6a vocab

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 this commission, it 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 it 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 Darwinists

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 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. They 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 their 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 group 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 these agreements with employers, in which the employer would agree not to hire nonunion members.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

(1794-1877) A railroad magnate who made millions in steamboating before beginning a business consolidating railroads and eliminating competition in the industry.

Alexander Graham Bell

(1847-1922) The inventor of the telephone, patented in 1876.

Thomas Alva Edison

(1847-1931) 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

(1835-1919) 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

(1839-1937) 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

(1837-1930) A prominent labor activist and community organizer, dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America" in 1902 by a West Virginia district attorney. She 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

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

Samuel Gompers

(1850-1924) The president of the American Federation of Labor nearly every year from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924. He was no foe of capitalism but wanted employers to offer workers a fair deal by paying high wages and providing job security.

"waving the bloody shirt"

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

Tweed Ring

A symbol of Gilded Age corruption, _______ 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.__________ was eventually jailed for his crimes and died behind bars.

Crédit Mobilier Scandal

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 inflated prices—and profits. In 1872 a scandal erupted when journalists discovered that it had bribed congressmen and even the vice president to allow the ruse to continue.

panic of 1873

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.

Gilded Age

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

patronage

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

Compromise of 1877

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.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

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.

sharecropping

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 portion of each year's crop. It 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.

Jim Crow

System of racial segregation in the American South from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century. Based on the concept of "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites, this 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.

Plessy v. Ferguson

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 1950s.

Great Strike of 1877

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.

Chinese Exclusion Act

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

Pendleton Act

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

Jay Gould

(1836-1892) A railroad magnate who was involved in the Black Friday scandal in 1869 and later gained control of many of the nation's largest railroads, including the Union Pacific. He became revered and hated for his ability to manipulate railroad stocks for his personal profit and for his ardent resistance to organized labor.

Horace Greeley

(1811-1872) A New York newspaper editor, he ran for president in 1872 under the mantles of the Liberal Republican and Democratic parties.

Rutherford B. Hayes

(1822-1893) The former Republican governor of Ohio who became president after the contested 1876 election. By 1880 he had lost the support of his party and was not renominated for the office.

James A. Garfield

(1831-1881) Elected to the presidency in 1880, he served as president for only a few months before being assassinated by Charles Guiteau, who claimed to have killed him because he was denied a job through patronage when ______ was elected. The assassination fueled efforts to reform the spoils system.

Chester Arthur

(1829-1886) Elected as vice president in 1880, he became president after Garfield's assassination. He was primarily known for his efforts at civil service reform, which culminated in the Pendleton Act.

Grover Cleveland

(1837-1908) President from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897; his 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.

Thomas B. Reed

(1839-1902) The Republican congressman from Maine who became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1889 and then led the Billion-Dollar Congress like a "czar," making sure that his agenda dictated the business of the legislature.

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 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, these places 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. 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 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 ______, 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.

Jane Addams

She 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

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

As head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he 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. DuBois

A Harvard-educated leader in the fight for racial equality, he 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.