Hayes on the backs of the nation’s freed blacks. Reforms in the South seemed unlikely in 1877 when Congress resolved the previous autumn’s disputed presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. It was also a period of reform, in which many Americans sought to regulate corporations and shape the changes taking place all around them. They set in motion developments that would shape the country for generations-the reunification of the South and North, the integration of four million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion, immigration, industrialization, urbanization. Twain and Warner were not wrong about the era’s corruption, but the years between 18 were also some of the most momentous and dynamic in American history. They stress greed, scandals, and corruption of the Gilded Age. Given the period’s absence of powerful and charismatic presidents, its lack of a dominant central event, and its sometimes tawdry history, historians have often defined the period by negatives.
The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner corruption and poverty. When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age, they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name.
