Gilded Age
In the post-Civil War era, the Senate dealt with great national issues such as Reconstruction and monetary policy. Given the strong political parties of the Third Party System, the leading politicians controlled enough support in state legislatures to be elected Senators. In an age of unparalled industrial expansion, entrepreneurs had the prestige previously reserved to victorious generals, and many were elected to the Senate.
In 1890-1910 a handful of Republicans controlled the chamber, led by Nelson Aldrich (Rhode Island), Orville H. Platt (Connecticut), John Coit Spooner (Wisconsin), William Boyd Allison (Iowa), along with national party leader Mark Hanna (Ohio). Aldrich designed all the major tax and tariff laws of the early 20th century, including the Federal reserve system. Among the Democrats Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland stood out.
From 1871 to 1898, the Senate did not approve any treaties. The Senate scuttled a long series of reciprocal trade agreements, blocked deals to annex the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands, defeated an arbitration deal with Britain, and forced the renegotiation of the pact to build the Panama Canal. Finally, in 1898, the Senate nearly refused to ratify the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War.
Read more about this topic: History Of The United States Senate
Famous quotes containing the words gilded and/or age:
“Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)