Explain how the Gilded Age force Americans to confront traditional understandings of freedom?

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888). [LICENSE: PUBLIC
DOMAIN; LINK: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_nRMZAAAAYAAJ.]

ESSAY PROMPT

As the Gilded Age remade social life in the United States, Americans struggled to define what
freedom would mean amid their new industrial economy. “I am aware that you called yourselves
free in the nineteenth century,” Dr. Leete says in Edward Bellamy’s bestselling 1888 novel,
Looking Backward. He argues that Americans were anything but free: “The meaning of the word
could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have
applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal
dependence upon others.” Using your reading of Looking Backward and your historical
understanding of the Gilded Age, answer the following prompt: How did the Gilded Age force
Americans to confront traditional understandings of freedom?

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