How the Gilded Age’s wealth stress-tested democracy

In the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, industrialization created eye-popping fortunes virtually overnight. That new wealth also produced new questions.

“The big story of the Gilded Age is not only about these new concentrations of wealth, but the concentrations of power that that produced,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage says. “One of the big questions of the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era, was: Could you run a democracy, could this country survive as a republic when you were going to have these concentrations of wealth and power?”

In Chicago, a city that became a symbol for the Gilded Age, the wealthiest Americans began funding new cultural institutions — often “high art, classical music, public libraries, sometimes as monuments to themselves,” Gage says. “But another piece of what happened was that you began to have movements saying that this is not the way the world ought to operate. We don’t want these concentrations of power.”

Judy Woodruff joined Gage as she traveled across the country, exploring the people, places and turning points that have shaped America over its 250-year history. Watch our report, which is part of our Crossroads: America at 250 series.

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