Controversies over the role of government in the Gilded Age
Regulating capitalism
During the later 19th century, a variety of political movements and parties, often short-lived but sometimes with enduring legacies, challenged the prevailing laissez-faire approach of local, state and federal politicians, arguing for greater regulation and oversight of industry and capitalism. Spurred in part because of greater government oversight and regulation of industry during the Civil War, disparate political parties and movements, including the Grange, the Greenbacker Party, and the People’s Party, often called the Populists, emerged during the Gilded Age to demand greater use of paper money, the expansion of silver in the economy, regulation of railroads, and antitrust legislation to prevent and/or break up monopolies and oligopolies.
Given that many economists and legislators subscribed to laissez-faire economic theories, regulation of industry was often minimal. Furthermore, **social Darwinist **ideas about economics and society decreased the likelihood of effective regulation. The influence of industrial capitalists frequently extended to the courts, too, as many judges, including Supreme Court justices, were former corporate lawyers. Even when Congress passed laws such as the **Interstate Commerce Act **(1887) and the **Sherman Antitrust Act **(1890), the interpretation and enforcement of these laws favored the interest of capital, not labor.
An enduring legal development from the 1880s is that the US Supreme Court determined that corporations are legal persons meaning that they are entitled to constitutional rights and protections, including from the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment which was originally designed to ensure that formerly enslaved persons were afforded the same rights as other American citizens. This finding from the 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad would be supplemented by further legal decisions in favor of corporations and their rights, including the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission where the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions to political action committees and related political actors are speech by corporations and unions are vital free speech rights protected by the 1st Amendment.
Civil service reform
American politics had long consisted of patronage networks in which parties and politicians provided supporters with contracts and jobs in return for votes and campaign contributions. Local, state and federal agencies were often staffed by political supporters with limited qualifications and allegations of corruption in the late 19th century at **Tammany Hall **and the **Customs House **in New York City as well as white southern complaints about corruption in Reconstruction governments and the Freedmen’s Bureau and the ***Credit Mobilier ***scandal involving members of Congress prompted greater demands for civil service reform. Ironically, President Chester Arthur, previously accused of corruption while head of the New York Customs House in the 1870s, signed the Pendleton Act in 1883 that sought to reduce patronage and corruption in the federal government by requiring civil servants to pass qualifying exams; momentum for the Pendleton Act built as a result of the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled job seeker, Charles Guiteau.
Pendleton Act, January 16, 1883
Improving the lives of Americans
In the next chapter, you will read more extensively about urban reform movements, including the Progressive movement, that sought to make American cities safer and more livable, but early impetus for economic and urban reforms in the late 19th century stemmed from salient contemporary calamities and crises, including the Great Chicago Fire (1871), the panics of 1873 and 1893, and greater awareness of urban tenement conditions that were publicized in Jacob Riis’s influential book, How the Other Half Lives. As were described earlier in this chapter, the government’s roles in settling and/or suppressing labor strikes and protests also prompted calls for reform.