Chapter 22 & 23 exam key terms

A Supreme Court decision that prohibited states from regulating the railroads because the constitution grants congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.

Wabash, St. Luis & Pacific railroad Company vs. Illinois

Congressional legislation that established the Interstate Commerce Commission, compelled railroads to publish standard rates, and prohibited rebates and pools. Railroads quickly became adept at using the act to achieve their own ends, but it gave the government an important means to regulate big business.

Interstate Commerce Act

The practice perfected by Andrew Carnegie of controlling every step of the industrial production process in order to increase efficiency and limit competition.

Vertical integration

The practice perfected by John D. Rockefeller of dominating a particular phase of the production process in order to monopolize a market, often by forming trusts and alliances with competitors.

Horizontal integration

A mechanism by which one company grants control over its operations, through ownership of its stock, to another company. The standard oil company became known for this practice in the 1870’s as it eliminated its competition by taking control of smaller oil companies.

Trust

John D. Rockefeller’s company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trust and monopolies of the Gilded Age,

Standard Oil Company

The practice of having executives or directors from one company serve on the board of directors of another company. J. P. Morgan introduced this practice to eliminate banking competition in the 1890s.

Interlocking directorates

Refers to the innovation in steel production where air was blown on molten iron to remove impurities, allowing steel to be produced cheaply at mass quantities. A portent of Gilded Age industrialization, it was famously used by Andrew Carnegie at his steelmaking factory in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Bessemer Process

Believers in the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that people gained wealth by “survival of the fittest.”

Social Darwinists

A law that forbade trusts or combinations in business, this was landmark legislation because it was one of the first congressional attempts to regulate big business for the public good.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

This first national labor organization in U.S history gained 600,000 members from many parts of the work force, although it limited the participation of Chinese, women, and blacks. The organization devoted much of its energy to fighting for an eight-hour workday before it dissolved in 1872.

National Labor Union

The second national labor organization, organization in 1869 as a secret society and opened for public membership in 1881. The Knights were known for their efforts to organize all workers, regardless of skill level, gender, or race.

Knights of Labor

A May Day rally that turned violet when someone threw a bomb into the middle of the meeting, killing several dozen people. Eight anarchists were arrested for conspiracy contributing to the disorder, although evidence linking them to the bombing was thin. Four were executed, one committed suicide, and three were pardoned in 1893.

Haymarket Square

A national federation of trade unions that included only skilled workers, founded in 1886. Led by Samuel Gompers for nearly four decades, the AFL sought to negotiate with employers for a better kind of capitalism that rewarded workers fairly with better wages, hours, and conditions. The AFL’s membership was almost entirely white and male until the middle of the twentieth century.

American Federation of Labor

A union-organizing term that refers to the practice of allowing only unionized employees to work for a particular company. The AFL became known for negotiating closed shop agreements with employers, in which the employer would agree not to hire non-union members.

Closed shop

The use of Civil War imagery by political candidates and parties to draw votes to their side of the ticket.

“Waving the bloody shirt”

A symbol of Gilded Age corruption, “Boss” Tweed and his deputies ran the New York City Democratic Party in the 1860s and swindled $200 million from the city through bribery, graft, and vote-buying. Boss Tweed was eventually jailed for his crimes and died behind bars.

Tweed Ring

A construction company was formed by owners of the Union Pacific Railroad for the purpose of receiving government contracts to build the railroad at highly inflicted prices-and profits. In 1872 a scandal erupted when journalists discovered that the Credit Mobilier Company had bribed congressmen and even the vice president to allow the ruse to continue.

Credit Mobilier Scandal

A worldwide depression that began in the United States when one of the nation’s largest banks abruptly declared bankruptcy, leading to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. The crisis intensified debtors’ calls for inflationary measures such as the printing of more paper money and the unlimited coinage of silver. Conflicts over monetary policy greatly influenced politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Panic of 1873

A term given to the period 1865-1896 by Mark Twain, indicating both the fabulous wealth and the widespread corruption of the era.

Gilded Age

A system, prevalent during the Gilded Age, in which political parties granted jobs and favors to party regulars who delivered votes on Election Day. Patronage was both essential wellspring of support for both parties and a source of conflict within the Republican Party.

Patronage

The agreement that finally resolved the 1876 election and officially ended reconstruction. In exchange for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, winning the presidency, Hayes agreed to withdraw the last of the federal troops from the former Confederate states. This deal effectively completed the southern return to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics.

Compromise of 1877

The last piece of federal civil rights legislation until the 1950s, the law promised blacks equal access to public accommodations and banned racism in jury selection, but it provided no means of enforcement and was therefore ineffective. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared most of the act unconstitutional.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

An agricultural system that emerged after the Civil War in which black and white farmers rented land and residences from a plantation owner in exchange for giving him a certain “share” of each year’s crop. Sharecropping was the dominant form of Southern agriculture after the Civil War, and landowners manipulated this system to keep tenants in perpetual debt and unable to leave their plantations.

Sharecropping

System of racial segregation in the American south from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century. Based not he concept of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites, the Jim Crow system sought to prevent racial mixing in public, including restaurants, movie theaters, and public transportation. An informal system, it was generally perpetuated by custom, violence, and intimidation.

Jim Crow

A Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, saying that as long as blacks were provided with “separate but equal” facilities, these laws did not violate the fourteenth amendment. This decision provided legal justification for the Jim Crow system until the 1950’s.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Wage cuts by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company triggered a forty five day strike that engulfed Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri. One hundred people died in the unrest.

Great Strike of 1877

Federal legislation that prohibited most further Chinese immigrants to the United States. This was the first major legal restriction on immigration in U.S history.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Congressional legislation that established the Civil Service Commission, which granted federal government jobs on the basis of examination instead of political patronage, thus reining in the spoils system.

Pendleton Act