The Social Crisis.

American society at the turn of the century stood in the middle of a process of industrialization and urbanization that had begun after the Civil War and would continue until the Great Depression. The gap between upper and lower classes was widening throughout this period, as immigration swelled the ranks of the laboring class while industrialists and financiers — some soothed by the late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestant Gospel of Wealth, which made poverty a sin and prosperity a Christian duty—consolidated their monopolies and raised their profit margins. Labor unions were just beginning to gain a foothold, often being born into an atmosphere of strikes and violence. No safeguards existed to prevent industrialists from demanding long hours and dangerous work, and labor abuses of the sort documented by immigrant journalist Jacob Riis were in abundance...