The essential corruption of the late 1800's, referred to as the Gilded Age, really cannot be overstated. Congressmen were openly bribed in more scandals than you could name, with endless conflicts of interest, often involving railroad companies. There was an almost cynical treatment of spoils in the era of unregulated capitalism, which also gave way to nepotism and cronyism, and cast the Great Men of the day as corrupt politicians and the immoral railroad tycoon/Monopoly man.

Before the Civil War, slaveholding interests dominated the country. After they were rested from power with a great deal of bloodshed, the business class now held a dominant position in the Republican Party and mirrored itself within the Democrats. The Gilded Age is regarded as a period of rapid industrialization, with a sharp increase in urban populations, brutal and unregulated working conditions, and working class families that could barely subsist upon the wages they were afforded by corporate powerhouses and sweatshop labor. There were a number of labor massacres, corporations hired Pinkerton agents to break strikes, and governments often sent in the militia to maintain order among discontented workingmen.

Farmers were slowly doing worse and worse over this 40 year period, and their desperate economic conditions grew from the Granger movement into the larger Populist movement of the 1890s, which was distinctly centered around agrarianism and proposed the introduction of silver currency to help farmers in distress. The Republican Party had become the party of big business, and for a while the Democratic Party had failed to define clear ideological differences, adopting moderate reform here and there, just as the Republican Party did, when it suited them. But eventually the Populist movement produced William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate in 1896.

The Wizard of Oz is often regarded as a metaphor for the Election of 1896. The Scarecrow represents the poor farmers, the Tin Man represents steel workers, and William Jennings Bryan is the Cowardly Lion. The yellow brick road is the gold standard, the red shoes were originally silver, the man behind the curtain might be McKinley, etc. Bryan railed against the gold standard, but in an era after the Civil War where electing Democrats was increasingly difficult, he lost the election.

The Populist movement still saw major victories as it was absorbed into the Progressive Era of the 1900's, with figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Taft & Woodrow Wilson promising varying measures of reform. The general discontent was so great that tabloid newspapers were dripping with "muckraking" cries of corruption, while the threat of working class rebellion and socialism led the business class to concede to regulations and curb the most horrible excesses of industrial labor. You see the income tax amendment, the direct election of U.S. Senators, and the Prohibition enacted.

The Progressive presidents have been praised for adopting certain measures and criticized for half-heartedly channeling populist sentiment. Roosevelt only championed the causes of labor on occasion, and only took on monopolies when he could gain popularity from it, leaving monstrous corporations such as Standard Oil to the more ardent trustbuster, Taft. It is hard to defend Wilson for his racism and gestures towards the Klan, his crackdown on socialists and WW1 critics, and his reluctant acceptance of women's suffrage after such horror stories as the jailing & beating of the Silent Sentinels. At a time when social Darwinism was popular and the "nadir of American race relations" saw frequent lynchings and racial violence, the figures of the era are full of contradictions.

The 1920's were a time of booming business for corporatists. President Harding campaigned on a "return to normalcy" as a backlash to Wilson's repulsive activism and foreign policy. American companies turned Latin American countries into "banana republics," owned vast amounts of land and ran plantation economies that often gave way to the violent Banana Wars of the time. The Supreme Court entered a sort of dark age called the Lochner Era, and struck down laws that regulated working conditions, hours and wages. The courts even struck down laws regulating child labor, which was not outlawed until 1933. As the corporate boom gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930's, Franklin Roosevelt created an incredibly ambitious government safety net, never before seen in American politics, between Social Security and the whole host of programs that make up the New Deal. Once again, the business class maintained their overall position of power and exploitation over the working masses, but workingmen were afforded a better quality of life and greater guarantees of protection by the government than ever before. FDR's focus on the New Deal eventually gave way to the all-out war of WW2, putting a bookend on the "Age of Reform."

The measures of reform that were enacted to stave off any more extreme working-class rebellion are still important accomplishments that owe their existence to both popular pressure & the newfound willingness of the federal government to channel that discontent in the early 1900's.