and flaunted in the decade that followed that the 1870s were called the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller was all of 31 years old when he and his brother William incorporated the Standard Oil Company in 1870. The Rockefellers, along with Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, dominated the American economy. Tremendous economic power was concentrated in few hands -- a dangerous trend. The machinations of a single railroad magnate, Jay Cooke, caused the Panic of 1873 and led to a five-year depression. 

Mechanization also begat modernization. The telephone and the phonograph were invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, but in 1879 the latter topped himself with perhaps his greatest creation, the electric light.    

In 1876, the year of America's centennial celebration, Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the presidency by a Republican-dominated commission despite losing the popular vote to Samuel Tilden. Hayes's victory marked the end of Reconstruction. The only person who perhaps suffered a worse defeat was General George Armstrong Custer, who led his men into a massacre at Little Big Horn that cost the lives of nearly 300 men, including his own.