For number one i got that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were the first to call the years after the Civil War
the "gilded age."He was Struck by what they saw as the rampant greed and
speculative frenzy of the marketplac. The corruption pervading
national politics, they satirized a society whose serious problems, they
felt, had been veiled by a thin coating of gold..
For number two i got that The Democrats were the hardest hit by the farmers' defections from their
party to the Populists. They, far more than the Republicans, relied on
southern and western votes. And so they did what America's major
political parties usually do when facing a challenge from a third
part. They co-opted one of their challengers' issues and stole most of
their thunder.
