Timeline

• 1866: Medicine Lodge Treaty establishes the reservation system

• 1869: Founding of the Knights of Labor

• 1873: Panic of 1873

• 1876: Alexander Graham Bell develops the telephone

  • The Battle of the Little Big Horn/Custerʼs Last Stand

• 1877: Great Railroad Strike

  • Munn v. Illinois

• 1879: Thomas A. Edison develops the light bulb

• 1881: Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century of Dishonor

• 1882: Formation of the Standard Oil Trust

  • Chinese Exclusion Act

• 1883: Opening of the Brooklyn Bridge

• 1886: Founding of the American Federation of Labor

  • Haymarket bombing

  • Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois

• 1887: Interstate Commerce Act

  • Opening of the first subway system in the United States (Boston)

  • Dawes Severalty Act

• 1890: Sherman Antitrust Act

  • Beginning of Ghost Dance movement

  • Massacre at Wounded Knee

• 1892: Homestead lockout

• 1893: Worldʼs Columbian Exposition (Chicago Worldʼs Fair)

  • Panic of 1893

• 1894: Pullman Strike

• 1895: United States v. E. C. Knight Company

• 1896: Plessy v. Ferguson

Westward Expansion: Economic Development

Mechanization and the Transformation of American Agriculture

• During the decades following the Civil War, expensive machines such as the mechanical reaper and the combine harvester replaced hand-held tools to harvest field crops.

• This increased agricultural output and reduced the man-hours needed for tasks such as mowing, baling, and threshing.

• However, the increase in production lowered the prices that farmers received per bushel of corn or wheat, and most farmers could not afford the new equipment.

• By the late 1800s, large-scale farms dominated agriculture, leading to many smaller farmers going out of business.

Agrarian Resistance in the Face of Structural Change

• Debt and Dependence in the Gilded Age

  • Farmers in the post-Civil War period faced a variety of challenges, including overcharging, currency shortages, and foreclosures.

  • To address these issues, they formed local and regional organizations to challenge corporate power.

  • Some of their political agitation was carried out within the twoparty system, while others were outside of mainstream politics.

• The Greenback Party

  • It was an early political formation with agrarian roots that advocated issuing paper money that was not backed by gold or silver.

  • It received a million votes in the 1878 congressional elections and soon disbanded, but the call for expanding the money supply was taken up again following the Panic of 1893.

• The Grange and Granger Laws

  • The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was a farmers' organization that pushed for state laws to protect farmers' interests, known as Granger Laws.

  • Initially, the Supreme Court upheld these laws, but later reversed itself and ruled that individual states could not regulate railroads because they cross state lines.

• Protecting Communal Lands of the Southwestern Hispanos

  • Clashes occurred in the 1880s and 1890s in the Southwest between recently arriving settlers from older states and long-time Mexican and American Indian occupants of the land.

  • Much of the conflict occurred in northern New Mexico, which was federally administered land that the United States gained from Mexico following the Mexican-American War (1846–1848).

  • The Homestead Act of 1862 gave these squatters a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the federal government. Large portions of these lands were used communally by the local Hispano population, who lived in villages and used the surrounding lands for grass, timber, water, and other resources.

  • By the 1890s, the local Hispanos and Indians had lost more than 90 percent of their traditional lands and began organizing resistance.

  • The Surveyor of General Claims Office demanded that documentation of ownership be in English, but titles held by the Hispanos were in Spanish.

  • Las Gorras Blancas and Las Manos Negras organized resistance, including raids on settler-held land and the formation of a populist party. Ultimately, the movement failed to regain lost lands.

Transportation, Communication, and the Opening of New Markets in the West

• Land Grants to Railroads

  • The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 greatly accelerated the process, giving railroad companies wide swaths of land through which new rail lines would be built.

  • These land grants totaled more than 175 million acres, generating huge profits for railroad companies.

  • The presence of railroad lines made the land more accessible and more valuable, bringing about $435 million to the railroad companies.

• The Telegraph and the Telephone

  • The federal government granted patents to protect inventions such as the telegraph and the telephone during the Gilded Age.

  • The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, ushering in an era of rapid communications between Europe and North America.

  • In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone, and within a year, the Bell Telephone Company was established.

  • By 1880, almost 50,000 telephones were in use in the US.

  • These developments greatly aided the development of corporations with a national and international reach.

Promoting Westward Expansion—Government Policies, Railroads, and Mining Operations

• Government Policies and Westward Expansion

  • The federal government had long made it a priority to promote settlement of the West, and the Homestead Act of 1862 was not as successful as its promoters had hoped.

  • Congress responded by increasing the size of plots granted to homesteaders and offering acreage for a discounted price if the recipients agreed to irrigate the land.

• Government Support for Transcontinental Railroads

  • The Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s promoted government bonds and land grants to railroad companies to complete rail lines to the Pacific Ocean.

  • The completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 was a milestone in the development of a network of railroad lines that connected the far reaches of the country.

  • Four additional transcontinental lines were completed in the coming decades, and the last of the five lines, the Great Northern Railway, was privately built without the benefit of federal land grants.

  • Western railroad companies were eager to sell the land they had been granted, as it was valuable due to the new accessibility created by the rail lines.

• Mining Operations in the West

  • In 1859, the Comstock Lode was discovered, leading to the creation of a major boomtown, Virginia City.

  • In 1869, gold was discovered at Pikeʼs Peak, which included land reserves in the Kansas and Nebraska Territories.

  • The influx of over 100,000 people into the region resulted in the establishment of boomtowns such as Denver City and Boulder City, and the rapid establishment of the Colorado Territory in 1861.

  • Most of the mining operations in the West went through similar stages, with placer mining quickly finding deposits and large mining firms investing in elaborate operations.

  • Mining had more in common with industrial operations in the East, with investors enjoying substantial profits, shares in operations being traded on international markets, and wage workers replacing prospectors.

Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development

Settling the West

• Chinese Communities in the West

  • Chinese immigrants were drawn to North America by the gold rush in California, and by 1870, over 63,000 lived in America, with nearly 80% in California.

  • White Californians pushed for laws to exclude Chinese immigrants from mining, and discrimination, legal obstacles, and changes in the economics of mining pushed most Chinese immigrants away from mining and toward other jobs.

  • Up to 12,000 Chinese workers helped complete the first transcontinental railroad line in 1869, representing 90% of the workforce.

• Anti-Asian Sentiment and the Chinese Exclusion Act

  • Chinese immigrants faced a great deal of discrimination and hostility in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  • Federal naturalization laws, altered after the Civil War, denied citizenship to Asian immigrants.

  • The 1854 California Supreme Court decision, the People of the State of California v. George W. Hall, ruled that Chinese Americans were not allowed to testify against whites in court.

  • When the economy suffered a major downturn in the 1870s, many Californians singled out the Chinese population as the cause of the crisis.

  • The Workingmen's Party pushed for legislation excluding Chinese immigrants from the United States, which was successful.

  • The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first discriminatory federal law that targeted a particular national group, banning Chinese immigration for ten years.

  • It was renewed and made permanent in 1902 and finally repealed in 1943.

• Mining Boomtowns in the West

  • A typical boomtown was Virginia City in present-day Nevada, which was born in the wake of the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859.

  • By 1875, Virginia City had a population of over 25,000 people, making it one of the largest towns in the interior of the West.

  • These towns were ethnically and racially diverse, and as mining operations became more elaborate and industrial, they more closely resembled the established industrial cities in the East, complete with schools, theaters, and churches.

• Ranching and the Era of the Cowboy in the West

  • Ranching on the Great Plains gave rise to the cowboy, who drove large herds of cattle across the open plains.

  • By the mid-1880s, large ranchers began to enclose grazing areas with barbed wire, ending the era of open-range grazing.

  • In the late 1880s, severe blizzards decimated the cattle population, leading to the replacement of free-spirited cowboys with wage-earning hired hands.

• Farming on the Great Plains

  • The Homestead Act (1862) and completion of the transcontinental railroad facilitated the movement of settlers west of the Mississippi River in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

  • The populations of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska all grew dramatically between the end of the Civil War and 1900, from 300,000 to 5 million.

  • The first-generation of pioneers were nicknamed "sodbusters" because they had to cut through the thick layer of sod to get to the topsoil needed for farming.

  • About a fifth of the farmers who established farms in this era obtained land directly from the government through the Homestead Act and similar federal legislation.

  • As the century progressed, the dream of land ownership proved to be beyond the means of many people, and large-scale farming in the West followed a pattern similar to mining and ranching operations.

  • Increasing numbers of residents of the West were migrant farmers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and hired employees as land was consolidated into fewer and fewer hands.

Violence on the Frontier

• Destruction of the Buffalo

  • Railroad workers and passengers killed buffalo for food and sport, and industrial uses for their hides put pressure on their numbers, leading to their extinction. T

  • his greatly weakened the Plains peoples, who depended on the buffalo for spiritual and physical sustenance.

• Red Cloud's War and the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie

  • Violence on the frontier increased during and immediately following the Civil War.

  • Between 1866 and 1868, fighting occurred between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho on one side and U.S. troops on the other.

  • The fighting ended with the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which allowed the Lakota to maintain much of the disputed territory and agreed to close the Bozeman Trail.

• The Indian Peace Commission (1867)

  • It was established in 1867 to negotiate an end to warring on the Great Plains.

  • Despite several treaties being negotiated, Congress did not consistently fund or enforce agreements made by the commission.

  • The primary goal of the commission was to further confine Indian groups to reservations and pursue a policy of assimilation.

  • The commission was seen as a failure, as fighting continued over the next decade.

• The Battle of the Little Big Horn and Custer's Last Stand (1876)

  • The Great Sioux War in 1876 was sparked by the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory in 1874.

  • Sioux warriors, along with Cheyenne allies, achieved a major victory over American forces at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, resulting in the death of General George Custer and 225 of his men.

  • U.S. forces led by General Philip Sheridan soundly defeated American Indian forces, and the Lakota Sioux were confined to a reservation in the Dakota Territory.

  • The defeat of the Sioux was a major turning point in the government's campaign to control the previously autonomous American Indian tribes of the Great Plains.

Government Policies and the Fate of American Indians

• President Grant and the “Peace Policy”

  • President Ulysses S. Grant announced a "peace policy" in 1869 to pursue assimilation of American Indians, which involved a move away from treaties and toward individual ownership of plots of land.

  • Eventually, Indians would become citizens of the United States rather than members of Indian nations.

  • The policy did not initially gain many adherents, but was later reflected in the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act.

• Helen Hunt Jackson and the Call for Reform

  • Helen Hunt Jackson's 1882 book, “A Century of Dishonor”, chronicled the abuses the U.S. government committed against native peoples.

  • Historians have placed the activism of Jackson and other women within the context of gender norms in the Victorian era, where it was seen as the duty of white middle-class women to civilize people.

  • These women were successful in lobbying for the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which reduced cruelty toward American Indians by government forces.

• The Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

  • This abandoned the reservation system and divided tribal lands into individually owned plots, with the goal of forcing American Indians to assimilate into white culture.

  • This reform was as damaging to American Indians as the earlier reservation policy, as it reflected ideal middle-class living arrangements.

• Indian Boarding Schools

  • The Bureau of Indian Affairs established a series of Indian boarding schools in the late 1870s to assimilate American Indian children into white culture.

  • The Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania was a model for other schools, where students were forced to cut their hair and wear traditional clothing, practice Christianity, and be trained in menial tasks.

  • Colonel Richard Henry Pratt's motto was "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

American Indian Resistance

• The Ghost Dance Movement

  • The Ghost Dance movement was developed by Wovoka, a Northern Paiute prophet, to promote cooperation among tribes and clean living and honesty.

  • It was not successful in stopping white incursions, but had a profound effect on Indian tribes into the twentieth century.

• Wounded Knee and the End of Autonomous American Indian Groups

  • The "Indian Wars" were a series of military conflicts between settlers and American Indians in the 1880s.

  • The last "battle" was a massacre at the Lakota reservation near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in 1890, when U.S. troops opened fire on them, killing more than 200 Lakota men, women, and children.

The “New South“

The Limited Success of Calls for a “New South”

• Henry Grady, an Atlanta journalist, argued for a "New South" that would include industrialization.

• However, for the remainder of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, the South remained mired in poverty and underdevelopment.

• African Americans continued to toil in the sharecropping system or as tenant farmers, both of which involved African Americans working land that they did not own.

• Tenant farming was a slight step up the social ladder from sharecropping, as tenant farmers rented land from a landowner, paying in cash.

Segregation in the “New South”

• The Proliferation of the “Jim Crow” System

  • After Reconstruction ended, African Americans saw their gains in political and economic rights erode.

  • Jim Crow laws segregated public facilities such as railroad cars, restrooms, and schools, further relegating them to second class status in the South.

  • The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the laws, but the Supreme Court ruled that it applied only to national citizenship rights, not to rights derived from "state citizenship".

  • This led to Jim Crow laws proliferating throughout the South.

• Plessy v. Ferguson and the “Separate but Equal” Doctrine

  • The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that racial segregation did not violate the equal protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  • Opponents argued that Jim Crow laws violated the amendment because they relegated African Americans to inferior public accommodations and had the effect of making them second-class citizens.

  • The Court disagreed, stating that segregation was acceptable as long as the facilities for both races were of equal quality.

• Challenging Jim Crow in the Gilded Age

  • African Americans fought for social justice in the Gilded Age, with Ida B. Wells suing the Memphis and Charleston Railroad for denying her a seat in the ladies' car.

  • After three friends of hers were lynched, Wells began to write and campaign against the practice of lynching. Booker T. Washington encouraged African Americans to gain training in vocational skills and was selected to be the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute.

  • He argued that confrontation with whites would end badly for African Americans and counseled cooperation with supportive whites and collective self-improvement.

  • His conciliatory approach was challenged by the more radical W. E. B. Du Bois.

Technological Innovation

The Raw Materials of Industrialization

• Steel and the Bessemer Process

  • Steel production was key tao the industrialization of the United States, as it was more durable, versatile, and useful than iron.

  • Henry Bessemer's Bessemer process reduced the cost of steel and made it available to a wide variety of industrial operations.

  • By the late 1860s, a more efficient production method, called the open-hearth process, replaced Bessemer.

• Coal and Oil

  • The Gilded Age required new forms of fuel.

  • The most practical fuel was a form of hard coal called anthracite.

  • Later, soer coal, called bituminous, came into wide use in industrial processes.

  • In the 1850s, innovators such as George Bissell demonstrated that oil could be refined and used for a variety of processes, such as illuminating lamps.

  • Bissell raised money to drill for oil in western Pennsylvania, and the first oil well was established by one of his employees in 1859.

  • Later, the demand for oil increased as it was refined into gasoline, a fuel for automobiles.

The Rise of Industrial Capitalism

The Rise of the Corporation and Mass Production

• The Evolution of the Corporation and the Managerial Revolution

  • Before the Civil War, many states made it easier for entities to incorporate.

  • After the war, large corporations developed management systems that separated top executives from managers who were responsible for day-to-day operations.

  • A new class of middle managers evolved to supervise the various departments, creating new opportunities for women in the workplace.

• Advances in Marketing and Distribution

  • Industrial capitalism developed methods to distribute goods, leading to changes in consumption patterns. Ready-made clothing replaced homemade clothing, and canned food made inroads with families used to growing and processing their own foodstuffs.

• Chain Outlets and Department Stores

  • New types of retail outlets began to replace traditional small-scale, locally owned stores in the late 19th century.

  • Chains such as the Atlantic and Pacific (A & P) Tea Company (groceries) and F. W. Woolworth (manufactured dry goods) opened outlets in cities and towns, while department stores such as Wanamaker's in Philadelphia and Macy's in New York City catered to middle-class residents.

  • Companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward printed mail-order catalogs of the products they sold and encouraged people to purchase items from the catalogs using installment payment plans.

  • Being far from a metropolitan center and the actual stores was no longer an impediment to participating in the burgeoning consumer culture.

• The Labor Force in the Industrial Era

  • Migrants from within the US and abroad were drawn to America's industrial cities during the Gilded Age.

  • Before the Civil War, immigrants were primarily from northern and western Europe, but by the 1870s, new sources of immigration included southern and eastern Europe, Mexico, and China.

  • Employers often hired recruiters to entice Europeans to immigrate, with the money deducted from their wages.

  • This practice was made illegal in 1885, but the flow of immigrants continued until the first decades of the twentieth century.

Economic Consolidation

• The Rise of Major Industries

  • The Gilded Age saw the rise of large corporations and trusts that dominated industries such as railroads, steel, and oil.

  • The corporate model spread to a variety of industrial processes, such as the production of bicycles, clothing, shoes, and paper, as well as the processing of food products.

• Andrew Carnegie and Vertical Integration (or Consolidation)

  • Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry by investing in all aspects of production, including the mills, coal mines, iron ore mines, and transportation lines.

  • Carnegie controlled transportation lines—the ships that transported the iron ore and the railroads that transported the coal to the factory.

    • This type of organization—in which all key aspects of the business are performed by the particular company—is called vertical integration.

• Rockefeller and Horizontal Integration (or Consolidation)

  • Horizontal integration is the merging of companies that create the same or similar products.

  • This can lead to a monopoly if a company captures the majority of the market for a particular product or service.

  • To gain monopoly control of an industry, corporations established trusts, such as Standard Oil.

• Other Business Leaders of the Gilded Age

  • Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were two of the most famous industrial and business leaders of the second half of the 19th century.

  • Others included Collis P. Huntington, a railroad magnate, Mark Hanna, a coal and iron merchant, Philip Armour, a meat-processing giant in Chicago, and Stephen Elkins, a magnate in mining, railroads, and politics.

  • Financiers, such as J. P. Morgan, parlayed leverage into dominance of the entire U.S. economy, leading reformers to call for legislation to check their influence and reign in monopolistic practices.

Corporations Look Abroad

• Foreign trade was rapidly expanding in the Gilded Age, with American exports doubling to over $850 million by the turn of the century.

• Companies such as Standard Oil, Eastman Kodak, and American Tobacco established branches in other countries, and the economic downturn following the Panic of 1893 encouraged businessmen to seek new markets abroad.

• Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the West was essential for American economic growth, and that the next logical step for American economic expansion was foreign lands.

Labor in the Gilded Age

Poverty and Wealth in Industrializing America

• The Wealthy Class

  • The Gilded Age saw the growth of a well-to-do class that surpassed previous wealthy classes in terms of money, cohesiveness, and power.

  • These businessmen built gaudy mansions in exclusive urban neighborhoods and summer "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island.

  • Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" to describe the lavish spending habits of the wealthy.

• The Working Class

  • Wages for workers rose in the decades after the Civil War, but were well below levels that economists consider necessary for a minimum degree of comfort.

  • During economic downturns, wages could be cut, and workers were vulnerable to seasonal nature of work.

  • However, those who had recently relocated to industrial cities and towns had amounts of spending money that were unimaginable in their former places of residence.

  • Additionally, prices for mass-produced goods were falling, making a world of new goods and services available to many working-class people.

An Expanding Workforce

• Children and women began to enter the paid workforce in large numbers due to low wages for working-class men.

• From the 1870s until World War I, child labor grew each decade, and by 1900, children, aged ten to fieen years old, made up 18% of the industrial workforce.

• Women in working-class communities also increased in the Gilded Age, making up 17% of the workforce by 1900.

Conflict at the Work Site

• The Declining Status of Work in the Age of Industrialization

  • The Gilded Age saw workers' position and status erode due to cutthroat competition and mechanization of the production processes.

  • Wages rose incrementally, but gains were precarious and often erased during cyclical downturns.

  • The wealth generated by the rapid expansion of industry was not evenly distributed, and the loss of control over the processes of production led to a loss of pride in one's work and unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

  • Workers responded by forming and joining labor organizations, or unions, to advance their cause through collective bargaining and striking.

• An Era of Pitched Battles in the Workplace

  • The fierce labor battles of the Gilded Age were almost exclusively won by management, with its near monopoly on weaponry, the support of the government and the courts, and vast numbers of poor, working-class men willing to serve as strikebreakers.

  • These battles often occurred in the wake of announced pay cuts during the economic downturns of the 1870s and of the 1890s.

• The Knights of Labor

  • This is founded in 1869, welcomed all members regardless of race, gender, or level of skill.

  • By 1886, the organization had 800,000 members, but by the 1890s a sharp decline in membership and influence due to ethnic, linguistic, and racial barriers, a centralized and autocratic governing structure, and government repression in the wake of the Haymarket bombing.

• The Great Railroad Strike of 1877

  • In 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) announced a 10 percent pay cut for its workers, leading to the Great Railroad Strike, which involved more than 100,000 railroad workers and more than half a million other workers.

  • Violence erupted in nine states and President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops, leading to fears of a second civil war.

• The Haymarket Incident (1886)

  • In 1886, a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago turned violent when skilled workers were replaced by "scabs".

  • The striking workers attacked several of the "scabs" on May 3, two days after a large May Day rally.

  • The police and Pinkerton guards opened fire on the strikers, killing or injuring six men.

  • The strikers called for a rally on May 4 in Haymarket Square, where a bomb exploded in the midst of the police ranks, killing several police.

  • Eight strikers were tried and convicted on scanty evidence, four of whom were executed.

  • The popularity of the Knights of Labor diminished in the aftermath of the incident.

• The American Federation of Labor (1886)

  • This was formed in 1886 and included only skilled workers, the "aristocracy of labor."

  • It did not permit unskilled workers to join, nor did it allow African Americans or women to join.

  • It was known as a "bread and butter" union, with its one goal of getting higher wages and better conditions for its members.

  • It maintained a growing membership into the twentieth century, led by Samuel Gompers.

• The Homestead Strike (1892)

  • Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, a powerful union under the AFL umbrella, in 1892.

  • He traveled outside of the country and placed the plant under the control of Henry Clay Frick, a notorious anti-union man.

  • Frick built a fence around the plant, locked out the workers, brought in "scabs," and hired Pinkerton guards to enforce his edicts.

  • The workers won a temporary victory and took over the plant, but the governor called in 8,000 National Guard troops to retake it.

  • Frick was able to reopen the plant, without union workers, in a devastating blow for organized labor.

• The Pullman Strike: Strife in a Company Town (1894)

  • The Pullman Strike occurred during the economic downturn following the Panic of 1893.

  • The Pullman Company, which built railroad cars, cut wages several times in 1893 and 1894. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, to come to their aid.

  • In May 1894, three union organizers were fired and most of the 3,300 workers went on strike.

  • ARU members across the nation voted to support the strike by refusing to handle trains that contained Pullman cars.

  • Courts issued two injunctions against the strike, and President Grover Cleveland eventually called out federal troops to put it down.

  • Violence ensued, leading to the death of twenty-five strikers.

  • The strike ended in defeat for the union, with new workers hired by Pullman.

  • Following the episode, the Supreme Court asserted that the government was justified in stopping the strike.

Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age

Migrations and a Diverse Workforce

• The “New Immigration”

  • The large wave of immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1920 was essential to the industrialization of the country.

  • The Irish and German immigrations of the pre-Civil War years were supplemented by waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and other areas.

  • The label "new immigrants" was applied to these groups, who tended to come from agricultural areas just beyond the industrial core of Europe and North America.

  • The number of immigrants from China was growing until the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Immigrants were drawn to the economic opportunities of the United States, although many Jews fled to Russia to avoid anti-Semitic massacres.

• The “Exoduster” Movement

  • It was a movement of 40,000 African Americans who left the South in the late 1870s, crossing the Mississippi River to settle in Kansas.

  • African American activists and white philanthropists established organizations to help them, and the most successful "Exodusters" settled in the growing towns of Kansas.

The New Culture of the Immigrant City

• A Divided City

  • The Gilded Age saw a bifurcation of the city between working-class districts and wealthy enclaves.

  • Before the Civil War, different classes lived in close proximity to one another, but in the second half of the century, the middle class and the wealthy moved away from the industrial zones.

  • In New York City, the wealthy moved uptown and the wealthier areas had the nicest amenities, such as wider streets, large parks, and sunlight.

• Living Conditions for the Working Class and the Poor

  • The Lower East Side of New York City was the densest neighborhood in the late 1800s, with poor conditions such as lack of ventilation and light, streets thick with horse dung, and a lack of basic municipal services.

  • Jacob Riis' photographs of tenement life drew attention to the plight of the poor.

• Working-Class Culture and Urban Life

  • Modest increases in wages and shorter workdays provided more opportunities for leisure-time activities for urban residents, such as drinking in saloons.

  • Saloons were seen as part social hall, part political club, and part community hub, and reformist attacks on them were seen as attacks on workingclass immigrant culture.

Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age

Debates over Identity and Immigration

• The Persistence of Ethnicity in the Gilded Age City

  • The large influx of immigrants in the late 1800s changed the social geography of American cities. Immigrants from small towns and rural areas of Europe had to adjust to life in urban America, and foreign-language papers emerged.

  • Parts of New York, such as Little Italy and the Jewish areas of the Lower East Side, became increasingly defined by ethnicity. Immigrant groups established savings institutions, insurance programs, choruses, political organizations, and summer camps.

  • Some immigrants, mostly young men, worked for part of the year in the United States and then returned to their home country, known as "birds of passage".

• Immigration and Nativism

  • The new immigrant groups of the Gilded Age heightened fears among conservative, Protestant public figures, who feared that Anglo-Saxon Americans were committing "race suicide" by allowing "inferior" races to enter America.

Justifying the Inequities of the Gilded Age

• The Waning of the “Free Labor” Ideal

  • The rise of giant corporations in the late 19th century challenged traditional American ideas about the economy and society.

  • This was due to the influx of unskilled workers into the factory system, who were not going to rise to become independent entrepreneurs.

  • As older ideas about the nature of the American economy became outmoded, new ones gained traction. Some embraced the new corporate order, while others challenged it.

• Social Darwinism

  • This was an attempt to defend the new social order by applying Charles Darwin's ideas about the natural world to social relations.

  • It was popularized in the US by William Graham Sumner, who argued against government intervention in the economic and social spheres, believing that it would hinder the evolution of the human species.

• Horatio Alger and the Myth of the Self-made Man

  • Horatio Alger's "dime novels" often featured a poor boy who achieves success due to luck and pluck.

  • These "rags-to-riches" novels put forth the idea that anyone could make it in Gilded Age America, but the reality was quite different.

The Settlement House Movement

• Jane Addams and Hull House

  • Jane Addams founded and ran Hull House in Chicago, challenging societal expectations around gender and family life.

  • She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and is considered one of the founders of the field of social work in the US.

Development of the Middle Class

The Growth of the Urban Middle Class and the Expansion of Consumer Culture

• The Rise of the Middle Class

  • In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a class of white-collar employees became essential to the successful functioning of industrial capitalism.

  • White-collar employees saw their wages rise faster than working-class (blue-collar) men and women, and their average workday was shorter than that of laborers and factory workers.

  • Women filled many of the lower-level white-collar jobs, as more office workers were hired in the large firms of the Gilded Age.

  • As the typewriter came into use, literate women learned to type and were hired to perform office duties.

  • Women were also hired as schoolteachers, a growing field in the late 1800s. By 1900, there were 6,000 public high schools in the US.

• The Commercialization of Leisure

  • The most successful large-scale "amusement park" was Brooklyn's Coney Island, which featured three main amusement areas, a boardwalk, vaudeville theaters, and other attractions.

  • Among the most successful entertainments was "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West show, which mythologized the "Old West".

  • Circuses became popular in the Gilded Age, with P. T. Barnum creating the most popular circus of the era.

• Newspapers

  • Large-circulation papers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal gained readership through exaggerated, sensationalistic coverage of events, which helped to push public opinion towards support for the 1898 Spanish-American War.

• The Health of the City and the Parks Movement

  • Reformers sought to provide more opportunities for city dwellers to enjoy outdoor recreation by adopting the germ theory of disease causation.

  • Public parks were part of a strategy to provide an alternative to dirty streets and alleyways for healthful recreation.

• Frederick Law Olmsted and New Yorkʼs Central Park

  • The most important park project of the nineteenth century was New York's Central Park (1858).

  • Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed the park to create a democratic meeting place for the city's different classes.

  • However, working-class advocates questioned why the park was built so far from the working-class districts, and the rules and regulations made it seem more about social control than enjoyment.

  • Olmsted became the most prominent landscape artist in the US, designing other parks, campuses, and private grounds.

• Recreation and Spectator Sports

  • Park grounds became centers for a variety of recreation activities in the late 1800s. Several of these activities went from being participatory activities to spectator sports.

    • Baseball: Developed in 1845, it became the “national pastime” by the Gilded Age.

      • The first truly professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings (1869).

    • Tennis: Lawn tennis was developed in Great Britain (1873) as mainly a womenʼs sport.

      • Gained popularity in America among men and women during the Gilded Age.

    • Croquet: It was a popular activity in public parks during the last third of the nineteenth century. It was often played by mixed-gender groups.

    • Cycling: “Wheeling”—bicycle riding—became very popular in the Gilded Age.

      • The difficult “penny-farthing” bicycles, with their enormous front wheel, gave way to the modern design of the “safety bicycle” in the 1880s.

      • Wheeling was especially popular among women, who enjoyed the freedom from male supervision that bicycle riding offered.

    • Football: College football games became popular during the Age.

      • The first contest was between Rutgers and the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1869.

The Moral Obligations of the Wealthy Class

• Gilded Age business elite felt a moral obligation to give back to the community, leading to major financial contributions that improved cities and educational opportunities.

• Andrew Carnegie's essay "Wealth" (1899) argued that successful entrepreneurs should distribute their wealth responsibly and give back to society.

  • He believed in a laissez-faire approach to social problems and urged his fellow millionaires to take action on behalf of the community.

Reform in the Gilded Age

Challenges to the Dominant Corporate Ethic

• Henry George and the “Single Tax” on Land

  • Henry George was a writer, economist, and politician who was critical of the persistence of poverty in a nation of technological and industrial progress.

  • In his bestselling book, Progress and Poverty (1879), he argued for the elimination of all taxes, except for a "single tax" on the value of land.

  • This tax would be high enough to eliminate land accumulation and speculation, making land the "common property" of society.

• Socialism and Anarchism

  • Many Americans began to question the basic assumptions of capitalism and embraced alternative ideologies, such as anarchism and socialism, but these ideas never gained the same traction in the US as they did in Europe.

  • Conservative newspapers and politicians exaggerated the strength of these movements in the US, often conflating them with the labor movement in order to delegitimize or stigmatize the labor movement.

  • Eugene V. Debs moved away from the labor movement and toward socialism, founding the Socialist Party of America in 1901.

• Edward Bellamyʼs Looking Backward, 2000–1887

  • The most famous American socialist tract of the nineteenth century was Edward Bellamyʼs Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888).

  • This novel imagined a man who falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find a socialist utopia in which the inequities and poverty of the Gilded Age have been eradicated.

• Coxeyʼs Army

  • It was a group of disgruntled workers who marched from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to demand government action to address the economic crisis following the Panic of 1893.

  • There were other similar "armies" of populist inspired working-class men.

Gender, Voluntary Organizations, and Social Reform

• Women became more politically engaged due to economic dislocations and the "cult of domesticity".

• In the 1880s and 1890s, women's clubs emerged in many towns and cities to investigate and advocate around issues of poverty, working conditions, and pollution.

• The General Federation of Women's Clubs used the rhetoric of domesticity to justify their activism outside the home, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became a mass organization.

• Women continued to press for voting rights in the late 1800s, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1890.

Controversies over the Role of Government in the Gilded Age

Laissez-Faire Policies Versus Reform

• Reformers and critics of the new industrial capitalist order pushed for government measures to regulate economic activities, but these efforts were often hampered by the courts and lax enforcement.

• In 1886, the Supreme Court limited the ability of states to regulate railroads, leading to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887).

• The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) was the first attempt by Congress to keep monopolistic practices in check, making it illegal for firms to make agreements with one another that limit competition.

• However, it had only limited usefulness, as the Supreme Court greatly limited the scope of the act by making a distinction between trade and manufacturing.

Debates Around Pursuing an Imperialist Policy

• Foreign policymakers began to look abroad to gain greater access and control over foreign markets and natural resources, and the United States entered the scramble for overseas possessions.

• The American acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War set the United States on the path to having a global presence.

Politics in the Gilded Age

Farmers and the Populist Party

• Organizing the Populist Party

  • The Populist Party was born in 1892 and proposed a radical program for change that included increased democracy, a graduated income tax, regulation of the railroads, and currency reform.

  • It sought to undo the "crime of ʼ73" by calling for the "free and unlimited coinage" of silver.

  • The party did well in the presidential election of 1892 and made gains in the midterm election of 1894, but their popularity was short lived.

• The Election of 1896 and the “Cross of Gold” Speech

  • The election of 1896 was significant in that it resulted in the demise of the Populist Party and helped establish the identity of the major political parties.

  • William Jennings Bryan ran for president on the ticket of the Democratic Party and endorsed the call for the "free and unlimited coinage" of silver.

  • William McKinley, the Republican candidate, appealed to banking and business interests by promising to keep the country on the gold standard.

  • The positions of the two parties shaped the political landscape well into the twentieth century, with the Republican Party more aligned with pro-business interests and the Democratic Party presenting itself as the champion of the "little guy."

Politics, Big Business, and Corruption in the Gilded Age

• The Evolution of the Two-Party System

  • The two main political parties from the Civil War to the present, the Democrats and the Republicans, were unable to dominate national politics during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

  • The Republicans controlled the White House for most of the period from 1869 to the turn of the century, with no presidential candidate receiving a clear majority of the popular vote in any election between 1872 and 1896.

  • Control of Congress was split, with the Republicans controlling the Senate and the Democrats controlling the House.

  • Corruption permeated political life, leading to reform movements such as the People's Party and the Populist Party.

• Ideology Takes a Back Seat

  • The Republicans and Democrats did not take strong stands on many pressing issues of the Gilded Age, such as child labor, the consolidation of industries, workplace safety, and abuses by railroad companies.

  • Neither party did much to protect the rights of African Americans or American Indians, and neither addressed the call of many women for the right to vote.

  • One issue that consistently divided the parties was the tariff, with Democrats wanting lower tariff rates and Republicans wanting higher tariff rates.

  • Both parties aligned with the priorities of big business, and political leaders seemed to shrink in importance when compared with the towering industrial figures of the day.

• Corruption and the Grant Administration

  • American political life was rife with corruption during the post-Civil War period, evidenced by the illegal schemes of "Boss" William Marcy Tweed.

  • Ulysses S. Grant, former Union commanding general in the Civil War, was tainted by corruption, with his ability as a president far below his abilities on the battlefield.

  • He surrounded himself with incompetent and corrupt advisors and appointees, and rewarded friends, army contacts, and party loyalists with jobs that required political experience.

  • Key members of his administration, including his vice president, were also implicated in corruption.

• Corruption and Civil-Service Reform

  • Civil-service reform was a major issue in the late 19th century, aiming to remove nepotism and cronyism from government hiring practices.

• Mugwumps, Stalwarts, and Half-Breeds

  • The issue of civil-service reform divided the Republican Party in the wake of the scandals of the Grant administration.

  • Reform-minded Republicans, mainly from Massachusetts and New York, were nicknamed "Mugwumps" by their critics.

  • Those most resistant to abandoning the spoils system were nicknamed "Stalwarts."

  • Those loyal to the Republican leadership were known as "Half-Breeds."

  • Rutherford B. Hayes, who won the disputed election of 1876, was not well liked by any of the factions and chose not to run for reelection in 1880.

• The Pendleton Act

  • This was passed in 1883 to set up a merit-based federal civil service, a professional career service that allots government jobs on the basis of a competitive exam.

  • Upper-level, policy-oriented positions are still rotated when new presidential administrations come into office.

  • This system still covers most of the bureaucratic jobs in the federal government.

• The Politics of Tariff Rates

  • Industrialists tended to encourage higher tariffs to keep out foreign competition, while farming interests and many Democratic politicians supported a lower tariff rate.

  • By the 1880s, the government was awash in money from the tariff, and tariff reformers argued that lowering the tariff would put more money into circulation and stimulate economic activity.

  • President Chester Arthur broke with Republican orthodoxy and looked into lowering the tariff, but ultimately, a small decrease in tariff rates was passed.

  • During Democratic president Grover Cleveland's first administration, many Democrats began to push for lower rates, as they saw high tariff rates as benefiting big business interests at the expense of consumers and small producers.

  • In 1888, Benjamin Harrison, grandson of President William Henry Harrison, was nominated and signed into law the highest tariff in the nationʼs history.

• The Currency Issue

  • The economic growth of the last decades of the nineteenth century came to a halt in 1893 due to the inadequate amount of currency in circulation.

  • For decades, the United States used metallic money, but in 1873 Congress changed this policy, allowing only for the coinage of gold.

  • This depressed the prices of goods, making it difficult to repay loans.

  • This was beneficial to bankers, who wanted a relatively stable currency so that money repaid on loans retained its value.

Politics, Power, and Reform in Urban America

• Urban Politics and the Rise of Machine Politics

  • Political machines in major cities were created after the Civil War to achieve and maintain power.

  • New York City was dominated by the Democratic Party machine, run by party "bosses" and headquartered at Tammany Hall.

  • William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and other political leaders earned a reputation for corruption, including the building of a courthouse that involved millions of dollars in kickbacks.

  • The Tammany Hall political machine was popular with German and Irish immigrants, and initiated massive municipal projects that provided jobs to thousands of immigrants.

• The Campaign Against Prostitution

  • Prostitution was a major issue in the late 1800s, with religious-based activists seeing it as sinful, gender equality activists seeing a double standard, public-health advocates seeing it as spreading venereal disease, and anti-poverty activists pressuring local authorities to close "red-light" districts.

  • In the early twentieth century, progressive reformers successfully lobbied for the Mann Act, which cracked down on the transport of women across state lines to engage in prostitution.

• The Temperance Campaign

  • This movement was one of the largest reform movements in the 19th century, led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

  • It was especially popular among women, who were troubled by the fact that their husbands often drank away their paychecks.

  • It also complemented the growing nativist, or anti-immigrant, movement.

Period 7: 1890-1945 Economic Dislocation and Reform in the Age of Empire and World of War