Testimony During The Gilded Age

The article “Testimony before a U.S. Senate Committee, 1885” is written by the U.S. Congress as a Report of the Senate Committee in 1885. This testimony takes place during the Gilded Age, an era marked by industrialization, corruption, and American greed. The testifier in this article Thomas O’Donnell, describes what it was like to be a worker during the Gilded Age. O’Donnell is a husband and a father of two children. He tells the senate that he is not very well educated since he had to start working when he was a young boy. During this time child labor was a very common thing. To be able to go to school and participate in the free education system was a luxury that many Americans could not afford. O’Donnell continues to testify how difficult

Economy in the sense of jobs, labor systems, industrialization, and social classes. Why was there a call for such mass production of goods? The need of hundreds of workers, and the inhumane conditions put upon these workers commonly led to their death? Americas movement into a consumer culture pushed for a new way of life. Instead of making things for themselves, they wanted to buy things for themselves. Therefore businesses needed a way to make enough products at a low enough cost so that people could buy them. This therefore led to employers hiring hundreds of workers that got paid very little. By doing so, it provided a way for businesses to produce and provide cheaply. As discussed in the textbook, workers commonly quit due to the awful labor systems that were like a “scene that resembled hell” (Roark, Johnson, Cohen, Stage, Hartmann). The textbook expands on these work conditions, and how the employers may choose to pay their workers less at any given time. It is no wonder that so much of the population was in poverty. The survival of many families depended on contributions from each family member, this is known as the family