The Gilded Age was given its name by Mark Twain, an observer disgusted by the social and political decadence he believed filled America. But while accurate in capturing the underside of the era—desperate poverty, crowded cites, unsafe factory conditions, political corruption—it fails to acknowledge that there was an upside to the period as well. 

Most dramatically, industrialists developed new production, distribution, and organizational strategies that ushered in the American corporate economy and provided new products and new levels of wealth for an expanding middle class.