Review for Gilded Age/pages 105 through 120

Review for Gilded Age/pages 105 through 120 Collins/U.S. History

Keep this in mind….this is how the common people viewed trusts… “The Bosses of the Senate”

Words/terms you need to Know: Robber Barons Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan Trusts Monopolies Interlocking directories Protective tariffs Capitalism Results of competition in the market place overproduction • Transcontinental Railroad • Reservations • Wounded Knee • Dawes Act • Significance of the Light Bulb • George Westinghouse and significance of alternating current • Henry Ford and significance of assembly line

Terms/Words to Know continued… Immigration Nativism Child labor Urban slums and tenements Political machines William Jennings Bryan Cross of Gold Speech Campaign of Cash • Social Darwinism • Gilded Age • International markets • Standard of living • Populist Movement and populists – why they appealed to more than just farmers • The Grange and farm cooperatives • Green backs • Bimetallism

Questions to focus on, you’ll need to write the answers in sentences… • Why did people want to move west? • How did the transcontinental railroad create a national economy? • When was the national railroad planned? Why do you think 7 years pass before the railroad was built? • Explain (in several sentences with factual examples) the relationship between the plains Indians and the buffalo.

Questions continued…. • Be able to discuss the Dawes Act, what was the intent and why was it a failure? • How did the telegraph and the telephone transform America and help the national economy? • What was the result of Henry Ford’s mass production/assembly line? • How did the discovery of natural resources help fuel this industrial period?

Questions continued… • Discuss the rise of the robber barons, who were they? What else were they called? Why? Were they products of their time, just lucky, or hard working or smart? Use names and facts to back up your statement. • How did J.P. Morgan take advantage of the industrial era going on around him? • How did interlocking directories limit competition?

Q’s continued… • Explain what is good vs. what is bad about social Darwinism. • Why did Mark Twain refer to this period as the Gilded Age? (give some facts to back up your statement.) • Be able to explain: Market demand and how it drives what producers make, what does competition lead to, and what encourages mass production…

Q’s continued… • Discuss the effects of industrialization: • Why did democracy increase? • How did industrialization and mechanization affect farmers? • Discuss the purpose of the Grange. • What was the political agenda of the Populists? • Election of 1896: Contrast Republicans and Democrats in a chart, and explain why mcKinley won the election.

Q’s continued… • West and East - why were cities and towns growing? • What is going on with African Americans in the South during this time period? • Why did people immigrate to the U.S.? • Why did many Americans adopt a “nativist” viewpoint? • Chinese Exclusionary Act • Discuss labor conditions with specific examples

Final Page on Questions… • Why did city governments grow so quickly? • What is a political machine – (bottom of page 120) and contrast – what was good about political machines? What was bad about them?

Political Machines • Immigrants & Big City Machine PoliticsDavid Wiles, Eaps 760 • The first large scale government that "grew up as homegrown" in the United States were political machines. Their birth can be traced to the first large scale waves of immigrants that came to the United States in the 1820's-1850's. • The workings of the machine was based upon the idea of jobs for votes. Simply, government and public services employment were for those who would exchange their political rights of choosing those who would "boss" them and "run" the government for jobs and guarantees of being employed as long as the "machine" stayed in political control. • The strength of the machine was found in both the personal allegiance and the local neighborhood identity of the people involved. Each neighborhood of vote giving employees was run by a "precinct captain." The immigrant would see the captain for the initial job, go to them for advice, let them adjudicate complaints and controversies and, most important, to secure other jobs for members of the immigrant family. On election day, the precinct captain would make sure the voter turnout was 100 percent.

The giving of public service jobs as "favors" was called patronage. The criteria for being selected was blind and unswerving loyalty. Expertise and technical competence (ability) were secondary and qualifications based on some code like civil service was not part of the equation. • We must not forget the strong prejudice and hatred for new immigrants that was the general culture of the cities on the Eastern Seaboard. The original thirteen American colonies were a confederated government and cities carried the same provincial tone. In the decade after the Constitution was written it was quite clear that the grand unifying features of the nation-state (even "federal" government itself was a bit shaky) played second fiddle to the real political culture. Immigrants escaping from European disasters (e.g. the Irish potato famine and Cromwell government) were met with open hostility by general citizens. The idea of public schools to educate immigrant children, for example, was seen as a "charity" arrangement. Employment through the cooperative and undemocratic machine was the only option available.

Over time, the original immigrants evolved into the neighborhood captains and machine bosses. The family and intergenerational membership of the machine was called nepotism, meaning hiring one of your own. The strong ethnic and racial identity of waves of immigrants guaranteed that machine politics would identify city government and public services with those features. In New York, for example, the Irish and Italian "roots" are still referenced to the Erie Canal era and the Afro Americans to the "between the wars." • The real strength of the political machines used to dominate local government did so through what Paul Peterson calls the "instrumental politics" style. The ability to make government operations persist without open ideological allegiance or appeals to moral authority is seen in the anger of the municipal reformers like Woodrow Wilson and Samuel Tilden. The historical legacy of the "precinct captain" relationship can still be detected in a spectrum of close association arrangements, from the organized labor "shop steward" to the present day, project driven "street level bureaucrat." • Readings • Shafritz & Hyde; Woodrow Wilson, pages 11-24; • Shafritz & Hyde; E. Pendleton Herring, pages 75-79. • Other Readings • William Riordan, Plunkett and Tammany Hall (1905);

http://www.slideshare.net/coachlowe/unit-1-powerpoint-6-the-gilded-age-political-machineshttp://www.slideshare.net/coachlowe/unit-1-powerpoint-6-the-gilded-age-political-machines • Crash Course History – Gilded Age

Review for Gilded Age/pages 105 through 120