GML7 Chapter 16 Outline: America's Gilded Age, 1870-1890 PDF

CHAPTER 16 OUTLINE: america's gilded age, 1870--1890 ==================================================== I. The Second Industrial Revolution A. The Industrial Economy 1\. By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world's industrial output. 2\. The 1880 Census showed for the first tim...

CHAPTER 16 OUTLINE: america's gilded age, 1870--1890 ==================================================== I. The Second Industrial Revolution A. The Industrial Economy 1\. By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world's industrial output. 2\. The 1880 Census showed for the first time that a majority of the workforce engaged in nonfarming jobs. 3\. Most manufacturing took place in industrial cities. a\. New York and Boston financed industrialization and westward expansion. b\. With its many factories, the Great Lakes region led production. B. Railroads and the National Market 1\. The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the second industrial revolution. 2\. The growing population formed an ever-expanding market for the mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing of goods. C. The Spirit of Innovation 1\. Scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation spurred growth. a\. Thomas Edison's innovations with electricity transformed Americans' lives. b\. The spread of electricity was essential to industrial and urban growth. D. Competition and Consolidation 1\. Depression plagued the economy during the 1870s and 1890s. 2\. Businesses engaged in ruthless competition. 3\. To avoid cutthroat competition, more and more corporations battled to control entire industries. a\. Between 1897 and 1904, 4,000 firms vanished into larger corporations. E. The Rise of Andrew Carnegie 1\. Under Thomas Scott, the Pennsylvania Railroad pioneered modern techniques of business organization. 2\. Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry through vertical integration. 3\. Carnegie's life reflected his desire to succeed and his desire to give back to society. F. The Triumph of John D. Rockefeller 1\. John D. Rockefeller dominated the oil industry through horizontal expansion and vertical integration. 2\. Depending on one's point of view, industrial leaders were either "captains of industry" or "robber barons." G. Workers' Freedom in an Industrial Age 1\. For a minority of workers, the rapidly expanding industrial system created new forms of freedom. 2\. For most workers, economic insecurity remained a basic fact of life. 3\. Between 1880 and 1900, an average of 35,000 workers perished each year in factory and mine accidents, the highest rate in the industrial world. 4\. Women, mostly employed in domestic service, were part of the working class and often worked in wretched conditions. H. Increasing Wealth and Poverty 1\. Class divisions became more and more visible. 2\. Many of the wealthiest Americans consciously pursued an aristocratic lifestyle. a\. Thorstein Veblen criticized the conspicuous consumption of the upper class. 3\. The working class lived in desperate conditions. II\. Freedom in the Gilded Age A. The Social Problem 1\. As the United States matured into an industrial economy, Americans struggled to make sense of the new social order. 2\. Many Americans sensed that something had gone wrong in the nation's social development. B. Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy 1\. Many Americans viewed the concentration of wealth as inevitable, natural, and justified by progress. 2\. Gilded Age reformers feared that with lower-class groups seeking to use government to advance their own interests, democracy was becoming a threat to individual liberty and to the rights of property. C. Social Darwinism in America 1\. Charles Darwin put forth the theory of evolution, whereby plant and animal species best suited to their environments took the place of those less able to adapt. 2\. Social Darwinism argued that evolution was as natural a process in human society as it was in nature and that government must not interfere. 3\. Failure to advance in society was widely thought to indicate a lack of character. 4\. The Social Darwinist William G. Sumner believed that freedom required frank acceptance of inequality. D. Liberty of Contract 1\. Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the workplace. 2\. The demands by workers that government should help them struck liberals as an example of how the misuse of political power posed a threat to liberty. E. The Courts and Freedom 1\. The courts viewed state regulation of business as an insult to free labor. 2\. The courts generally sided with business enterprises that complained of a loss of economic freedom. 3\. *Lochner v. New York* voided a state law establishing ten hours per day or sixty per week as the maximum hours of work for bakers, claiming that it infringed on individual freedom. III\. Labor and the Republic A. "The Overwhelming Labor Question" 1\. The 1877 Great Railroad Strike was the first national labor walkout. 2\. President Rutherford B. Hayes sided with the industrialists and used federal troops to end the strike. B. The Knights of Labor and the "Conditions Essential to Liberty" 1\. The Knights of Labor accepted all workers, with the exception of Asian immigrants, and sought to improve workers' social conditions. a\. The Knights gained nearly 800,000 members by 1886. 2\. Labor raised the question of whether meaningful freedom could exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality. C. Middle-Class Reformers 1\. Alarmed by fear of class warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered numerous plans for change. D. *Progress and Poverty* 1\. Henry George's solution was the single tax. 2\. George rejected the traditional equation of liberty with ownership of land. E. *The Cooperative Commonwealth* 1\. Lawrence Gronlund's *Cooperative Commonwealth* was the first book to popularize socialist ideas for an American audience. 2\. It explained socialist concepts in easy-to-understand prose. F. Bellamy's Utopia 1\. Freedom, Edward Bellamy insisted, was a social condition resting on interdependence, not on autonomy. 2\. Bellamy held out the hope of retaining the material abundance made possible by industrial capitalism while eliminating inequality. G. Protestants and Moral Reform 1\. A "Christian lobby" of mainstream Protestants sought political answers to the moral dilemmas they observed as a result of labor strife and urbanization. 2\. The Women's Christian Temperance Union and others moved from "moral suasion" to a campaign for federal legislation outlawing the consumption of alcohol. 3\. Prostitution, gambling, birth control, and polygamy were other behaviors these moral reformers fought. 4\. Protestants of a new "Bible Belt" joined the campaign for federal regulation of individual morality, breaking with the white southern states' rights tradition. H. A Social Gospel 1\. Walter Rauschenbusch insisted that freedom and spiritual self-development required an equalization of wealth and power and that unbridled competition mocked the Christian ideal of brotherhood. 2\. Social Gospel adherents established mission and relief programs in urban areas. I. The Haymarket Affair 1\. On May 1, 1886, some 350,000 workers in cities across the country demonstrated for an eight-hour day. 2\. A riot ensued after a bomb killed a policeman on May 4. 3\. Employers took the opportunity to paint the labor movement as a dangerous and un-American force prone to violence and controlled by foreign-born radicals. 4\. Seven of the eight men accused of plotting the Haymarket bombing were foreign born. J. Labor and Politics 1\. Henry George ran for mayor of New York in 1886 on a labor ticket. 2\. The events of 1886 suggested that labor might be on the verge of establishing itself as a permanent political force. IV\. The Transformation of the West A. A Diverse Region 1\. The political and economic incorporation of the American West was part of a global process. 2\. The federal government acquired Indian land by war and treaties, administered land sales, and distributed land to farmers, railroads, and mining companies. 3\. Western territories took longer than eastern territories to achieve statehood. B. Farming on the Middle Border 1\. More land came into cultivation during the thirty years after the Civil War than during the previous two and a half centuries of American history. 2\. Farming was difficult and much of the burden fell to women. C. Bonanza Farms 1\. John Wesley Powell warned that the region's arid land required large-scale irrigation projects and communal farming as practiced by Mexican settlers. 2\. Small farmers became increasingly oriented to national and international markets. 3\. As crop production increased, prices fell, and small farmers throughout the world suffered severe difficulties during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 4\. The future of western farming ultimately lay with giant agricultural enterprises, as seen in California. D. The Cowboy and the Corporate West 1\. Cowboys became symbols of a life of freedom on the open range. 2\. By the mid-1880s, farmers enclosed more and more of the open range and moved cattle operations close to rail connections. 3\. Many western industries fell under the sway of companies that mobilized eastern and European investment in order to introduce advanced technology. E. The Chinese Presence 1\. After the Civil War, Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the American West as families. 2\. Chinese immigrants worked in a variety of western industries including mining, agriculture, and manufacturing. 3\. Immigrants kept in touch with relatives and events in China through letters and magazines from home. 4\. *Voices of Freedom* (Primary Source document feature) a\. *From* Letter by Saum Song Bo, *American Missionary* (1885) b\. A Chinese immigrant to the United States contrasts American celebrations of liberty with the treatment of Chinese. F. Conflict on the Mormon Frontier 1\. Western settlement eroded the isolation of the Mormon religious utopia in Utah. 2\. The forceful removal of the obstructive territorial governor Brigham Young ushered in a period of tension between Mormon families, the federal government, and non-Mormon settlers. 3\. This conflict reached a high point in the Mormon slaughter of over 100 settlers in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. 4\. With the Mormon ban on polygamy, Utah was able to acquire statehood and end its resistance against the federal government. G. The Plains Indians in a Changing West 1\. The incorporation of the West into the national economy spelled the doom of the Plains Indians and their world. 2\. As settlers encroached on Indian lands, bloody conflict between the army and Plains tribes began in the 1850s and continued for decades. H. Grant's Peace Policy and Reconstruction in Indian Territory 1\. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely Parker designed Grant's Peace Policy. a\. The goal was to end military violence in the West. 2\. Congress banned the practice of making treaties with Indigenous peoples. 3\. Warfare soon resumed, and American generals sought to destroy the foundations of the Indian economy. I. "Let Me Be a Free Man" 1\. The Nez Percé were chased over 1,700 miles before surrendering in 1877. 2\. Defending their land, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors attacked Custer at the Little Bighorn. 3\. The Comanche empire fell in the 1870s. 4\. Indian resistance only temporarily delayed the onward march of white soldiers, settlers, and prospectors. 5\. *Voices of Freedom* (Primary Source document feature) a\. *From* Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians, in Washington, D.C. (1879) b\. Chief Joseph calls for freedom and equal rights for Native American people. J. Remaking Indian Life 1\. In 1871, Congress eliminated the treaty system that dated back to the Revolutionary era. a\. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools with the aim of forced assimilation. K. The Dawes Act 1\. The crucial step in attacking tribalism came in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Act, which divided Native land into small parcels. a\. The policy led to an enormous loss of tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions. L. Are Native Americans American? 1\. Many nineteenth-century laws offered citizenship to Indians if they gave up tribal identity and assimilated into American society, but not many Indians were willing to do so. 2\. *Elk v. Wilkins* (1884) agreed with lower court rulings that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to Indians. 3\. By 1900, roughly 53,000 Indians had become American citizens by accepting land allotments under the Dawes Act. 4\. In 1924 Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans, but their right to vote was still contested. a\. As late as 1948, Arizona and New Mexico did not allow Indians to vote. M. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee 1\. Some Indians sought solace in the Ghost Dance, a religious revitalization campaign. 2\. On December 29, 1890, soldiers opened fire on Ghost Dancers encamped on Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing between 150 and 200 Indians, mostly women and children. N. Settler Societies and Global Wests 1\. The conquest of the American West was part of a global process. 2\. Countries like Argentina, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as the United States, are often called "settler societies," because emigrants from overseas quickly outnumbered and displaced the original inhabitants. 3\. In settler societies such as Australia, native peoples were subjected to cultural reconstruction similar to policies in the United States. O. Myth, Reality, and the Wild West 1\. Despite the presence of farms, mines, and cities, a new image of the West emerged after the Civil War---one of a lawless "Wild" ruled by cowboys and Indians. 2\. "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" became the most important popularizer of this idea. 3\. Popular entertainment imagined the West as a place of adventure, uncorrupted by civilization. 4\. The real West included farm families, labor conflict, active involvement of the federal government and eastern capital, and racial and ethnic diversity. V. Politics in a Gilded Age A. The Corruption of Politics 1\. Americans during the Gilded Age saw their nation as an island of political democracy in a world still dominated by undemocratic governments. 2\. Political corruption was rife. 3\. Urban politics fell under the sway of corrupt political machines. a\. New York's "Boss Tweed" plundered tens of millions of dollars from the city while gaining the support of the city's immigrant poor. 4\. Corruption existed at the national level too. a\. The Crédit Mobilier corporation and the Whiskey Ring are examples of corruption during the Grant administration. B. The Politics of Dead Center 1\. Every Republican candidate for president from 1868 to 1900 had fought in the Union army. a\. Pensions for Union soldiers, as well as for their wives and children, consumed nearly half of the federal budget. 2\. Democrats dominated the South and Catholic votes. 3\. The parties were closely divided and national elections very close. 4\. Gilded Age presidents made little effort to mobilize public opinion or to exert executive leadership. 5\. In some ways, American democracy in the Gilded Age seemed remarkably healthy. C. Government and the Economy 1\. The nation's political structure proved ill-equipped to deal with the problems created by the economy's rapid growth. a\. Republicans and Democrats disagreed on tariff policy. b\. In 1879, the United States returned to the gold standard. 2\. Republican economic policies strongly favored the interests of eastern industrialists and bankers. D. Reform Legislation 1\. The Civil Service Act of 1883 created a merit system for federal employees. 2\. Congress established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887. 3\. Passed in 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act banned practices that restrained free trade, but it was also used to prohibit unions. E. Political Conflict in the States 1\. State governments expanded their responsibilities to the public. 2\. Third parties enjoyed significant (if short-lived) success in local elections. a\. The Greenback-Labor Party contributed to the election of twenty-one members of Congress. 3\. Farmers responded to railroad policies by organizing the Grange.