The Conquest of the Far West, Industrial Supremacy

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The “Great West“ (Great American Desert)

Given to the territory between the Mississippi & Cali/Oregon (west of the 98th meridian). Had few trees & little rainfall given migrants the impression that it was unfit for farming. Harsh winters & hot dry summers also discouraged settlement, migrants were attracted to the reports coming from Oregon & Cali. The plains supported over 250,000 natives, in the 35 years (1865-1900) this would change.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

__**Ban on further Chinese labor immigration to the U.S.**__ Created from hatred for __having to compete with foreigners for jobs.__ 1/3 of western miners in the 1860s were Chinese. 200,000 Chinese came to the U.S. for the 49er gold rush. __Anti-Chinese sentiment led to violence__ & desire for state and federal gov to address the issue. This was the __first Congressional act to restrict immigration based on race/nationality__.

Homestead Act (1862)

Signed by Lincoln and gave applicants up to 160 acres of underdeveloped land for free. People needed to be 21 years old and be a citizen or actively trying to be one. They must improve the land, file for a deed of title, and stay for five years or forfeit the land. The reasons to move west were for advertisements and incentives from railroads and land speculators, Midwest states were becoming as populated as seaboard states, and it was new land.

Reservation Solution

Political approach of dealing with conflicts with Native tribes throughout the 1850s. In 1851 negotiations at Fort Laramie & Fort Atkinson resulted in assigned reservations for plains tribes. The tribes refuse to restrict their movements & struck against encroaching miners, cowboys, and farmers. At first 2 large reservations were set aside in Dakota and Oklahoma. Tribes that resisted faced the trained U.S. army.

Battle of Little Big Horn

Result of an 1875 Office of Indian Affairs order; directing the Sioux to vacate their Powder River hunting grounds. Motivated by reports of gold in the Black Hills, Sioux chiefs Sitting Bull & Crazy Horse concentrated their warriors on the Little Big Horn river. Colonel George A. Custer was sent ahead of the major army columns to locate the Sioux encampment. Custer foolishly engaged the Sioux with only 256 men became known as “Custer’s Last Stand“. Custer’s 7th Cavalry was slaughtered but the Sioux would lose to the larger army. In 1881 the last of the Sioux resistance surrendered.

Wounded Knee (12/28/1890)

The last great tragic engagement of the Indian Wars. Great Plains’ settlers called the army to protect them when they were alarmed by the new Native religious movement that promoted return to tradition. The “Ghost Dance“ a religious movement adopted by the Minneconjou but was given up when Chief Big Foot fell ill. Soldiers tried to disarm the Natives. Fighting began where 146 Native men, women, and children were killed. The U.S. suffered minor casualties.

Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

Meant to break up tribal organization & assimilate Natives to make them more “civilized“ & law-abiding. Dividing the tribal land into 160 acre lots or less for Native occupants citizenship if they stayed for 25 years. 90 million acres of prime reservation land was sold to white settlers due to Natives not signing up to claim them. This failed policy along with disease & poverty reduced the Native population drastically.

*A Century of Dishonor* by Helen Hunt Jackson (1881)

Chronicling injustices Natives suffered due to expansion. Tells the treatment of Natives from colonial times through western expansionist pursuits. Created sympathy for Natives but most proposed assimilation through education, training, and religious conversion. Schools like Carlisle in Penn. were set up for Native children to separate them from their people.

Henry Bessemer (& William Kelly)

Discovered the process for refining iron into steel. Discovered that forcing air through molten iron helped burn off the impurities & produced high-quality steel. Coal from the Great Lakes region & iron ore from Minnesota allowed the area to become the lead steel producer.

Henry Ford / assembly line

Entrepreneur to revolutionize the car industry. Workers remained in one station & preformed the same simple task over & over at a rapid pace. Making large amounts of cars faster allowed for their priced to go down. Throughout the 1920s most industries adopted the assembly line method. Lower prices enabled the middle class to become the primary purchasing demographic of cars.

Railroads

Nations’s first big business, milage increased by 500% over a 35 year period following the Civil War. Created national markets & encouraged production, consumption, & specialization. Steel and Coal benefited. Sparked by westward expansion and the gov’t provided land grants and subsidies. Brought value to the lands it went through.

Standard Time

Railroads could not accurately assign arrival & departure times due to most placed using the sun for time. Solving the problem meant that the railroad companies invented their own time schedule for the US.

Standard Gauge

Early rail travel suffered from lack of uniformity in distance between the rails. There were at least 11 different sized that were in use meaning people would need to transfer train to train. Eventually the rail companies agreed on a sizing of 4 ft and 1/2 inches.

Andrew Carnegie

Was a Scottish immigrant who worked up in the railroad business before moving to steel. Built the Edgar Thompson Works, a massive steel mill in Pittsburgh. Outdistanced competitors with the most advanced equipment & vertical integration. Controlling mining, smelting, refining, rolling, transport, etc. Making his company the premier steel producer with over 20,000 workers. Sold his company to a steel conglomerate owned by J.P. Morgan, renaming it U.S. Steel. The first billion dollar company controlling 3/5 of the nation’s steel business.

John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil)

Founder of the company that would control most of the nation’s oil refineries. Utilizing the latest technology & business practices to eliminate the competition. Negotiating for rebates from the railroad industry & cut oil/kerosene prices. Standard Oil Trust controlled 90% of the oil refinery business. His company power over the market allowed him to eliminate waste and increase efficiency keeping prices low.

Trusts & Holding Companies

Methods used by Capitalists to control larger portions of the economy.

Trusts-

Were a group of corporations of related fields that combine under a board of trustees that control the actions of each member corporation. Shareholders receive profits but have no say in operations the way they would in a corporation

Holding companies-

Large companies that own controlling amounts of stock in numerous corporations rather than holding direct control over the operations of companies. This was adopted to circumvent laws that outlawed trusts.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Merged local railroads into New Your Central Railroad in 1867, using the millions he earned in the steamboat business. Consolidated independent rail lines up the Hudson River and across NY. He and his son eventually built NYCR into a trunk line to Chicago over 4,500 miles of track. Rivaled only by Penn. Railroad

Laissez-Faire

Economic theory developed by economist Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations“ 1776 arguing that business can regulate itself through the law of supply & demand, not the government. Business is motivated by competition to improve goods & services at low prices. Powerful trusts of the 1880s largely limited or eliminated competition, undermining the natural regulatory process. Industrialists use the laissez-faire argument to excuse their business practices & discourage government regulation.

Social Darwinism

Application of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the free-market. British philosopher Herbert Spencer & Professor William Graham Sumner believed the wealthy were naturally selected to be societal/economic leaders & were shown to be “fittest“ through the natural selection of laissez-faire

“Gospel of Wealth”

Directly applies to Andrew Carnegie’s formal doctrine that with wealth comes the obligation of civic philanthropy. (Carnegie gave over $350 mil to libraries, universities, and various public institutions) Can also be interpreted as a religious justification for the success of the American businessman. (Rockefeller said “God gave me my riches“)

Knights of Labor

National labor union, started as a secret society of Philadelphia garment cutters in 1869 and grew into a national movement by 1878. Led by Terence Powderly, the Knights raised funds to set up cooperative factories & stores, but little of this was done. Advocated for the abolition of child labor, trusts, & monopolies, for the adoption of the 8 hr. workday. Powderly favored arbitration however, some denominations of Knights continued to use strikes. Went public in 1881, opening the doors to women & African0Americans. Membership would just as swiftly declined as unions became associated with violence, anarchists, and Communism

American Federation of Labor & Samuel Gompers

A labor organization founded in 1881 as an association of 25 craft unions under the name “the Federation of Organized Trade & Labor“

1886-1924, led the renamed AF of L concentrated on practical economic goals like higher wages & improved working conditions. Limited membership and directed skilled workers to walk out until employers agreed to negotiate through collective bargaining. High dues in order to build up cash to support strikers. Largest and most successful labor union.

Haymarket Square Riot

Starting as a peaceful strike meeting of workers, organized by anarchists & Communists. Police moved in to break up the meeting someone threw a bomb, killing 7 police & wounding others. The guilty party was never found but eight anarchist leaders were tried on criminal conspiracy charges. Seven were sentenced to death & many Americans began associating unions and The Knights of Labor with violence

Anarchists

Revolutionary movement of the mid-1800s supporting violent overthrow of all gov’t.

Homestead Strike

Steelworker strike in Homestead, PA started when plant manager Henry Clay Frick cut wages by nearly 20% & refused to deal with the Iron & Steel Workers Union in 1892. Plant owner Carnegie believed the union had cost him money he could spend on advanced machinery to reduce skilled labor. Frick used the lockout, private guards, & strikebreakers to defeat the steelworker strike in five months.

Pullman Strike & Eugene V. Debs

Refusal of railroad workers to handle trains that were transporting Pullman cars as an extension of a labor strike of workers in the Pullman company. Workers manufacturing Pullman cars went on strike in 1894 when the company made a general wage cut & fired leader of the bargaining delegation. The leader of the American Railroad Union, directed rail workers not to handle trains with Pullman cars. This boycott disrupted rail transportation across the country and rail owners started attaching Pullman cars to mail trains to appeal to the gov’t for backing. The government backed the businesses and arrested Debs and other strikers, effectively ending the strike.

Urbanization

Process of people moving from rural to urban areas; 1860 & 1915, the U.S. urban pop. grew more than 700% sparked by industrialization, which brought job opportunities & vast consumer markets to city life. By 1910, more than 1/3 of people living in U.S. cities had come from farms & most immigrants also settled in cities. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than rural areas. Made from millionaires, middle-class/white-collar workers and businessmen, & unskilled laborers. From 1897-1930, almost 1 mil. African-Americans had moved to northern and eastern cities for work.

Old Immigrants (Old Comers)

Majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. from the 1820s to 1880s, typically from northern or western European origins. Same/similar origins to that of concurrent U.S. ancestry; British Isles, Ireland, Germany, & Scandinavia. Native U.S. citizens, spoke mostly English & were Protestant, Irish-Catholic, or German-Catholic. Cultural commonalities & job skills made it easier for these immigrants to blend into American society. The Welsh came to dominate tinplate work, the English mining, Germans machinists & artisans, Belgian glass workers, Scandinavians seamen, & Irish laborers.

New Immigrants

Majority of immigrants coming from to the U.S. from the 1880s to 1924, typically of eastern & southern European origins. Having fewer cultural commonalities with native U.S. citizens, causing them to be segregated from U.S. society. Came from Italy, Greece, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, & Russia; were poor and illiterate, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox or Jewish. Due to prejudice & the need for laborers, they typically filled low paying, dangerous, unskilled industrial jobs in the cities. Settled in poor ethnic slums, having followed their relatives or neighbors. Around 25% planned to return home with money earned in America.

“Melting Pot“ v. Assimilation v. Pluralism

The various theories to explain how immigrants integrate.

• Melting Pot - Suggests that various cultures come together & diffuse to make a new American identity

  • Underestimates the degree to which immigrants hold on to traditions

• Assimilation - Suggests that immigration become part of a larger established culture, giving up their native language & Customes

  • Gov’t supported efforts to assimilate immigrants through education

• Pluralism - Characterized by minority groups within a culture retaining distinctive cultural characteristics while participating in the dominant society

  • Various cultures living side by side contributing to the larger cultures

  • a.k.a. - the “Salad Bowl“

Frederick Law Olmsted

Landscape architect who designed Central Park NYC along with other parks. Late 1860s, Olmsted designed suburban communities that became the model; these “villages in the park“ exposed people to the beauties of nature in a community setting.

Tenements

Multifamily buildings that made up most of the inner-city housing available to immigrants & working-class families. Landlords subdivided poorly maintained buildings into small apartments to cram in more tenants. Apartments often had rooms that lacked windows/ventilation.

“dumbbell“ tenements

Building design resulting from a contest in “The Plumer & sanitary Engineer“ magazine in 1878 (cheapest way to respond to an 1879 NYC building code) Unfortunately, “dumbbell“ tenements were built side by side. leaving only a 56 inch wide air shaft between them. This shaft provided little light & the air brought in was foul from garbage & waste dumped between the buildings. When fires broke out the gaps between the buildings the gaps acted like chimineas speeding up the fire spreading.

Slums

To increase profits, city landlords divided housing into small units designed to cram over 4k people into one city block. Tenement buildings were typically 6 or 7 stories having some rooms with no windows/ventilation & poor sanitation. Poor ethnic/immigrant groups clustered in slums, often splitting rent/costs between multiple families squeezing into apartments much to small for them.

Ghettos

An area, often an urban slum, inhabited, voluntarily or involuntarily, by members of the same ethnic, racial, cultural, or religious groups.

Jacob Riis

Photojournalist & urban reformer who authored ‘How the Other half Lives‘ (1890). Demonstrated the need for better urban housing, especially for poor whites and immigrants. Shocking pictures of starving children living in garbage-ridden slums helped prompt reform like building codes.

Mass Transit

Post-Civil war cities sprawled into suburban communities along the city’s perimeter as a result of the desire of the rich to flee pollution, poverty, & crime of the city. As well as the development of new transportation technologies, providing affordable travel at further distances. By the 1890s horse driven streetcars (taxis) gave way to electric trolleys, elevated rails, & subways that ran within and outside the cities. This change created visible segregation between the financial classes of urban society. Other public works accompanied the growth of mass transit, including construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883.

Skyscraper

As cities expanded out, American innovators attempted to build taller buildings to expand upward as well. James Bogardus constructed one of the first iron skeleton buildings, relying on the frame for strength rather than a wide foundation. In 1885 William Le Baron Jenny built the first true, steel skeleton skyscraper in Chicago (10 story Home Insurance Company Building) Affordable steel, the Otis elevator, central steam-heating made the upward growth possible as well. By 1900, steel-framed skyscrapers for corporate offices had changed city skylines.

Political Machines

Organized “rings“ of politicians that controlled parties in major cities; each boss rewarding supporters w/ gov’t jobs. Usually rose to power when cities were in disrepair & stole millions from taxpayers while making internal improvements. Tammany Hall in NYC coordinated the needs of business, immigrants, & the poor in return for votes. Many machines founded jobs for immigrants, founded lawyers for the accused, organized benefits for workers, etc. In the 1860s in NYC an estimated 65% of public building funds went to Boss Tweed & his supporters

Montgomery Ward and Sears & Roebuck

Two mail-order companies that used improved rail systems to ship to everything from hats to houses to rural customers.

• Richard Sears & Alvah Roebuck started their mail order business to meet general needs

• Montgomery Ward started his mail order store after overhearing complaints from farmers about the limited choices at local stores

From Vermont to Cali. farm families selected goods from the catalogs of these companies, growing the national market.

William Randolph Hearst

Former owner of the San Francisco ‘Examiner‘ who bought the NY ‘Journal‘ in 1895. Eventually competed with Pulitzer’s ‘World‘ with stories of scandal & sensationalism that often lacked credible evidence. Ushered in what would be known as “yellow journalism“

Joseph Pulitzer

Former owner of the St. Louis ‘Post-Dispatch‘ newspaper who would by NY’s ‘World‘ in 1883. Became the 1st newspaper to exceed circulation of a million through sensational crime & disaster stories & featured stories of political or economic corruption. Later challenged

VIDEO

“yellow journalism“

Type of journalism adopted by Hearst’s ‘Journal‘ & Pulitzer’s ‘World‘. Scandalous sensational stories containing exaggerated/false accounts printed to build a larger audience/readership. The term '“yellow journalism“ was taken from the first comic strip to appear in the ‘Journal‘, “The Yellow Kid,“ referencing the paper’s links to sensational stories. Yellow journalists would later have a principle role in propagandizing disputes between the U.S. & Spain leading up to the Spanish-American war of the late 1890s.

Realism

Cultural movement to counter the genteel post-Civil War literature & artistry which had often been romantic/idealistic. Tried to portray the world as it was, imperfections, & Social complications included

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“