Unit 6 Review: Industrialization, Urbanization, and Westward Migration (1865-1898)

Rise of Industrial Capitalism (1865-1898)

• America became the leading industrial power by the end of this period.

Railroads

• Massive expansion created a national market for goods.
• Railroad mileage grew fivefold after the Civil War.
• Encouraged mass production and consumption.
• Connected the Eastern and Western sides of the country.
• Enabled westward expansion.
• Government support:
  • Land grants and loan subsidies to private railroad corporations.
  • 70,000,000 acres given away to the railroad project.
  • Four new transcontinental railroads were built connecting:
    • Nebraska to California.
    • New Orleans to Los Angeles.
    • Kansas City to Los Angeles.
    • Minnesota to Washington.
• Panic of 1893:
  • A quarter of railroads filed for bankruptcy.
  • Bankers gained control, leading to regional monopolies.
  • By 1900, 2/3 of railroad companies controlled by 7 entities.

Technological Advancements

• Bessemer Process:
  • Enabled production of high-quality steel in large quantities.
  • Blasting air through molten iron yields stronger steel.

Industrial Giants

• Andrew Carnegie (Steel):
  • Pioneered vertical integration:
    • One company controls every stage of manufacturing.
    • Mining of iron ore to delivery of the final product.
• John D. Rockefeller (Oil):
  • Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil industry by the 1880s.
  • Horizontal integration involved buying out competitors.

Economic Environment

• Laissez-faire capitalism:
  • Minimal government intervention in business.
  • Rooted in Adam Smith's ideas.
  • Individuals make economic decisions guided by supply and demand.
  • The lack of competition undermined Smith's thesis.
• Social Darwinism:
  • Applied Darwinism to economics.
  • Concentration of wealth in the hands of the fittest is considered best for everyone.
• Gospel of Wealth (Andrew Carnegie):
  • Wealthy had a duty to invest wealth into society through philanthropic works.
  • Carnegie donated 350,000,000 to build libraries, concert halls, and universities.

Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)

• Made monopolizing a market illegal.
• Vaguely worded.
• Few convictions occurred.

Social Changes

• Raised standard of living for most.
• Sharply divided classes.
• Elite class: new millionaires.
• Growth of the middle class.
• White-collar work: salesmen and managers dressed in suits.
• Laboring class:
  • Barely sustainable wages.
  • Long hours, six days a week.
  • Women and children worked in factories.
  • Punishing work environment.

Labor Unions

• Dangerous and exhausting factory, railroad, and mining work.
• Workers faced injuries and premature deaths.
• Corporations held the negotiation power due to immigrant influx.
• Immigrant workers accepted lower wages.
• Labor unions formed to demand better conditions and wages.
• Strikes were a common tactic.

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

• Companies cut wages during a recession.
• Workers went on strike in 11 states, shutting down 60% of railroads.
• President Hayes sent in troops to quell violence, resulting in 100 deaths.
• Employers improved wages and conditions.

Pullman Strike

• Pullman Company cut wages.
• Union workers who negotiated for higher wages were fired.
• Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railroad Union, directed members not to work on trains with Pullman cars.
• Railroad owners linked Pullman cars to mail trains to involve the federal government.
• Debs and other leaders jailed for hindering rail traffic.
• The movement died.
• Corporations often had the backing of the federal government.

Knights of Labor

• Became public in 1881.
• National in scope, open to all laborers, including black people and women.
• Goals: abolish child labor and destroy trusts/monopolies.
• Over 700,000 members at its height.
• Compromised by the Haymarket Square Riot in 1886.
  • A bomb exploded during a protest for an eight-hour workday.
  • Associated with anarchists, but blamed on Knights of Labor.
  • Membership declined.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

• Association of craft unions led by Samuel Gompers.
• Over a million members by 1901.
• Advocated for higher wages and better working conditions.

Immigration

• US population tripled.
• 16,000,000 immigrants arrived.
• Mainly Europeans (Irish, Scandinavian, German).
• Reasons for immigration: poverty, overcrowding, joblessness, religious persecution.
• America viewed as land of liberty and opportunity.

Backlash Against Immigrants

• Labor Unions opposed immigrants due to cheap labor.
• Nativists: policy of protecting native born interests.
  • American Protective Association: anti-Catholic.
  • Opposition to Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who were largely Catholic.
• Social Darwinists: believed immigrants, especially Irish, were racially inferior.

Westward Migration

• Resumed after 1865 with the hope of self-sufficiency and independence.
• By the end of the 19th century, frontier was settled.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

• Barred further Chinese immigration.
• First immigration law targeting a specific race or nationality.

Cattle Trade

• Railroads facilitated cattle trade in Eastern markets.
• Overgrazing and barbed wire fences ended cattle drives by the 1880s.

Homestead Act of 1862

• Offered 160 acres of free land to those who settled and lived on the land for five years.
• Hundreds of thousands of families took the offer between 1870-1900.
• By 1890, the US Census Bureau declared that frontier was officially settled.

Oklahoma Territory

• Land was originally given to Indians by treaty.
• The US broke the treaty and opened the territory to settlement.

Frederick Jackson Turner

• Wrote "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893).
• Argued that the closing of the frontier was troubling because Western expansion was a means of releasing discontent.
• The frontier had been a great class and societal leveler.

Reservation System

• Indian nations assigned tracks of land called reservations.
• Smaller than previous land grants.
• Indians refused to restrict their movements.
• Sioux Wars: Sioux won a decisive victory against the US army in 1866.
• Indian Appropriation Act of 1871: ended federal recognition of the sovereignty of Indian nations and nullified previous treaties.
• Wars with Sioux and Comanches, which the Americans won.
• Extinction of bison herds.

Ghost Dance Movement

• Nationwide movement of resistance against encroachment of Americans on Indian land.
• Belief that ancestors would return and drive white people from their lands if they performed the ghost dance.

Wounded Knee (1890)

• Killing of more than 200 Indian men, women, and children.
• Effectively ended the period of Indian resistance.

Assimilationist Movement

• Attempt to end Indian culture by forcing assimilation to American values.
• Dawes Act of 1887: broke up tribal organization.
• Divided tribal lands into 160-acre plots.
• Offered US citizenship to those who lived there and Americanized themselves.

Shift in Agriculture

• Farmers relied more on single cash crops like wheat and corn.
• Increased use of expensive machinery (combines) powered by steam engines.
• Smaller farmers went out of business due to inability to afford machinery.

Economic Challenges for Farmers

• Industrial trusts kept prices high on manufactured goods.
• Railroad corporations charged high prices to ship crops.

Farmer Resistance

• National Grange Movement (organized in 1868):
  • Social and educational collective.
  • Became political to defend farmers against trusts and railroad exploitation.
  • Lobbied for laws against price gouging and special privileges for preferred customers.
  • Interstate Commerce Act of 1886 legally required railroad rates to be reasonable and just, and it established a federal commission (Interstate Commerce Commission) to oversee this process.

Urbanization

• By the end of this period, almost 40% of Americans lived in cities.
• Urbanization went hand in hand with industrialization.

Tenements

• Laboring class and immigrants crowded into poorly ventilated, disease-ridden housing.

Suburbanization

• Middle class and upper classes resettled in suburbs with individual houses built outside the city
• Abundant land at low cost and cheap rail transportation made this possible.

Urban Political Machines

• Corrupt organizations of political bosses and followers.
• Tammany Hall in New York City.
• Met the needs of businesses and immigrants in the urban poor for political gain.

Cultural Changes

• Demand for entertainment and leisure.
• Joseph Pulitzer's New York World filled with sensational stories.
• Theaters with vaudevillian variety shows.
• PT Barnum's traveling circus.
• Rise of spectator sports like baseball, football, and boxing.

Urban Reform Movements

• Settlement Houses provided social services to the poor.
• Hull House (established by Jane Addams in 1889): taught English to immigrants and pioneered early childhood education.

Women's Movements

• Push for women's suffrage.
• National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) formed in 1890 by Elizabeth Cady and Susan B. Anthony.

Temperance Movement

• Women's Christian Temperance Union formed in 1874 with half a million members by 1898.
• Anti-Saloon League formed in 1893 to persuade congress to close down bars and saloons.
• Carrie A. Nation: grabbed a hatchet and went from bar to bar hacking away of beer kegs and liquor casts.

Social Gospel

• Christian principles ought to be applied to right societal wrong.
• Protestant preachers crusaded for social justice for the poor and encouraged middle class citizens to solve urban problems as their Christian duty.

Artistic Responses to Urbanization

• Adoption of realism in literature.
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn depicted corruption, violence, and racism.
• Realism also adopted by Painters. James McNeil Whistler’s painting titled Arrangement in Gray and Black
• Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered a natural style of architecture, which sought to incorporate the lines and features of the natural environment.

The South

• Henry Grady advocated for a "New South" based on economic diversity, industrial growth, and laissez-faire capitalism.

Industrialization

• Some Southern cities grew as industrial centers.
• Southern states surpassed New England as top manufacturer of textiles.
• However, most of the South was still a racially segregated agricultural economy.

Sharecropping

• Servitude under a different name.

Racial Segregation

• Ideology of white supremacy dominated Southern society.

Plessy versus Ferguson (1896)

• Upheld the constitutionality of "separate but equal" facilities for different races.
• Resulted in Jim Crow laws that segregated every public place.
• Blacks prevented from serving on juries and sometimes killed by lynch mobs.

Black Resistance

• Ida B. Wells editorialized against lynchings and Jim Crow.
• Henry Turner started the International Migration Society in 1894 to facilitate black migration to Africa.
• Booker T. Washington advocated for economic self-sufficiency over political equality.

Politics

• Largely hands off and corrupt.
• Widespread belief in laissez-faire economics.

Major Political Parties

• Republicans: blacks, middle class businessmen, Protestants.
• Democrats: big city political machines, immigrants.
• Politics: game of winning elections and awarding jobs to faithful party supporters (patronage).

Issues Fought About

• Civil service
• Money
• Tariffs

Civil Service

• Criticism after the assassination of President James Garfield.
• Pendleton Act of 1881: created a competitive examination for civil service jobs.

Money

• Farmers and entrepreneurs wanted expanded money supply, including paper money and the unlimited coinage of silver.
• Bankers and investors wanted to keep US currency on the gold standard.

Tariffs

• Provided over half of federal revenue in the 1890s.
• Congress put tariffs in place to fund the union effort and to protect American industry during the civil war.
• Farmers suffered because other nations enacted retaliatory tariffs.
• Consumers suffered because tariffs kept prices of imported goods very high.

Populist Party

• Met in 1892 to correct the concentration of economic power held by banks and trusts.
• Omaha platform: outlined political and economic reforms.

Political Reforms

• Direct election of senators.
• Use of initiatives and referendums.

Economic Reforms

• Unlimited coinage of silver.

• Graduated income tax.

• Eight-hour workday for laborers.

• No populist candidate ever won a presidential election.

• In the election of 1896, the Democratic Party took up some of the main tenants of populism into their own platform, the most important being the unlimited coinage of silver, and thus secured much of the populist vote.

• Republican candidate William McKinley won the election of 1896.

Gold Discovery in Alaska

• Increased the money supply.
• Satisfied Republicans and civil rights advocates.