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"Iron Law of Wages" (mid-19th century, couldn't find specifics)
The Iron Law of Wages was a theory first named by Ferdinand Lassalle. It was a proposed law of economics that asserted that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage needed to sustain the life of a worker. It was said that higher wages will result in raising more children to maturity, and lower wages in fewer. So eventually the competition of more, or fewer, workers must drive wages back in line with the natural rate needed to sustain a sufficient number of workers. -
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Time Period 6 Key Terms
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Interstate Commerce Act 1866
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1866 was a law that required for railroads to charge fair rates to their customers and make those rates public. This act also created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), and they had the authority to investigate and prosecute companies who violated the Interstate Commerce Act. -
Purchase of Alaska
The U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia on October 18, 1867. Russia sold Alaska to the United States believing the U.S. would counteract the designs of Britain, which was Russia's biggest rival in the Pacific. Due to this purchase, Russia's presence in North America ended and ensured America's access to the northern Pacific Rim. -
Standard Oil
The Standard Oil Company was founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and his associates. It was an American company and trust that controlled almost all oil production, processing, marketing, and transportation in the United States from 1870 to 1911. It set a new standard in society for businesses and corporations being that Standard Oil was the first monopoly in the history of America and Rockefeller became the richest man in the world being worth 340 billion dollars. -
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a religious social reform movement that was prominent in the U.S. from about 1870 to 1920. The Social Gospel movement was popularized among Protestant Christians to better the economic, moral, and social conditions of the urban working class. The Social Gospel Movement also attacked the concept of Social Darwinism, implemented numerous reforms to help other people, and most importantly created settlement houses. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism was the theory(-ies) that people are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals, popular in the 1870's. It was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform. They were theories about natural selection and survival of the fittest to society and politics. -
Panic of 1873
The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that resulted in an economic depression in Europe and North America that could have lasted until around 1879. It was caused by over-expansion in the industry, railroads, a decline in European demand for American farm products, and a drop in European investment in the U.S. This depression brought reconstruction to an end, and many problems across the country. -
"Crime of 1873"
The Crime of 1873 refers to the exclusion of the standard silver dollar from the coinage law of 12 February 1873, the Coinage Act of 1873. It constituted a virtual codification of the then extant laws in relation to the mints and coinage. The reason this act was called the "Crime of 1873" was because Western mining interests and others who wanted silver in circulation years later named it the "Crime of '73". -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 to transmit vocals telegraphically. It was the first device that allowed for people to talk directly to each other over long distances. It transformed the US socially, allowing for faster trade and also provided more women with jobs as operators. -
Railroad Strike of 1877 (RR Strike 1877)
The RR Strike 1877 began on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages for the third time in a year. Workers who were on strike wouldn't allow for any trains to roll on railroads until that third wage cut was revoked. Although more than 100,00 workers participated in the strike, 1,000 people went to jail, and nearly 100 died, and more than half the freight on America's railroads had come to a halt, the strike didn't accomplish much. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a law that was passed in 1882 that prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. It also excluded Chinese nationals from being being eligible for naturalization. Mainly in California due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the abundance in population of Asians. -
Pendleton Act
The Pendleton Act stated that Federal Government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit and that Government employees be selected through competitive exams. This was established due to the assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker. -
Dawes Act
The Dawes Act was authorized as "An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations," on February 8, 1887. It emphasized the the treatment of Native Americans as people rather than tribe members. It allowed the government to break up tribal lands by dividing them into many lots, intended to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream U.S. society by eliminating their culture and social reforms. -
Gospel of Wealth
The Gospel of Wealth was an article by Andrew Carnegie that explains the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class self-made rich. It asserted that hard work dedication could lead to wealth and stated that wealthy men like him had a responsibility to use their wealth for the greater good of society. -
Sherman Anti-trust Act
The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 is an antitrust law that regulates competition among enterprises. It was the first major law passed to address oppressive business practices linked to cartels and oppressive monopolies. This law prohibits any contract, trust, or conspiracy in restraint of interstate or foreign trade. -
Forest Reserve Act 1891
The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 is a law that allowed the President of the U.S. to set aside forest reserves from the land in the public domain. Forest reserves are portions of state land where commercial harvesting of wood products isn't allowed in order to keep elements of biodiversity that could be missing from sustainably harvested sites. The act was established in an effort to to sustain healthy, diverse, and productive forests and grasslands for generations to come. -
Panic 1893
The Panic of 1893 was an economic crisis that was a result of two of the country's largest employers collapsing, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company. It affected every division of the economy, and produced political disruption that led to the realigning election of 1896 and the presidency of William McKinley. -
"Cross of Gold" Speech
The "Cross of Gold" speech was a speech delivered by William Jennings Bryan. The speech was made to express Bryan's support for bimetallism, "free silver," which he believed would bring the U.S. prosperity. When this speech was delivered, Democrats wanted to standardize the value of the dollar to silver and opposed pegging the value of the United States dollar to gold. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was a huge decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that established the constitutionality of racial segregation laws under the "separate but equal" doctrine. The case was a result of an incident in 1892 in which an African American train passenger, Homer Plessy, refused to sit in a train car for blacks. -
U.S. Steel
U.S. Steel was formed by J. P. Morgan in 1901, by financing the merger of Carnegie's "Carnegie Steel Company" with Elbert H. Gary's Federal Steel Company and William H. Moore's National Steel Company for $492 million. At one point it was the world's largest steel producer/corporation, being capitalized at $1.4 billion, making it the world's first billion-dollar corporation.
