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Government Subsidies
While the Associates risked their personal wealth in accomplishing their task, few would have taken on the task without the government subsidies. Much of the West would have remained isolated without the railroad. The 1864 legislation allowed the companies to float their own 30-year bonds at 6% interest, on which the federal government paid the interest the first year and guaranteed the interest payment for the next nineteen years. -
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Transcontinental Railroad
In 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act chartered the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies, and tasked them with building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies would race toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side and Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. -
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Republican Reconstruction
The Republican victories in 1860 and 1864 had been a result in large part of the division of the Democratic Party and, later, the removal of the South from the electorate. Readmitting the South, leaders of both parties believed, would reunite the Democrats and weaken the Republicans. Even among the Republicans in Congress, there was a considerable disagreement about the proper approach to reconstruction. -
Land Grants
The companies were granted 6,400 acres of land per mile of line completed. They were not entitled to mineral rights, but they were entitled to timber and stone on either side of a 400-foot right-of-way. An 1865 amendment, signed by President Andrew Johnson on July 3, 1866, dropped the restriction against the Central Pacific going 150 miles beyond the Nevada border, allowing the companies to lay track as far as they could until the two tracks met. -
Sharecropping
Administered by the Freedmen's Bureau, was designed to negotiate labor deals between white landowners and former slaves. Despite some talk after the war of land reform, most land was returned to its original owners. Instead of enjoying the often quoted "forty acres and a mule" that the government promised, freed slaves in Georgia were left with few options as free laborers. At the end of the season, workers only got to keep a small share of the crop, the rest was given to plantation owners. -
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Growth of the Cities
The growth of American metropolises was spectacular; in 1860 no city in the US had a million inhabitants; by 1890, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had passed the million mark; by 1900 New York had 3.5 million people (2nd largest city in the world) -
Black Codes
Designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force now that slavery had been abolished. Many states required blacks to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested as vagrants and fined or forced into unpaid labor. Northern outrage over the black codes helped undermine support for Johnson’s policies, and by late 1866 control over Reconstruction had shifted to the more radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress. -
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Post Civil War Southern Society
Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874–after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty–the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. -
Terms
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 laid out the process for readmitting Southern states into the Union.
The main features of the Reconstruction Acts were to divide the seceded states into five military districts, each state had to draft a new state constitution (which would have to be approved by Congress), each state had to ratify the 14th Amendment prior to readmission to the Union, (stating that every person born in the US was a citizen) and the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men suffrage. -
Impacts on Industry
Easier transcontinental business travel allowed direct growth through expanding markets and cheaper distribution. Within ten years of the transcontinental railroad’s completion, it was already shipping $50 million worth of freight from coast to coast every year. A marked production boom occurred as resources had faster transport to industrial settings, thus speeding up the process of making goods. -
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Laissez-Faire Economics
Argued that economic forces should be allowed to work themselves out with maximum freedom and minimal government interference. In addition, the philosophy was translated by the courts into a set of practical rules that enabled businesses to operate with even greater autonomy. State laws that attempted to regulate the workplace, such as restrictions on work hours and safety requirements, were repeatedly struck down by state courts. -
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Gilded Age Business Cycles
As industrial capitalism transformed the country, business cycles were mainly due to changes in the rate of investments in factories, railroads, and mines and to alterations in the supply of money and as a result of dramatic improvements in communications and transportation. The resulting depressions of the Gilded Age were two of the worst downturns the nation had ever experienced, and followed the same general pattern of development. -
Machine Politics
Political machines are characterized by a disciplined and hierarchical organization, reaching down to neighbourhood and block organizers, that enables the machine to respond to the problems of individual neighbourhoods, or even families, in exchange for loyalty at the polls. The term refers to their ability to elect candidates or enact measures with mechanical efficiency and predictability. Ex: Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, exchanged jobs for immigrants for votes, money scams. -
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Populism
A politically oriented coalition of agrarian reformers in the Middle West and South that advocated a wide range of economic and political legislation in the late 19th century. -
Election of 1876
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden led Hayes by more than 260,000 popular votes, and preliminary returns showed Tilden with 184 electoral votes (one shy of the majority needed to win the election) to Hayes’s 165. The U.S. Congress subsequently created an Electoral Commission, which by early March 1877 had resolved all the disputed electoral votes in favour of Hayes, giving him a 185–184 electoral college victory. -
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Southern and Eastern European Immigrants
Settled in New York, Massachusetts, and the Connecticut River Valley. Lured by rich soil and the promise of jobs in cities like Holyoke and Springfield, these immigrants improved the agricultural and industrial economies. Some took jobs in factories while others found work as agricultural laborers. Americans reacted with anxiety and hostility towards the increasing numbers of immigrants. These feelings of prejudice were shared by most United States citizens. -
Dawes Act
President Grover Cleveland signs the act to split up reservations held communally by Native American tribes into smaller units and distributed these units to individuals within the tribe. The goal was to encourage Native Americans to integrate into American agrarian culture. Each Native American family received 160 acres in an effort to encourage Native Americans to take up farming, live in smaller family units that were considered more American and renounce tribal loyalties. -
Gospel of Wealth
Essay by Andrew Carnegie, In his essay he warns that Communism won’t work, favors a progressive tax, especially an estate tax, and
suggests that philanthropy is the responsibility of the rich.
He also alludes to supporting both Unions and Monopolistic practices, in both cases due to the principles of liberty and democracy and freedom of association. -
Sanitation
In the city, goods came in throwaway bottles, boxes, bags, and cans. The Mountains of waste that urbanites generated testified to a cultural shift away from the virtues of thrift to the conveniences of consumerism. Sanitary facilities could not keep pace with the population explosion; impure water, uncollected garbage, unwashed bodies, and droppings from draft animals led to stench. Worst of all were the human pigsties known as slums; they grew more crowded, more filthy, and more rat-infested. -
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Progressivism
The movement beginning in the late 1800s to increase democracy in America by curbing the power of the corporation. It fought to end corruption in government and business, and worked to bring equal rights of women and other groups that had been left behind during the industrial revolution. -
Sherman Anti-Trust Act
First legislation enacted by the United States Congress (1890) to curb concentrations of power that interfere with trade and reduce economic competition. It was named for U.S. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who was an expert on the regulation of commerce. It outlaws all combinations that restrain trade between states or with foreign nations, fixes prices, limits industrial output, share markets, or exclusion of competition. A second key provision makes monopolies illegal. -
Sherman Anti-Trust Act's Use Against Unions
The law forbade any "restraint of commerce" across state lines, and courts ruled that union strikes and boycotts were covered by the law. This was ironic since the Sherman Act had been passed by liberal reformers hoping to curb the abuses of business cartels and monopolies, not to crack down on unions. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term scholars use to describe the practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, and society. They believed that government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the poor, and promoted the idea that some races are biologically superior to others. These ideas pervaded many aspects of American society in the Gilded Age, including immigration, imperialism, and public health. -
Populist Policies
They demanded an increase in the circulating currency (to be achieved by the unlimited coinage of silver), a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, a tariff for revenue only, the direct election of U.S. senators, and other measures designed to strengthen political democracy and give farmers economic parity with business and industry. -
Cause of Farmer Discontent
Railroads were using discriminatory rates to exploit farmers; big businesses used high tariffs to exploit farmers; deflationary monetary policy based on gold hurt farmers; corporations charged exorbitant prices for fertilizers and farm machinery -
Frederick Jackson Turner Thesis
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis” in an address in Chicago. He pointed to expansion as the most important factor in American history. He claimed that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” -
Stratification of Classes
Class distinctions became most pronounced in America history by 1900. New class of super-wealthy. Wealthiest 1% of families owned 51% of real and personal property. Meanwhile, 44% of familes at the bottom owned 1.2% of all property. Poorer & middle classes = 88% of families but owned only 14% of wealth. Working class: Usually Catholic (esp. Irish), foreign (esp. E & S Europe), or black. Between 23% and 30% of work force out of work for some period every year. -
Why Populism Failed
Western and southern farmers disagreed on political strategies; racism prevented poor white and black farmers from working together; increase in urban population led to higher prices for agricultural products; discovery of gold increased supply, easing access to credit; Democratic party absorbed programs; Bryan lost the 1896 election. -
Southern Racism
Populist Party leaders attempted to forge an interracial movement, but, southern racism proved a stronger force than common economic interest. Whenever grain prices fell, and poor whites felt threatened, they turned to racism, rather than seeing their common plight with poor blacks. The Supreme Court abandoned blacks during this time (Plessy v. Ferguson) Southern segregation was enforced by “Jim Crow” laws -
Yellow Journalism
Spain’s brutally repressive measures to halt the rebellion in Cuba were graphically portrayed for the U.S. public by several sensational newspapers, and American sympathy for the rebels rose. The growing popular demand for U.S. intervention became an insistent chorus after the unexplained sinking in Havana harbour of the battleship USS Maine which had been sent to protect U.S. citizens and property after anti-Spanish rioting in Havana. -
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Spanish American War
The Spanish-American War was a conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America. -
Philippines
After its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in the Treaty of Paris. Two days before the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, fighting broke out between American forces and Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo who sought independence rather than a change in colonial rulers. The ensuing Philippine-American War lasted three years and resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants. -
Open Door Policy
Statement of principles initiated by the United States for the protection of equal privileges among countries trading with China and in support of Chinese territorial and administrative integrity. The statement was issued by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay to Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia. It was received with almost universal approval in the United States, and for more than 40 years it was a cornerstone of American foreign policy in East Asia. -
Titans of Industry
"Titans of Industry" like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan built monopolies and revolutionized business practices. For over three decades, the rise of new industries and technologies such as railroads, oil, steel, electricity and motor vehicles revolutionized the way not just America, but the entire world, worked. It also made a lot of men very, very wealthy. -
DuBois vs. Douglass
For Du Bois, a politics suitable to counter Jim Crow had both to uplift black masses to assimilate them to the norms of modernity. He argues that elite control of black politics can be authoritative and effective only if it expresses a collective spirit that unites black people. Douglass, is not an assimilationist of the sort that Du Bois is. Rather he interprets radical, political change as requiring the reestablishment of the Republic on the founding principles of the Constitution. -
Muckrakers
Muckraking journalists attacked corruption and scandal with a sense of moral outrage
1. Lincoln Steffens exposed city machines in The Shame of the Cities (1904)
2. Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil Trust abuses
3. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) attacked the meat-packing industry -
Horizontal Integration/ Vertical Integration
Horizontal: A technique used by John D. Rockefeller. It is the act of joining or consolidating with ones competitors to create a monopoly. Rockefeller was excellent with using this technique to monopolize certain markets. It is responsible for the majority of his wealth.
Vertical: Pioneered by Andrew Carnegie, when you combine into one organization all phases of manufacturing from mining to marketing. It controlled the quality of the product at all stages of production. -
City Government
Industrialization, with all its increase in productivity and the number of consumer goods, created
1) Unemployment and labor unrest
2) Wasteful use of natural resources
3) Abuses of corporate power
-Growing cities magnified problems of poverty, disease, crime, and corruption
-City government system changed to prevent boss or "machine" rule
-City commissions replaced mayors and city councils in some areas
-City managers (nonpolitical professional managers) were hired to run small cities -
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member. Failed b/c over time, the Treaty of Versailles was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions. -
Reason Senate Defeated the League of Nations
Opposition w/in Congress and the press had begun building even before Wilson left for Paris. Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican concerns that the League would commit the US to an expensive organization that would reduce ability to defend its own interests. Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics. Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned hope for compromise. -
Progressive Reforms
Education, Law--judges opinions needed to be based on factual information, Settlement houses--Jane Addams, Promoted public health reform in cities, Racial anti-discrimination efforts, Formed NAACP- end racial discrimination, Women's rights, Margaret Sanger- provide birth control, 19th Amendment- Women's suffrage, Child Labor Laws, Temperance--Anti-Saloon League and Women's Christian Temperance Union, 18th Amendment which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor. -
Terms of League of Nations
Many of Wilson’s points would require enforcement. He called for a "general association of nations," and used his influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League would mitigate inequities in the peace terms. The League wanted to guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, safeguard the peace, establish procedures for arbitration, and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.
