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Major RxR Companies
Central Pacific Railroad -Rail laying at the California end was undertaken by them. This line pushed boldly eastward from boomtown Sacramento, over and through the towering, snow-clogged Sierra Nevada. -Some ten thousand Chinese laborers proved to be efficient, cheap, and expendable. -Built 689 miles.
Union Pacific Railroad -It was commissioned by Congress to thrust westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The laying of rails began in earnest after the Civil War ended in 1865, and with juicy loans and land grants available, the "groundhog" promoters made all possible haste. -Many Irish workers made up the sweaty construction gangs, who worked at a frantic pace. -Built 1,806 miles.
Wabash v. Illinois
In 1886, the Supreme Court decreed that individual states had no power to regulate interstate commerce. If the mechanical monster of the railroad monopoly were to be corralled, the federal government would have to do the job.
Interstate Commerce Act
-President Cleveland did not look kindly on effective regulation. But Congress ignored his indifference and passed this act in 1887.
-It prohibited rebates and pools and required the railroads to publish their rates openly. It also forbade unfair discrimination against shippers and outlawed charging more for a short haul then for a long one over the same line. Most important, it set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to administer and enforce the new legislation.
-It was the first large-scale attempt by Washington to regulate business in the interest of society at large. It heralded the arrival of a series of independent regulatory commissions in the next century, which would irrevocably commit the government to the daunting task of monitoring and guiding the private economy. It foreshadowed the doom of freewheeling, buccaneering business practices and served full notice that there was a public interest in private enterprise that the government was bound to protect.
Stock Watering
-Watered stock is an asset with an artificially-inflated value. The term most commonly refers to a form of securities fraud in which a company issues stock to someone before receiving at least the par value in payment. -JP Morgan did it after taking Carnegie holdings
Horizontal Integration
A technique which meant allying with and/or buying out competitors to monopolize a given market. Rockefeller used it
Vertical Integration
The process of combining into one organization all phases of manufacturing, from raw materials to the final product; Carnegie used it
Trust
A business arrangement where a group of corporations in the same industry come together under a single board of directors. This board effectively controls all the companies within the _______, allowing them to reduce competition, set prices, and maximize profits. It was perfected by Rockefeller
Interlocking Directorates
A technique coined by JP Morgan where he would consolidate rival enterprises and ensure future harmony by placing officers of his own banking syndicate on his rivals' various boards of directors.
Bessemer-Kelly Process
A method for making cheap steel; cold air blown on red-hot iron caused the metal to become white-hot by igniting the carbon and thus eliminating impurities.
Heavy Industry
-Industries that produce large-scale goods and materials essential for other industries, typically requiring significant capital investment, complex machinery, and large facilities.
-It included sectors like steel production, railroad construction, coal mining, and machinery manufacturing,
Consumer Goods
-Products made for personal consumption by the general public. These goods were typically finished products that are ready for sale, such as clothing, furniture, and household items.
-While heavy industry provided foundations for economic growth and industrialization, these were the everyday items people purchased and used.
Standard Oil Company
Organized by John D. Rockefeller, centered in Ohio
Social Darwinism
-Most defenders of wide-open capitalism relied heavily on the survival-of-the-fittest theories of English philosopher Herbert Spencer and Yale professor William Graham Sumner.
-Later mislabeled _________ists, these theorists argued that individuals won their stations on the basis of their natural talents. The wealthy and powerful had simply demonstrated greater abilities than the poor.
-"The millionaires are a product of natural selection," Sumner declared. In 1883 he asked, "What do social classes owe each other?" then answered his own question: nothing.
-Some _________ists later applied this theory to explain why some nations were more powerful than others or had the right to dominate "lesser peoples," often defined by race.
Gospel of Wealth
Steel baron Andrew Carnegie agreed that the wealthy, entrusted with society's riches, had to prove themselves morally responsible according to a _________
Sherman Anti-Trust Act
-Signed into law in 1890, it forbade combinations in restraint of trade, without any distinction between "good" trusts and "bad" trusts. Bigness, not badness, was the sin.
-The law proved ineffective, largely because it had only baby teeth or no teeth at all, and because it contained legal loopholes through which clever corporation lawyers could wriggle. But it was unexpectedly effective in one respect. Contrary to its original intent, it was used to curb labor unions or labor combinations that were deemed to be restraining trade.
-Early prosecutions of the trusts by the Justice Department under this Act, as it turned out, were neither vigorous nor successful. The decisions in seven of the first eight cases presented by the attorney general were adverse to the government.
-More new trusts were formed in the 1890s under President McKinley than during any other like period. Not until 1914 were the paper jaws of this Act fitted with reasonably sharp teeth. Until then, there was some question whether the government would control the trusts or the trusts the government.
-But the iron grip of monopolistic corporations was being threatened. A revolutionary new principle had been written into the law books by this Act, as well as by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Private greed should henceforth be subordinated to public need.
National Labor Union
-The ______________, organized in 1866, represented a giant bootstride by workers. One of the earliest national-scale unions to organize in the Americas or Europe, it aimed to unify workers across locales and trades to challenge their ever more powerful bosses.
-It lasted six years and attracted an impressive total of some 600,000 members, including the skilled, unkilled, and farmers, though in keeping with the times, it excluded the Chinese and made only nominal efforts to include women and blacks.
-It fought for the arbitration of industrial disputes and the eight-hour workday, winning the latter for government workers. But the devastating depression of the 1870s dealt it a knockout blow. Labor was generally rocked back on its heels during the tumultuous years of the depression, but it never completely toppled. Wage reductions in 1877 touched off such disruptive strikes on the railroads that nothing short of federal troops could restore order.
Knights of Labor
A new organization that seized the torches dropped by the defunct National Labor Union. Officially known as the Noble and Holy Order of the ____________, it began inauspiciously in 1869 as a secret society with a private ritual, passwords, and a special handshake. Secrecy, which continued until 1881, would forestall possible reprisals by employers.
-Like the National Labor Union, they sought to include all workers in "one big union." A welcome mat was rolled out for the skilled and unskilled, for men and women, for whites and blacks, some ninety thousand of whom joined. They barred only "nonproducers" - liquor dealers, professional gamblers, lawyers, bankers, and stockbrokers.
-Setting up broad goals, they refused to thrust their lance into politics. Instead they campaigned for economic and social reform, including producers' cooperatives and codes for safety and health. They frowned upon industrial warfare while fostering industrial arbitration. The ordinary workday was then ten hours or more, and they waged a determined campaign for the eight-hour stint.
-Terrence Powderly led them to win a number of strikes for the eight-hour day. When they staged a successful strike against the Wabash Railroad in 1885, membership mushroomed to about three-quarters of a million workers.
-Besides the Haymarket Square incident, a fatal handicap was their inclusion of both skilled and unskilled workers. Unskilled labor could easily be replaced by strikebreaking "scabs." High-class craft unionists, who enjoyed a semi monopoly of skills, could not readily be supplanted and hence enjoyed a superior bargaining position. This led them to eventually break away and form their own union.
-By the 1890s they had melted away to 100,000 members, and these gradually fused with other protest groups of that decade.
Haymarket Square
The Knights of Labor became involved in a number of May Day strikes in 1886, about half of which failed. A local point was Chicago, home to about eighty thousand Knights. The city was also honeycombed with a few hundred anarchists, many of them foreign-born, who were advocating a violent overthrow of the American government.
-Labor disorders had broken out, and on May 4, 1886, the Chicago police advanced on a meeting called to protest alleged brutalities by the authorities. Suddenly a dynamite bomb was thrown that killed or injured several dozen people, including police.
-Hysteria swept the Windy City. Eight anarchists were rounded up, although nobody proved that they had anything to do directly with the bomb. But the judge and jury held that since they had preached incendiary doctrines, they could be charged with conspiracy. Five were sentenced to death, one of whom committed suicide, and the other three were given stiff prison terms.
-In 1892, some six years later, John P. Altgeld, a German-born Democrat of strong liberal tendencies was elected governor of Illinois. After studying the case exhaustively, he pardoned the three survivors. Violent abuse was showered on him by conservatives, unstinted praise by those who thought the men innocent. Whatever the merits of the case, Altgeld displayed courage in opposing what he regarded as a gross injustice.
-This incident helped blow the props from under the Knights of Labor. They were associated in the public mind, though mistakenly, with the anarchists. The eight-hour movement suffered correspondingly, and subsequent strikes by the Knights met with weak success.
American Federation of Labor
-A federation of exclusively skilled craft unions
-Born in 1886, the __________ was largely the brainchild of Samuel Gompers. Rising spectacularly in the labor ranks, he was elected president of this every year except one from 1886 to 1924.
-Significantly, it was just what it called itself - a federation. It consisted of an association of self-governing national unions, each of which kept its independence, with a unifying overall strategy. No individual laborer could join the central organization.
-It thus established itself on solid but narrow foundations. Although attempting to speak for all workers, it fell far short of being representative of them. Composed of skilled craftsmen, like the carpenters and bricklayers, it was willing to let unskilled laborers, including women and especially blacks, fend for themselves.
-Though hard-pressed by big industry, the federation was basically non-political. But it did attempt to persuade members to reward friends and punish foes at the polls.
-It weathered the panic of 1893 reasonably well, and by 1900 it could boast a membership of 500,00. Critics referred to it, with questionable accuracy, as "the labor trust."
Open vs. Closed Shop
A _______ shop is a company that has agreed only to hire people who are already a member of the union. A _____, on the other hand, is a company that doesn't require employees to be a member of a union as a condition of employment.
Completion of Transcontinental Railroad
Completion of the transcontinental line - a magnificent engineering feat for that day - was one of America's most impressive peacetime undertakings. It welded the West Coast more firmly to the Union and facilitated a flourishing trade with Asia. It penetrated the arid barrier of the deserts and paved the way for the phenomenal growth of the Great West.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
-The success of the western lines was facilitated by welding together and expanding the older eastern networks, notably the New York Central. The genius in this enterprise was "Commodore" ________ - burly, boisterous, white-whiskered.
-Having made his millions in steamboating, he daringly turned, in his late sixties, to a new career in railroading. Though ill-educated, ungrammatical, coarse, and ruthless, he was clear-visioned. Offering superior railway service at lower rates, he amassed a fortune of $100 million.
-He helped popularize the steel rail when he replaced the old iron tracks of the New York Central with the tougher metal.
Grover Cleveland
-Before 1887, land grants to railroads were made in broad belts along the proposed route. Within these belts the railroads were allowed to choose alternate mile-square sections in checkerboard fashion. But until they determined the precise location of their tracks and decided which sections were the choicest selections, the railroads withheld all the land from other users.
-This President put an end to this foot-dragging practice in 1887 and threw open to settlement the still-unclaimed public portions of the land-grant areas.
Thomas Edison
-He was a gifted tinkerer and a tireless worker, not a pure scientist.
-Wondrous devices poured out of his "invention factory" in New Jersey - the phonograph, the mimeograph, the dictaphone, and the moving picture.
-He is probably best known for his perfection in 1879 of the electric lightbulb, which turned night into day and transformed ancient human habits as well. People had previously slept an average of nine hours a night; now they slept just a bit more than seven.
Andrew Carnegie
-The steel king
-At 13, he was brought to America by his impoverished parents in 1848 and got a job as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week. Mounting the ladder of success so fast that he was said to have scorched the rungs, he forged ahead by working hard, doing the extra chore, cheerfully assuming the responsibility, and smoothly cultivating influential people.
-After accumulating some capital, he entered the steel business in the Pittsburgh area. A gifted organizer and administrator, he succeeded by picking high-class associates and by eliminating many middlemen. Although inclined to be tough-fisted in business, he was not a monopolist and disliked monopolistic trusts. His remarkable organization was a partnership that involved, at its maximum, about forty "Pittsburgh millionaires." By 1900 he was producing one-fourth of the nation's Bessemer steel, and the partners in these pre-income tax days were dividing profits of $40 million a year as their take-home pay, himself receiving a cool $25 million.
-He integrated every phase of his steel-making operation. His miners scratched the ore from the earth in the Mesabi Range; his ships floated it across the Great Lakes; his railroads delivered it to the blast furnaces at Pittsburgh. When the molten metal finally poured from the glowing crucibles into the waiting ingot molds, no other hands but those in his employ had touched the product.
-He pioneered the creative entrepreneurial tactic of vertical integration. His goal was to improve efficiency by making supplies more reliable, controlling the quality of the product at all stages of production, and eliminating middlemens fees. He dedicated the remaining years of his life to giving away money for public libraries, pensions for professors, and other such philanthropic purposes - in all, disposing of about $350 million.
JP Morgan
-The bankers' banker
-He had made a legendary reputation for himself and his Wall Street banking house by financing the reorganization of railroads, insurance companies, and banks. He had an enviable reputation for integrity. He did not believe that "money power" was dangerous, except when in dangerous hands - and he did not regard his own hands as dangerous.
-The force of circumstances brought him and Carnegie into collision. By 1900 Carnegie, weary of turning steel into gold, was eager to sell his holdings. He had meanwhile plunged heavily into the manufacture of steel pipe tubing. Carnegie, cleverly threatening to invade the same business, was ready to ruin his rival if he did not receive his price. Carnegie's agents haggled with him for 8 agonizing hours, and he finally agreed to buy out Carnegie for over $400 million.
-He moved rapidly to expand his new industrial empire. He took the Carnegie holdings, added others, "watered" the stock liberally, and in 1901 launched the enlarged United States Steel Corporation. Capitalized at $1.4 billion, it was America's first billion-dollar corporation - a larger sum than the total estimated wealth of the nation in 1800.
-He devised still other schemes for eliminating "wasteful" competition. The depression of the 1890s drove into his welcoming arms many bleeding businesspeople, wounded by cutthroat competition. His prescribed remedy was the concept of interlocking directorates.
John D. Rockefeller
-The oil baron
-Born to a family of precarious income, he became a successful businessman at age nineteen. One upward stride led to another, and in 1870 he organized the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, nucleus of the great trust formed in 1882. Locating his refineries in Cleveland, he sought to eliminate the middlemen and squeeze out competitors.
-Pious and parsimonious, he flourished in an era of completely free enterprise. So-called piratical practices were employed by "corsairs of finance," and business ethics were distressingly low. ________, operating"just to the windward of the law," pursued a policy of rule or ruin. By 1877 he controlled 95 percent of all the oil refineries in the country.
-He showed little mercy. A kind of primitive savagery prevailed in the jungle world of big business, where only the fittest survived. Or so he believed. His son later explained that the beautiful rose could be produced "only by sacrificing the early buds that grew up around it." Simply, _______ pinched off the small buds with complete ruthlessness. Employing spies and extorting secret rebates from the railroads, he even forced the lines to pay him rebates on the freight bills of his competitors
-On the other side of the ledger, his oil monopoly did turn out a superior product at a relatively cheap price. It achieved important economies, both at home and abroad, by its large-scale methods of production and distribution.
-He was a master of the strategy of horizontal integration, and he perfected a device for controlling bothersome rivals - the trust.
William McKinley
More new trusts were formed in the 1890s under President ________ than during any other like period.
Terrence V. Powderly
An Irish-American of nimble wit and fluent tongue. Under his eloquent but often erratic leadership, the Knights of Labor won a number of strikes for the eight-hour workday.
Samuel Gompers
-The elitist American Federation of Labor, born in 1886, was largely the brainchild of him
-This Jewish cigar maker, born in a London tenement and removed from school at age ten, was brought to America when thirteen. Taking his turn at reading informative literature to fellow cigar makers in New York, he was pressed into overtime service because of his strong voice.
-Rising spectacularly in the labor ranks, he was elected president of the American Federation of Labor every year except one from 1886 to 1924.
-He adopted a down-to-earth approach, soft-pedaling attempts to engineer sweeping social reform. A bitter foe of socialism, he shunned politics for economic strategies and goals. He had no quarrel with capitalism, but he demanded a fairer share for labor. All he wanted, he said, was "more."
-Promoting what he called a "pure and simple" unionism, he sought better wages, hours, and working conditions. A major goal of his was the "trade agreement" authorizing the closed shop - or all-union labor. His chief weapons were the walkout and the boycott, enforced by "We don't patronize" signs. The stronger craft unions of the federation, by pooling funds, were able to amass a war chest that would enable them to ride out prolonged strikes.
Urbanization
-The growth of American metropolises was spectacular. In 1860 no city in the United States could boast a million inhabitants; By 1890 New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had vaulted past the million mark. By 1900 New York, with some 3.5 million people, was the second largest city in the world.
-American cities grew both up and out. The cloud-brushing skyscraper allowed more people and workplaces to be packed onto a parcel of land. Appearing first as a ten-story building in Chicago in 1885, the skyscraper was made usable by the perfecting of the electric elevator.
-Americans were also becoming commuters, carted daily between home and job on the mass transit lines that radiated out from central cities to surrounding suburbs. Electric trolleys, powered by wagging antennae from overhead wires, propelled city limits explosively outwards. By the end of the century, the nation's first subway opened in Boston
-Cavernous department stores attracted urban middle-class shoppers and provided urban working-class jobs, many of them for women. The bustling emporiums also heralded a dawning era of consumerism and accentuated widening class divisions.
-Electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones - whose numbers leapt from some 50,000 in 1880 to over 1 million in 1900 - all made life in the big city more enticing.
-In the city, goods came in throwaway bottles, boxes, bags, and cans. Apartment houses had no adjoining barnyards where residents might toss garbage to the hogs. Cheap ready-to-wear clothing and swiftly changing fashions pushed old suits and dresses out of the closet and onto the trash heap. Waste disposal, in short, was an issue new to the urban age. And the mountains of waste that urbanites generated further testified to a cultural shift away from the virtues of thrift to the conveniences of consumerism.
New Immigration
-Until the 1880s most immigrants had come from the British Isles and Western Europe chiefly Germany and Ireland. Also significant were the more than 300,000 Chinese immigrants. Many of these earlier immigrants had faced virulent nativism, especially the Irish and the Chinese. In fact, the latter were legally excluded in 1882.
-But by the last decades of the century, the "old" European immigrants had adjusted well to American life by building supportive ethnic organizations and melding into established farm communities or urban craft unions. Although many still lived, worked, and worshiped among their own, they were largely accepted as "American" by the native-born.
-In the 1880s the character of the immigrant stream changed drastically. The so-called New Immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. Among them were Italians, Jews, Croats, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles. They came from countries with little history of democratic government, where people had grown accustomed to cringing before despotism and where opportunities for advancement were few.
-These new people totaled only 19% of the inpouring immigrants in the 1880s, but by the first decade of the 20th century, they constituted an astonishing 66% of the total inflow.
Tenements
-A type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access
-They seemed to grow evermore crowded, more filthy, and more rat-infested, especially after the invention of the "dumbell" ________. So named because of the outline of its floor plan, the dumbbell was usually seven or eight stories high, with shallow, sunless, and ill-smelling air shafts providing minimal ventilation.
-Several families were sardined onto each floor of the barracks-like structure, and they shared a malodorous toilet in the hall. In these fetid warrens, conspicuously in New York's "Lung Block," hundreds of unfortunate urbanites coughed away their lives
-"Flophouses" abounded where the half-starved and unemployed might sleep for a few cents on verminous mattresses. Small wonder that slum dwellers strove mightily to escape their wretched surroundings - as many of them did. The slums remained foul places, inhabited by successive waves of newcomers. To a remarkable degree, hard-working people moved up and out of them.
Settlement Houses
-Following Jane Addams's lead, women founded these in other cities as well. Conspicuous among the houses was Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York, which opened its doors in 1893.
-The ________ became centers of women's activism and of social reform.
Hull House
-Inspired by a visit to England, Jane Addams acquired the decaying ____ mansion in Chicago in 1889. There she established __________, the most prominent (though not the first) American settlement house.
-Located in a poor immigrant neighborhood of Greeks, Italians, Russians, and Germans, it offered instruction in English, counseling to help newcomers cope with American big-city life, child-care services for working mothers, and cultural activities for neighborhood residents.
Know-Nothings
-Nativist political party in the 1850s, also known as the American party, that emerged in response to an influx of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics
-The anti-immigrant sentiment stirred up by them spread as they joined other groups and influenced widespread nativism.
YMCA/YWCA
-Urbanites also participated in a new kind of religious-affiliated organization, the _________.
-The ____ and the ____, established in the United States before the Civil War, grew by leaps and bounds. Combining physical and other kinds of education with religious instruction, the "Y's" appeared in virtually every major American city by the end of the nineteenth century.
Tuskegee Institute
-Headed by Booker T. Washington
-Washington's commitment to training young blacks in agriculture and the trades guided the curriculum at this place and made it an ideal place for slave-born George Washington Carver to teach and research.
-After Carver joined the faculty in 1896, he became an internationally famous agricultural chemist who provided a much-needed boost to the southern economy by discovering hundreds of new uses for the lowly peanut (shampoo, axle grease), sweet potato (vinegar), and soybean (paint).
Land-Grant Colleges
-The truly phenomenal growth of higher education owed much to the Morrill Act of 1862. This enlightened law, passed after the South had seceded, provided a generous grant of the public lands to the states for support of education.
-These, most of which became state universities, in turn bound themselves to provide certain services, such as military training.
-The Hatch Act of 1887, extending the Morrill Act, provided federal funds for the establishment of agricultural experiment stations in connection with these.
Pragmatism
-The concept of ________ held that truth was to be tested, above all, by the practical consequences of an idea, by action rather than theories. This kind of reasoning aptly expressed the philosophical temperament of a nation of doers.
-One of America's most brilliant intellectuals, the slight and sickly William James (1842-1910), served for thirty-five years on the Harvard faculty. Through his numerous writings, he made a deep mark on many fields. In his most famous work, _______ (1907), he colorfully described America's greatest contribution to the history of philosophy.
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1910; WEB DuBois aided in this founding
Muckraker
Reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the United States who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications.
Yellow Journalism
Journalism that exploits, distorts, or exaggerates the news to create sensations and attract readers; Joseph Pulitzer's use of the colored comic supplements, featuring the "Yellow Kid,'' gave the name ___________ to his lurid sheets
Progress and Poverty
-Another journalist-author, Henry George was an original thinker who left an enduring mark. Poor in formal schooling, he was rich in idealism and in the milk of human kindness.
-After seeing poverty at its worst in India and land-grabbing at its greediest in California, he took pen in hand. His classic treatise ___________ undertook to solve "the great enigma of our times''—"the association of progress with poverty.''
-According to George, the pressure of growing population on a fixed supply of land unjustifiably pushed up property values, showering unearned profits on owners of land. A single 100 percent tax on those windfall profits would eliminate unfair inequalities and stimulate economic growth.
National American Woman Suffrage Association
-Fiery feminists continued to insist on the ballot. They had been demanding the vote since before the Civil War, but many high-minded female reformers had temporarily shelved the cause of women to battle for the rights of blacks. In 1890 militant suffragists formed this group.
-Its founders included aging pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had helped organize the first woman's' rights convention in 1848, and her long-time comrade Susan B. Anthony, the radical Quaker spitfire who had courted jail by trying to cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election.
Woman's Christian Temperance Union
-Militant women entered the alcoholic arena, notably when this was organized in 1874.
-The white ribbon was its symbol of purity; the saintly Frances E. Willard—also a champion of planned parenthood— was its leading spirit.
Realism
-Mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, in all its unvarnished detail.
-Adherents eschewed the idealism and nostalgia of the earlier romantic sensibility.
Naturalism
An offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement purported to apply detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme or sordid social environments. It used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character
Regionalism
A recurring artistic movement that, in the context of the late nineteenth century, aspired to capture the peculiarities, or "local color," of America's various regions on the face of modernization and national standardization.
Start of Prohibition Movement
-Alarming gains by Demon Rum spurred the temperance reformers to redoubled zeal. Especially obnoxious to them was the shutter-doored corner saloon, appropriately called "the poor man's club.'' The barroom helped keep both him and his family poor.
-Liquor consumption had increased during the nerve-racking days of the Civil War, and immigrant groups, accustomed to alcohol in the Old Country, were hostile to restraints. Whiskey-loving foreigners in Boston would rudely hiss temperance lecturers. Many tipplers charged, with some accuracy, that temperance reform amounted to a middle-class assault on working-class lifestyles.
-The National Prohibition party, organized in 1869, polled a sprinkling of votes in some of the ensuing presidential elections.
Shift from 'Old' to 'New' Immigration
-Until the 1880s most immigrants had come from the British Isles and Western Europe chiefly Germany and Ireland. Also significant were the more than 300,000 Chinese immigrants. Many of these earlier immigrants had faced virulent nativism, especially the Irish and the Chinese. In fact, the latter were legally excluded in 1882.
-But by the last decades of the century, the "old" European immigrants had adjusted well to American life by building supportive ethnic organizations and melding into established farm communities or urban craft unions. Although many still lived, worked, and worshiped among their own, they were largely accepted as "American" by the native-born.
-In the 1880s the character of the immigrant stream changed drastically. The so-called New Immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. Among them were Italians, Jews, Croats, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles.
-These new people totaled only 19% of the inpouring immigrants in the 1880s, but by the first decade of the 20th century, they constituted an astonishing 66% of the total inflow.
-The difference in place of origin, English-speaking ability, and religion distinguished the "old" from the "new," inspiring a new wave of Nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Jane Addams
-A middle-class woman who was deeply dedicated to uplifting the urban masses.
-Born into a prosperous Illinois family, she was one of the first generation of college-educated women. Upon her graduation she sought other outlets for her large talents than could be found in teaching or charitable volunteer work, then the only permissible occupations for a young woman of her social class.
-She went on to found Hull House in Chicago, the most prominent American settlement house.
-Soft spoken but tenacious, she became a kind of urban American saint in the eyes of many admirers. The philosopher William James told her, "You utter instinctively the truth we others vainly seek."
-She was a broad-gauge reformer who courageously condemned war as well as poverty, and she eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. But her pacifism also earned her the enmity of some Americans, including the Daughters of the American Revolution, who choked on her anti-war views and expelled her from membership in their august organization.
Liberal Protestants
-The swelling size and changing character of the urban population posed sharp challenges to American churches, which, like other national institutions, had grown up in the country. Protestant churches, in particular, suffered heavily from the shift to the city, where many of their traditional doctrines and pastoral approaches seemed irrelevant.
-Some religious leaders began to worry that in the age-old struggle between God and the Devil, the Wicked One was registering dismaying gains. The mounting emphasis was on materialism; too many devotees worshiped at the altar of avarice. Money was the accepted measure of achievement, and the new gospel of wealth proclaimed that God caused the righteous to prosper. Into this spreading moral vacuum stepped a new generation of ________________.
-With roots in the Unitarian revolt against orthodox Calvinism, liberal ideas came into the mainstream of American Protestantism between 1875 and 1925, despite frequent and bitter controversies with fundamentalists. Entrenched in the leadership and seminaries of the dominant denominations, liberal Protestants adapted religious ideas to modern culture, attempting to reconcile Christianity with new scientific and economic doctrines. -They rejected biblical literalism, urging Christians to view biblical stories as models for Christian behavior rather than as dogma. -They stressed the ethical teachings of the Bible and allied themselves with the reform-oriented "social gospel" movement and urban revivalists. -Their optimistic trust in community fellowship and their focus on earthly salvation and personal growth attracted many followers.
-They helped Protestant Americans reconcile their religious faith with modern, cosmopolitan ways of thinking
Booker T. Washington
-War-torn and impoverished, the South lagged far behind other regions in public education, and African-Americans suffered most severely. A staggering 44 percent of nonwhites were illiterate in 1900. Some help came from northern philanthropists, but the foremost champion of black education was an ex-slave, _____________, who had slept under a board sidewalk to save pennies for his schooling.
-Called in 1881 to head the black normal and industrial school at Tuskegee, Alabama, he began with forty students in a tumbledown shanty.
-Undaunted, he taught black students useful trades so that they could gain self-respect and economic security. His self-help approach to solving the nation's racial problems was labeled "accommodationist" because it stopped short of directly challenging white supremacy.
-Recognizing the depths of southern white racism, he avoided the issue of social equality. Instead he grudgingly acquiesced in segregation in return for the right to develop—however modestly and painstakingly— the economic and educational resources of the black community. Economic independence would ultimately be the ticket, he believed, to black political and civil rights.
WEB DuBois
-Other black leaders, notably Dr. _______, assailed Booker T. Washington as an "Uncle Tom'' who was condemning their race to manual labor and perpetual inferiority.
-Born in Massachusetts, he was a mixture of African, French, Dutch, and Indian blood ("Thank God, no Anglo-Saxon,'' he would add). After a determined struggle, he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, the first of his race to achieve this goal.
-He demanded complete equality for blacks, social as well as economic, and helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910.
-Rejecting Washington's gradualism and separatism, he demanded that the "talented tenth'' of the black community be given full and immediate access to the mainstream of American life. An exceptionally skilled historian, sociologist, and poet, he died as a self-exile in Africa in 1963, at the age of ninety-five.
Many of his differences with Washington reflected the contrasting life experiences of southern and northern blacks.
Carrie Chapman Catt
-By 1900 a new generation of women had taken command of the suffrage battle. Their most effective leader was her, a pragmatic and businesslike reformer of relentless dedication.
-Significantly, under her the suffragists de-emphasized the argument that women deserved the vote as a matter of right, because they were in all respects the equals of men. Instead she stressed the desirability of giving women the vote if they were to continue to discharge their traditional duties as homemakers and mothers in the increasingly public world of the city.
-Women had special responsibility for the health of the family and the education of children, the argument ran. On the farm, women could discharge these responsibilities in the separate sphere of the isolated homestead. But in the city, they needed a voice on boards of public health, police commissions, and school boards.
Mark Twain
-He had leapt to fame with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867) and The Innocents Abroad (1869). He teamed up with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 to write The Gilded Age. An acid satire on post-Civil War politicians and speculators, the book gave a name to an era.
-With his scanty formal schooling in frontier Missouri, he typified a new breed of American authors in revolt against the elegant refinements of the old New England school of writing.
-Named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he had served for a time as a Mississippi riverboat pilot and later took his pen name, _________, from the boatman's cry that meant two fathoms. After a brief stint in the armed forces, he journeyed westward to California, a trip he described, with a mixture of truth and tall tales, in Roughing It (1872).
-Many other books flowed from his busy pen. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) rank among American masterpieces, though initially regarded as "trash'' by snobbish Boston critics. His later years were soured by bankruptcy growing out of unwise investments, and he was forced to take to the lecture platform and amuse what he called "the damned human race.''
-A great tribute was paid to his self-tutored genius—and to American letters— when England's Oxford University awarded him an honorary degree in 1907.
-Journalist, humorist, satirist, and foe of social injustice, he made his most enduring contribution in recapturing frontier realism and humor in the authentic American dialect.
Buffalo Bill
Colorful "Wild West'' shows, first performed in 1883, were distinctively American. Headed by the knightly, goateed, and free-drinking William F. ("____________'') Cody, the troupe included war-whooping Indians, live buffalo, and deadeye marksmen.
Annie Oakley
Among the deadeye marksmen of Buffalo Bill was the girlish ___________. Rifle in hand, she could at thirty paces perforate a tossed-up card half a dozen times before it fluttered to the ground (hence the term ____________ for a punched ticket, later for a free pass).
Joseph Pulitzer
Hungarian-born and near-blind, he was a leader in the techniques of sensationalism in St. Louis and especially with the New York World.
William Randolph Hearst
A close and ruthless competitor to Pulitzer was youthful _______________, who had been expelled from Harvard College for a crude prank. Able to draw on his California father's mining millions, he ultimately built up a powerful chain of newspapers, beginning with the San Francisco Examiner in 1887.
Horatio Alger
-A Puritan-reared New Englander, who in 1866 forsook the pulpit for the pen. Deeply interested in New York newsboys, he wrote more than a hundred volumes of juvenile fiction that sold over 100 million copies.
-His stock formula was that virtue, honesty, and industry are rewarded by success, wealth, and honor—a kind of survival of the purest, especially nonsmokers, nondrinkers, nonswearers, and nonliars.
-Although his own bachelor life was criticized, he implanted morality and the conviction that there is always room at the top.
Frederick Law Olmstead
A contemporary landscape architect and park builder who sought to foster virtue and egalitarian values with his designs for New York's Central Park (1873) and Boston's "Emerald Necklace" (1896), as well as the campus of Stanford University, which opened in 1891.
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