The Gilded Age is described fairly well by it’s name. It was a time of advancement economically and technologically, at least on the surface. If you dig deeper you can find that it wasn’t a very good time to live in for the common people, and it would stay like that for most of duration of the Gilded Age until the Progressive Era began. As cities grew, political machines formed and the corruption that followed blinded the government. The common people lived in poverty while the government catered to the rich. Reformists who recognized these issues with society and reacted to them with public dismay were dubbed “mugwumps” because of their mistrust of conventional party discipline. The most notable mugwumps being Edwin L. Godkin, George William
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Some of these things being endowing mayors with greater executive powers, seeking citywide at-large elections, and creating boards of experts that had the authority to regulate metropolitan police, utilities, parks, schools, and public finance. Despite their efforts, mugwumps and goo-goos struggled and were greeted with limited success in their mission to influence the government’s actions in their favor. The people’s party, yet another reform group formed by the populist party in 1892, was another reform group that sought things such as Direct Democracy and labor reform. They reached out to farmers, laborers, and all kinds of common people. They got many votes and won four states in the 1892 presidential election, but they were unable to forge a winning national alliance. The National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was a group that fought for women’s suffrage that was founded in February 18, 1890. Though they did want equal rights overall, they eventually set women’s suffrage as their primary goal, a right that they would not get until many years after the gilded age was …show more content…
These same people would also attempt to limit the ways corporate money could influence legislative outcomes in order to make the law more fair. In the 1880s several farm states tried hard to impose rate regulation on rail corporations. Industrialized states began to invoke their constitutional police power to regulate factory hours and work conditions more forcefully than ever before. Mugwump reformers supported these policy initiatives with varying degrees of enthusiasm. A major new reform at the state level was the Australian (secret) ballot, which were designed to break the grip that political parties had on on the voting process. In 1888, ballot reform spread swiftly to other states and naturalization laws were codified to delay the right to vote among immigrants. Central to the mugwump goal was the most important political reform achievement of the era, civil service reform. Partly inspired by British precedents, its aim was to get rid of the spoils system that had long tainted the distribution of public jobs. The system, called "rotation in office," used payroll patronage at all levels of government to reward loyal followers of the party in
Some of these things being endowing mayors with greater executive powers, seeking citywide at-large elections, and creating boards of experts that had the authority to regulate metropolitan police, utilities, parks, schools, and public finance. Despite their efforts, mugwumps and goo-goos struggled and were greeted with limited success in their mission to influence the government’s actions in their favor. The people’s party, yet another reform group formed by the populist party in 1892, was another reform group that sought things such as Direct Democracy and labor reform. They reached out to farmers, laborers, and all kinds of common people. They got many votes and won four states in the 1892 presidential election, but they were unable to forge a winning national alliance. The National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was a group that fought for women’s suffrage that was founded in February 18, 1890. Though they did want equal rights overall, they eventually set women’s suffrage as their primary goal, a right that they would not get until many years after the gilded age was …show more content…
These same people would also attempt to limit the ways corporate money could influence legislative outcomes in order to make the law more fair. In the 1880s several farm states tried hard to impose rate regulation on rail corporations. Industrialized states began to invoke their constitutional police power to regulate factory hours and work conditions more forcefully than ever before. Mugwump reformers supported these policy initiatives with varying degrees of enthusiasm. A major new reform at the state level was the Australian (secret) ballot, which were designed to break the grip that political parties had on on the voting process. In 1888, ballot reform spread swiftly to other states and naturalization laws were codified to delay the right to vote among immigrants. Central to the mugwump goal was the most important political reform achievement of the era, civil service reform. Partly inspired by British precedents, its aim was to get rid of the spoils system that had long tainted the distribution of public jobs. The system, called "rotation in office," used payroll patronage at all levels of government to reward loyal followers of the party in