America in Transition

1. America in Transition Unit 2

2. Troubles for American Farmers • New urban populations and increased foreign competition caused American farmers to produce more food. • As the supply of food increased, prices dropped drastically, some were forced to give up their farms. • Farmers united to form organizations like the National Grange to look out for their interests. • In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act stopped railroads from offering lower cost or secret rebates to larger shippers. It also outlawed the practice of one carrier charging more for short hauls than for long ones.

3. Populist Party • The National Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance demanded that Congress increase the money supply to raise prices on farm products • When Congress did not satisfy the farmers, the two unions ran their own candidates in the 1890 elections and won 40 seats in Congress. • The coalition of Alliance members, farmers, labor leaders and reformers called themselves the Populist Party.

4. Gold or Silver • A central political issue in the l890’s was whether to back the countries money supply with gold or silver. • Conservative Republicans wanted to back each dollar with GOLD keeping the supply of money and prices of goods down. • The Democrats and farmers wanted to back money with more abundant SILVER, increasing the money supply and raising prices. • Eventually GOLD would be set as the standard

5. Second Industrial Revolution • From 1865 to 1905 America entered a second industrial revolution marked by numerous discoveries and inventions. • The basis of the new industrial revolution came with the Bessemer Process which allowed as much steel to be produced in one day which used to take one week to produce. • Increased steel supply spurred the building of more railroads and multistory buildings.

6. Transportation Innovations • The increased availability of steel lead to the rapid increase of railroad lines including the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. • In 1876 the first gasoline powered engine was invented by Nikolaus A Otto and in 1893 the Duryea Brothers built the first American car. • On December 17th, 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first piloted flight lasting 12 seconds and covering 120 feet.

7. CommunicationInnovations • In 1837 Samuel Morse developed the telegraph and the Morse Code – a system of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers. (SOS = … _ _ _ …) • By 1866 Western Union had more than 2,000 telegraph offices in the US. • In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and by 1900 more than a million telephones were in operation. • In 1867 Christopher Sholes developed the typewriter and sold his patent in 1873. • Typing pools were used by many businesses and gave women the opportunity to work in a skilled profession.

8. The New Capitalist Spirit • Capitalism is an economic system in which private businesses run industry and competition sets prices and wages. • An entrepreneur is a person willing to risk capital (money) in a business venture. • American government practiced a laissez-faire economic policy, meaning that government does little to interfere with the economy. • Free-enterprise is when governments allow businesses to compete in a free market.

9. Communism and Social Darwinism • The system of Communism proposed that individual ownership of property should not be allowed, property and means of production are owned by the community and the community would provide for all people equally. • Social Darwinism held that if society is allowed to progress through natural competition, then the fittest would rise to power and the unfit would fail; any attempt to help the poor would slow progress.

10. Corporations • After the Civil War many businesses chose to sell stock in their company to earn extra capital for their business. • These corporations were able to raise large amounts of money to expand, while stockholders owned a share of a business without taking responsibility for its running • Several corporations could join together to form a trust resulting in a monopoly where the trust has total control of the quality and price of a product. • In 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act which outlawed all monopolies and trusts. The act failed to define what a monopoly was thus proved difficult to enforce.

11. Giants of American Industry • Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry by lowering production costs and buying businesses that supplied his factories. • By 1880, John D. Rockefeller controlled 90% of the oil refining business; he was able to buy businesses that supplied his oil refineries and then raised prices for his competitors. • Cornelius Vanderbilt bought large and small railroad lines and connected many urban centers with direct rail lines.

12. The New Working Class • In the late 1800’s thousands of African Americans moved north in search of jobs, but even in the north black workers were given the dirtiest or most dangerous jobs. • The number of American female workers doubled between the years 1870-1890. • The number of laborers under the age of 16 also doubled in this time with 20% of children under the age of 16 working for a wage.

13. Labor Begins to Organize • In the late 1800’s , labor unions began to fight for shorter hours and better working conditions for the American worker. • The first union was the National Labor Union (1866). • By 1872, 32 national unions existed serving the special interests of bricklayers, typesetters, and shoemakers. • In 1894, the federal government declared Labor Day as a legal holiday in tribute to laborers.

14. Labor Unions • In 1886 the Knights of Labor lead several railroad strikes known as the Great Upheaval. • During a protest in Chicago, seven police officers and one civilian were killed after a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square. • After 1886 skilled workers led by Samuel Gompers split from unskilled workers and formed the American Federation of Labor • Between 1881 and 1900 there were 23,000 strikes involving 6,610,000 workers and employers lost $450 million. • Pullman Strike Eugene V Debs- Pullman tied to the US mailcar. Fed troops stop the strike

15. Old and New Immigrants • From 1800 to 1880, 10 million immigrants came to the United States; most were Protestants from Northwestern Europe and are often referred to as the Old Immigrants. • From 1891 to 1910, 12 million immigrants came to the US; 70% of “new immigrants” were from Southern or Eastern Europe. (remember SEE as a key) • Immigrants came to the US to escape poverty or persecution and many hoped to make enough money to return home and buy land

16. The Immigration Process • The journey to America was often difficult, immigrant passengers traveled in steerage (a cramped, poorly ventilated area below decks). • Millions of immigrants were processed through Ellis Island in New York or Angel Island in San Francisco. • Any immigrant with serious mental or physical health problems were deported. • All others answered questions about their skills, background and criminal history.

17. Immigration Restrictions • Nativists in the late 1800’s an Anti-Chinese movement began in the labor unions of California. • The Workingmen’s Party excited crowds and some Chinese were attacked and killed. • In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which denied citizenship to Chinese and stopped immigration of Chinese laborers. • In 1894 the Immigration Restriction League sought to impose literacy test on all immigrants but President Cleveland vetoed the bill.

18. New Urban Cities • Between 1865 and 1900 the percentage of Americans living in cities doubled. • Architects need to build skyscrapers to accommodate the new urban residents. • In 1852 Elisha Otis invented a mechanical elevator allowing more stories on buildings. • Cities began to build ‘up’ rather than ‘out’. • Urban transportation improved with the development of mass transit including trains, subways and trolley cars.

19. Upper Class Life • During the Second Industrial Revolution newly wealthy bankers, landowners and merchants formed the urban upper class. • This upper class usually liked to show offtheir money with expensive houses and lavish parties. • The rich also became concerned with social behavior and began to imitate British Victorian culture which had rules for etiquette in all manner of social situation.

20. Giants-Andrew Carnegie Steel Leadership of the fast-growing steel industry passed to a shrewd business genius, AndrewCarnegie, who in the 1850’s had worked his way up from being a poor Scottish immigrant to becoming the superintendent of a Pennsylvania railroad. In the 1870s, he started manufacturing steel in Pittsburgh and soon outdistanced his competitors by a combination of salesmanship and the use of the latest technology. Carnegies employed a business strategy known as verticalintegration, by which a company would control every stage of the industrial process, from mining the raw materials to transporting the finished product. Successful business leaders like Carnegie also pushed for horizontalintegration, or combining many firms engaged in the same type of business into onelargecorporation. Horizontal integration took place frequently as companies competed. When a company began to lose market share, it would often sell out to competitors to create a larger organization.

21. Giants- Rockefeller Oil By 1880, for example, a series of buyouts had enabled Rockefeller’sStandard Oil to gain control of approximately 90% of the oil refining industry in the US. When a single company achieves control of an entire market, it becomes a monopoly. Many American feared monopolies because they believed that a company with a monopoly could charge whatever it wanted for its products. They believed that monopolies had to keep prices low because raising prices would encourage competitors to reappear and offer the products for a lower price. By 1900 Carnegie Steel had climbed to the top of the steel industry, employing 20,000 workers and produced more steel than all the steel mills in Britain.

22. Giants- Cornelius Vanderbilt In the early decades of railroading (1830-1860), the building of dozens of separate local lines had resulted in different gauges (distance between tracks) and incompatible equipment. These inefficiencies were reduced after the Civil War through the consolidation of competing railroads into integrated trunklines. Trunk lines was the major route between large cities; smaller branch lines connected the trunk lines with outlying towns. “Commodore” CorneliusVanderbilt used his millions earned from a steamboat business to merge local railroads into the NYCentral Railroad (1867), which ran from New York City to Chicago and operated more than 4,500 miles of track (set standards of excellence and efficiency for the rest of the industry).

23. Gospel of Wealth A number of Americans found religion more convincing than social Darwinism in justifying the wealth of successful industrialists and bankers. Because Rockefeller diligently applied the Protestants work ethic (that hard work and material success are signs of God’s favor ) to both his business and personal life, he concluded that “God gave me my riches,” and everyone had a duty to become rich. (Carnegie’s philanthropy-give his fortune to support to libraries, universities, etc).

24. Middle Class Life • New industries and a growing urban population created a huge demand for educated workers. • By the late 1800’s a growing middle class included accountants, clerks, engineers, managers, teachers and salespeople. • Most married middle class women worked as homemakers but innovations such as running water allowed women time for social clubs and to join the reform movement

25. Changes in the Nature of Cities- Urbanization • Urbanization and industrialization developed simultaneously as two sides of the same coin. Cities provided both a central supply of labor for factories and also a principal market for factory made goods. By 1900 almost 40% of Americans lived in urban communities than in rural areas. • Streetcar cities & bridges- Divides the population in to economic classes • Ethnic Neighborhoods-To increase their profits, landlords divided up inner-city housing into small, windowless rooms. The resulting slums and tenement apartments could cram over 4,000 people into one city block. • In their crowded tenement quarters, different immigrant groups created distinct ethnic neighborhoods where each group could maintain its own language, culture, church or temple, and social club.

26. Life of the Poor • Life for those in poverty in the late 1800’s usually was marked by crowded living conditions, long hours and poor sanitation. • Most were forced to live in rundown, poorly built apartment buildings called tenements. • New York had some 40,000 tenements that housed over a million poor workers as many as 12 families per floor. • Tenements were known for poor sanitation, terrible smell and a lack of privacy and safety

27. Reforms for the urban poor & Social Gospel Movement • A number of Protestant ministers joined the battle against poverty. They developed the idea of the Social Gospel, which called for people to apply Christian principles to address their social problems. They (Glidden) believed that the church had moral duty to confront social injustice by providing job training, libraries, as well as counseling. • In the late 1800’s settlement houses offered education, job training and even daycare to the poor urban working class. • Jane Addams Hull House lead many educated young women on a missionto help the poor and later to press for women’s suffrage. • Many middle class women joined Protestant churches to apply Christian principles to address the problem of poverty and churches offered counseling, job training, libraries and other social services.

28. American Education • By 1900, most states had passes Compulsory Education Laws which required parents to send children to school. • In the West, the Morrill Act granted a total of more than 17 million acres of federal land to the states. The act ordered the sale of this land to finance the construction of agricultural and engineering colleges, which would found over 70 state universities. • From 1870 to 1900 the number of children in public schools doubled and by 1900, 72% of American children were in school. • Also by 1900, 1,000 American colleges were educating some 350,000 students. • Publishers began to serve a new educated public through newspapers and books.

29. American Leisure and Sports • In the late 1800’s city planners began the City Beautiful movement which stressed the importance of parks and an attractive design • By 1890 professional baseball teams were drawing an estimated 60,000 fans daily. • In the late 1890’s football and basketball had become popular in many universities. • Plays by William Shakespeare and Ragtime music were popular forms of American entertainment.

30. Laissez Faire • A government policy of not interfering in private business. • Since govt didn’t interfere business Giants drove small businesses into the ground. • No laws protected workers rights. • British textiles influenced the new US textiles that were being built. • Wealth of the US was in the hands of a few industrialist