During the late nineteenth century the United States lost their former place in the imagination of Europe, and by 1900 the accusations of immaturity, materialism and indiscriminate self-praise, formerly the stock-in-trade of conservative critics, had been accepted by the European left. In spite of attempts to treat this as an ‘age of enterprise’ modern Americans have been inclined to echo these criticisms, and ‘the Gilded Age’, with its implications of ostentatious wealth and intrinsic worthlessness, remains the popular label. Yet America remained the land of opportunity both for millions of poor European migrants and for well-to-do investors, and Americans themselves moved from the doubts and divisions of civil war to self-confidence, to social stability, and to a surprising uniformity in their fundamental beliefs. Movements of protest and criticism appealed to a traditional stock of American principles; proposals for radical change in the political, social and economic system won little support. For critics and conservatives alike the American utopia remained America.

The period was dominated by the rise of a highly developed industrial and capitalist society in the North and Mid-West. This society experienced internal tensions similar to those of other industrial societies, but avoided the great fissure of politics based on class. Until the last years of the century it did not encounter the problem of dependencies overseas, but it faced comparable problems in its relationship with the less-developed rural regions occupying a greater part of the territory of the United States.