7. The Rise to Power—“Boom and Bust”

In the years between 1865 and the close of the century the U.S. became the most powerful industrial nation in the world. The closing of the frontier in 1890 seemed to reinforcethe dominance of industrialization and urbanisation. The pejoratively termed “Gilded Age”had been largely powered by massive immigration, and had brought with it great wealth for the few, social problems on a scale never seen before, and political corruption at the highest level. A kind of backlash came with the Progressives, who prompted greater state intervention to curb the worst excesses of the capitalist system and championed social and political reform.

The 1890s also saw early attempts at empire-building, with intervention in the Civil War in Spanish Cuba by which the U.S. gained certain Caribbean colonies and power in the Pacific. The reluctance of the government to become involved in the First World War was finally overcome and the U.S. emerged from isolation to play a crucial part in the outcome. America reaped the rewards of victory and was also soon to experience the industrial boom of the 1920s—a decade which also brought with it intolerance, repression, Prohibition and female suffrage. The prosperity of the 1920s however was not widely enough dispersed and this was partly what led to the Great Depression that haunted 1930s America. Franklin Roosevelt’s“New Deal”⁶was only partially successful, but demonstrated the extent to which federal government could intervene to improve quality of life and set a precedent for the post-war era. The prosperity of the country was ironically restored by a war that it had, once again, hoped to avoid, with the U.S. eventually being shaken out of its isolationist complacency by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.