How Did the Gilded Age Get Its Name?

The Gilded Age takes its name from the novel The Gilded Age, written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873. The title was a provocation: the word gilded describes something covered in a thin layer of gold, shiny on the outside but, perhaps, cheap or rotten underneath. That’s how Twain and Warner saw the United States. Their book—part comedy, part critique, set in Washington, D.C.—mocked a society that looked bright and successful but that, underneath, was corrupt, driven forward by self-serving politicians and grasping businessmen. The title stuck because it captured the contradictions of the era.

After the Civil War, the United States experienced massive industrial growth, and a small number of businessmen and industrialists—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others—made huge personal fortunes. They were hailed by some as “captains of industry” and as America’s greatest philanthropists, but many criticized them as “robber barons” who built monopolies and caused people, particularly workers, misery.

Eventually, the golden surface wore thin. The reformers known as Progressives who emerged during the first two decades of the 20th century challenged the idea that the inequality and concentrated wealth of the 1870s and beyond was simply the price of progress. Journalists also played an important role in exposing the Gilded Age’s excesses. While Twain and Warner’s novel is today largely unread and forgotten, its title has endured because it expresses the essence of an era when spectacular wealth hid the deep fractures in American society that it had caused.