Chapter 22, 24, 26

Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois

A Supreme Court decision that prohibited states from regulating the railroads because the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. As a result, reformers turned their attention to the federal government, which now held sole power to regulate the railroad industry.

Interstate Commerce Act

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.

vertical integration

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

horizontal 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.

trust

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 1870s as it eliminated its competition by taking control of smaller oil companies.

Standard Oil Company

John D. Rockefeller’s company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age. By 1877 Standard Oil controlled 95 percent of the oil refineries in the United States. It was also one of the first multinational corporations and at times distributed more than half of its kerosene production outside the United States. By the turn of the century it had become a target for trust-busting reformers, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to break up into several dozen smaller companies.

Interlocking directorates

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.

Bessemer Process

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.

Social Darwinism

Believers in the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that people gained wealth by “survival of the fittest.” Therefore, the wealthy had simply won a natural competition and owed nothing to the poor, and indeed service to the poor would interfere with this organic process. Some Social Darwinists also applied this theory to whole nations and races, explaining that powerful peoples were naturally endowed with gifts that allowed them to gain superiority over others. This theory provided one of the popular justifications for U.S. imperial ventures like the Spanish-American War.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

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. At first the law was mostly used to restrain trade unions, as the courts tended to side with companies in legal cases. In 1914 the act was revised so it could more effectively be used against monopolistic corporations.

National Labor Union

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.

Knights of Labor

The second national labor organization, organized 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. After the mid-1880s their membership declined for a variety of reasons, including the Knights’ participation in violent strikes and discord between skilled and unskilled members.

Haymarket Square

A May Day rally that turned violent 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.

American Federation of Labor

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.

closed shop

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 nonunion members.

Cornelius Vanderbuilt

A railroad magnate who made millions in steamboating before beginning a business consolidating railroads and eliminating competition in the industry.

Alexander Graham Bell

The inventor of the telephone, patented in 1876.

Thomas Alva Edison

The inventor of, among other things, the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the mimeograph, the moving picture, and a machine capable of taking X-rays. Ultimately he held more than one thousand patents for his inventions.

Andrew Carnegie

A tycoon who came to dominate the burgeoning steel industry. His company, later named United States Steel, was the biggest corporation in U.S. history in 1901. After he retired, he donated most of his fortune to public libraries, universities, arts organizations, and other charitable causes.

John D. Rockefeller

The founder of the Standard Oil Company, he developed the technique of horizontal integration and compelled other oil companies to join the Standard Oil "trust." He became the richest person in the world and the United States’ first billionaire. He later became known for his philanthropic support of universities and medical research.

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

A prominent labor activist and community organizer, dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America" in 1902 by a West Virginia district attorney. Jones was born in Ireland and worked as a dressmaker and schoolteacher before turning to labor organizing in the 1870s, first for the Knights of Labor and later for the United Mine Workers. By the turn of the century, she had adopted the matronly public persona of "Mother Jones." In 1903 she organized a "Children’s Crusade" of youthful mill and mine workers who marched from Pennsylvania to New York to publicize the issue of child labor.

Terence V. Powderly

He was an American labor union leader, politician, and attorney, best known as the head of the Knights of Labor in the late 1880s.

Samuel Gompers

The president of the American Federation of Labor nearly every year from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924. Gompers was no foe of capitalism but wanted employers to offer workers a fair deal by paying high wages and providing job security.

New Immigrants

Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them. These new immigrants congregated in ethnic urban neighborhoods, where they worried many native-born Americans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of whom introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate.

political machines

A term used to describe political organizations that flourished in urban centers—such as Tammany Hall in New York—that captured the immigrant vote by promising them municipal jobs, housing, and rudimentary social services. Though they were criticized for breeding corruption, their supporters thought they were rendering valuable social services.

settlement house

Mostly run by middle-class native-born women, settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States. Many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed lifelong passions for social activism in the settlement houses. Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent.

liberal Protestants

Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth. Many liberal Protestants became active in the “social gospel” and other reform movements of the era.

Tuskegee Institute

A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. It focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence. Washington justified segregated vocational training as a necessary first step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too “accommodationist.”

land-grant colleges

Colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887. These grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of today’s public universities derive from them.

pragmatism

A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems. The pragmatists thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge. Among the most well-known purveyors of pragmatism were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James.

yellow journalism

A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women. NAWSA argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilities in the home and family made them indispensable in the public decision-making process. During World War I, NAWSA supported the war effort and lauded women’s role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, the WCTU went on to embrace a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women.

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.

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 in the face of modernization and national standardization.

City Beautiful movement

A turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners, who aimed to promote order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying the nation’s new urban spaces with grand boulevards, welcoming parks, and monumental public buildings.

World’s Columbian Exposition

Americans saw this world’s fair, held in Chicago, as their opportunity to claim a place among the world’s most “civilized” societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe. The fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a mini-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time. For many, this was the high point of the City Beautiful movement.

Jane Addams

(1860-1935) Addams founded Hull House, America’s first settlement house, to help immigrants assimilate through education, counseling, and municipal reform efforts. She also advocated pacifism throughout her life, including during World War I, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882) A British naturalist whose 1859 book On the Origin of Species outlined a theory of evolution based on natural selection, whereby the strongest individuals of a particular species survived and reproduced while weaker individuals died out. This theory had an enormous impact not just on science but on religion and society too, as people wrestled with the challenge evolutionary theory posed to biblical notions of divine creation and applied the ideas of natural selection to human society.

Booker T. Washington

(1856-1915) As head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington advocated for vocational education for African Americans so that they could gain economic security. Believing that southern whites were not yet ready for social equality, he instead concentrated on gaining economic power for blacks without directly challenging the southern racial order.

W.E.B. Du Bois

(1868-1963) A Harvard-educated leader in the fight for racial equality, Du Bois believed that liberal arts education would provide the "talented tenth" of African Americans with the ability to lift their race into full participation in society. From New York, where he was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he relentlessly brought attention to racism in America and demanded legal and cultural change. During his long life he published many important books of history, sociology, and poetry and provided intellectual leadership to those advocating civil rights. One of his deepest convictions was that American blacks needed to connect their freedom struggle with African independence, and he died as a resident of the new nation of Ghana.

Joseph Pulitzer

(1847-1911) A publisher whose newspapers, including the New York World, became a symbol of the sensationalist journalism of the late nineteenth century.

William Randolph Hearst

(1863-1951) A newspaper magnate who started by inheriting his father’s San Francisco Examiner and ultimately owned newspapers and magazines published in cities across the United States. He was largely responsible for the spread of sensationalist journalism. The Hearst Corporation still owns dozens of newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets in the United States and around the world.

John Dewey

(1859-1952) A leader of the pragmatist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dewey applied its philosophy to education and social reform, advocating "learning by doing" as well as the application of knowledge to solving real-life problems. He became an outspoken promoter of social and political reforms that broadened American democracy.

Carrie Chapman Catt

(1859-1947) A leader of the revived women’s suffrage movement, Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920. She was also active internationally, helping women in other countries gain suffrage and advocating for international peace.

Horatio Alger

(1832-1899) The writer of dozens of novels for children, Alger popularized the notion of "rags to riches," that by hard work and a bit of a luck, even a poor boy could pull himself up into the middle class.

Mark Twain

(1835-1910) A satirist and writer, Twain is best known for his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His work critiqued American politics and society, especially the racial and economic injustice that he saw in the South and West. Twain traveled abroad extensively, and his work was read and loved around the world.

Henry James

(1843-1916) Expatriate novelist and brother of philosopher William James. A master of "psychological realism," he experimented in novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove with point of view and interior monologue.

Winslow Homer

(1836–1910) Boston-born artist who excelled in portraying New England’s pastoral farms and swelling seas in the native realist style.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

(1848-1907) Irish-born sculptor who immigrated to America and produced some of the nation’s finest beaux arts sculptures, including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common.

Frederick Law Olmsted

(1822-1903) Journalist and leading American landscape architect. His landmark designs include New York’s Central Park, Boston’s "Emerald Necklace," and the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Karl May

(1842-1912)Karl Friedrich May was a German author. He is best known for his 19th century novels of fictitious travels and adventures, set in the American Old West with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand as main protagonists and in the Orient and Middle East with fictional characters Kara Ben Nemsi and Hadschi Halef Omar.

mechanization of agriculture

The development of engine-driven machines, like the combine, which helped to dramatically increase the productivity of land in the 1870s and 1880s. This process contributed to the consolidation of agricultural business that drove many family farms out of existence.

Populists

Officially known as the People’s party, the Populists represented Westerners and Southerners who believed that U.S. economic policy inappropriately favored Eastern businessmen instead of the nation’s farmers. Their proposals included nationalization of the railroads, a graduated income tax, and, most significantly, the unlimited coinage of silver.

Homestead strike

A strike at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, that ended in an armed battle between the strikers, three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives hired by Carnegie, and federal troops, which killed ten people and wounded more than sixty. The strike was part of a nationwide wave of labor unrest in the summer of 1892 that helped the Populists gain some support from industrial workers.

grandfather clause

A regulation established in many southern states in the 1890s that exempted from voting requirements (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) anyone who could prove that his ancestors (“grandfathers”) had been able to vote in 1860. Because slaves could not vote before the Civil War, these clauses guaranteed the right to vote to many whites while denying it to blacks.

Pullman strike

A strike by railroad workers upset by drastic wage cuts. The strike was led by socialist Eugene Debs but not supported by the American Federation of Labor. Eventually President Grover Cleveland intervened, and federal troops forced an end to the strike. The strike highlighted both divisions within labor and the government’s new willingness to use armed force to combat work stoppages.

fourth party system

A term scholars have used to describe national politics from 1896 to 1932, when Republicans had a tight grip on the White House and issues such as industrial regulation and labor concerns became paramount, replacing older concerns such as civil-service reform and monetary policy.

Gold Standard Act

An act that guaranteed that paper currency would be redeemed freely in gold, putting an end to the already dying “free-silver” campaign.

Oliver H. Kelley

key figure in the history of American agriculture, best known for founding the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, commonly called the Grange

William Hope “Coin” Harvey

influential financial reformer and publicist born in the mid-19th century in Virginia, later part of West Virginia. As the fourth son in a family with Southern loyalties during the Civil War, he experienced early life shaped by regional tensions.

Mary Ellen Lease

prominent American lecturer, writer, and political activist known for her role in the Populist movement

James B. Weaver

American politician in Iowa who was a member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the United States

Eugene Victor Debs

prominent American socialist, trade unionist, and political activist. He was a five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was also elected to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat in 1884.

John Peter Altgeld

German-born American politician, lawyer, and reformer, known for his progressive policies as the 20th Governor of Illinois. He served from 1893 to 1897 and was the first Democrat to govern Illinois since the 1850s. Altgeld is best known for pardoning three men convicted in the Haymarket Affair, a controversial decision that marked the end of his political career.

Grover Cleveland

(1837-1908) President from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897; Cleveland’s first term was dominated by the issues of military pensions and tariff reforms. He lost the election of 1888, but he ran again and won in 1892. During his second term, he faced one of the most serious economic depressions in the nation’s history but failed to enact policies to ease the crisis.

Jacob S. Coxey

(1854-1951) A wealthy Ohio Populist, he led a 500-strong "army" to Washington, D.C., in 1894 to demand a public works program to create jobs for the unemployed in the midst of a devastating four-year depression.

Tom Watson

(1856-1922) A Populist leader who initially advocated interracial political mobilization but later became a symbol of the party’s shift to white supremacy.

William McKinley

(1843-1901) A former Republican congressman from Ohio who won the presidency in 1896 and again in 1900. He was probusiness, conservative, and unwilling to trouble the waters by voicing unpopular opinions.

Marcus Alonzo Hanna

(1837-1904) The driving force behind McKinley’s rise to the presidency, Hanna was a former businessman who raised money and devised strategy for McKinley’s winning bid for the White House in 1896.