The American Yawp Ch. 16

The Great Railroad Strike

1877-Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down railroad traffic—the nation's economic lifeblood—across the country.

The head of the Pennsylvania Railroad

Thomas Andrew Scott

Who suggested that if workers were unhappy with their wages, they should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread?

Thomas Scott

A month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying...(3 main things)

dozens of buildings

over a hundred engines

over a thousand cars.

Nearly 100 Americans died in...

The Great Upheaval

Workers destroyed nearly $_____ worth of property

40 million

Workers struck from ______ to ______ shutting down railroad traffic—the nation's economic lifeblood—across the country.

Baltimore to St.Louis

Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was _______ ________ that finally defeated them

federal troops

The greatest strikes first hit the railroads only because

no other industry had so effectively marshaled together capital, government support, and bureaucratic management.

The post-Civil War era saw revolutions in ________ _________

American Industry

National Credit Agencies

eased the uncertainties surrounding rapid movement of capital among investors, manufacturers, and retailers

Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened

new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.

By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management aka

Taylorism

Taylorism was named after its noted proponent:

Frederick Taylor

Frederick Taylor urged all manufacturers to increase efficiency by:

Subdividing tasks

Taylorism did what?

increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.

Singer sewing machines, Chicago packers' "disassembly" lines, McCormick grain reapers, Duke cigarette rollers:

all realized unprecedented efficiencies and achieved unheard-of levels of production that propelled their companies into the forefront of American business

Cyrus McCormick

had overseen the construction of mechanical reapers (used for harvesting wheat) for decades. He had relied on skilled blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft horse-drawn machines.

What did McCormick do in 1880?

hired a production manager who had overseen the manufacturing of Colt firearms to transform his system of production

The company had produced _______ machines in 1880

21,000

The American economy had lagged behind Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the United States was

the world's leading manufacturing nation

Thirteen years later, by 1913, the United States produced _______ of the world's industrial output—more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.

1/3

A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the _______ ________ operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution

Visible Hand

A ______ _________ threatened the promise of investments

competitive marketplace

American industrial firms tried everything to avoid competition:

formed informal pools and trusts, entered price-fixing agreements, divided markets, and, when blocked by antitrust laws and renegade price cutting, merged into consolidations

Between 1895 and 1904, and peaking between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy. Competition melted away in what is known as the _______ _________ __________

great merger movement

In nine years, four thousand companies—nearly 20 percent of the American economy—were

folded into rival firms

In 1901, financier ______ ___________ oversaw the formation of United States Steel, built from eight leading steel companies.

JP Morgan

The notion of a glittering world of wealth and technological innovation masking massive social inequities and deep-seated corruption gave the era its most common label:

The Gilded Age

(drew from the title of an 1873 satirical novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Warner)

"This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,"

economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.

The great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons, including

railroad operator Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilman J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bankers such as J. P. Morgan

In 1859, a British naturalist named _________________________ published an explanation for how species could change over time. (Origin of Species)

Charles Darwin

One of Darwin's greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist ________ __________ applied Darwin's theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.

Herbert Spencer

"There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection," "All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak."

Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907.

Herbert Spencer's major work _________ sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States by the time of his death in 1903

Synthetic Philosophy

"Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence."

Yale's William Graham Sumner

The Republican Party had risen as an

antislavery faction committed to "free labor," but it was also an ardent supporter of American business

had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads,

Abraham Lincoln

gave millions of acres and dollars to railroad companies.

The Republican Congress

__________ became the party of business, and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, ________ candidates won all but four.

Republicans

The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to ________

organize

The ________ ___ _______ enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all laborers, including women (only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers).

Knights of Labor

By 1886, the Knights had over ________ members

700,000

In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould's rail companies did what?

fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting

From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly _________ workers struck against Gould's rail lines.

200,000

May 1, 1886

The campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike

The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the _________ _________ helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism.

Haymarket Riot

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor.

What did the American Federation of Labor seek to do?

reject the Knights' expansive vision of a "producerist" economy and advocated "pure and simple trade unionism," a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.

In 1892 what happened?

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at one of Carnegie's steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania

The plant's operator, ________ _______ ________ immediately called in hundreds of Pinkerton detectives, but the steel workers fought back.

Henry Clay Frick

The American Railway Union (ARU) was led by who?

Eugene Debbs (launched a sympathy strike)

But workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. _________ ________ also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

American farmers

"Wall Street owns the country," the Populist leader ________ ________ Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. "It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street."

Mary Elizabeth

Farmers had always been dependent on the whims of the weather and local markets. But now they staked their financial security on

national economic system subject to rapid price swings, rampant speculation, and limited regulation

Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through the cooperatives of the (2)

Farmers' Alliance and later through the politics of the People's (or Populist) Party.

Threatened by ever-plummeting commodity prices and ever-rising indebtedness, Texas agrarians met in (place, year) and organized the first Farmers' Alliance to restore some economic power to farmers as they dealt with railroads, merchants, and bankers.

Lampasas, Texas, in 1877

The alliance's most innovative programs were a series of farmers' cooperatives that enabled farmers to......

These cooperatives spread across the South between 1886 and 1892 and claimed more than a million members at their high point.

negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased.

at a time when falling prices and rising debts conspired against the survival of family farmers, the two political parties seemed incapable of representing the needs of poor farmers. And so alliance members organized a political party called

People's Party, or the Populists

Henry George's farmer-friendly ____ ______ proposal joined alliance members in the new party.

"single-tax"

And when the ______ of _____ sparked the worst economic depression the nation had ever yet seen, the Populist movement won further credibility and gained even more ground

Panic of 1893

The Populist movement, however, still faced substantial obstacles, especially in the South. The failure of alliance-backed Democrats to live up to their campaign promises drove some southerners to break with the party of their forefathers and join the _________. Many, however, were unwilling to take what was, for southerners, a radical step.

Populists

The _____ ______ _______, which had formed as a segregated sister organization to the southern alliance and had as many as 250,000 members at its peak, fell prey to racial and class-based hostility.

Colored Farmers' Alliance

The ______ _______ was a radical document, and some state party leaders selectively embraced its reforms. More importantly, the institutionalized parties were still too strong, and the Democrats loomed, ready to swallow Populist frustrations and inaugurate a new era of American politics.

Omaha platform

_______ ______ ________ (March 19, 1860-July 26, 1925) accomplished many different things in his life: he was a skilled orator, a Nebraska congressman, a three-time presidential candidate, U.S. secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and a lawyer who supported prohibition and opposed Darwinism (most notably in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial).

William Jennings Bryan

Bryan later won recognition as

one of the greatest speakers in American history.

He soon won election to the House of Representatives, where he served for two terms. Although he lost a bid to join the Senate, ________ turned his attention to a higher position: the presidency of the United States.

William Jennings Bryan

In 1895-1896, Bryan launched a national speaking tour in which he promoted the free coinage of silver. He believed that _______, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers' debts.

bimetallism

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."26 After a few seconds of stunned silence, the convention went wild. Some wept, many shouted, and the band began to play "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Bryan received the 1896 _____ ______ ______

Democratic presidential nomination.

In early 1900, Congress passed the _____ ______ Act, which put the country on the gold standard, effectively ending the debate over the nation's monetary policy. Bryan sought the presidency again in 1900 but was again defeated, as he would be yet again in 1908.

Gold Standard

the ______ ______ proved the most significant third-party movement in American history.

Populist Party

______ ______ had described the new industrial economy as a worldwide class struggle between the wealthy bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, such as factories and farms, and the proletariat, factory workers and tenant farmers who worked only for the wealth of others.

Karl Marx

According to socialist organizer and newspaper editor Oscar Ameringer, ________ wanted "ownership of the trust by the government, and the ownership of the government by the people

socialists

The ___________, founded in 1901, carried on the American third-party political tradition

Socialist Party of America (SPA)