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US HISTORY SINCE 1865 EXAM # 1 REVIEW

Barbed Wire Booker T. WashingtonCarpetbagger*Chinese Exclusion Act*Credit Mobilier SCANDLE*Disputed Election of 1876*Freedman’s Bureau*Interstate Commerce ActJim Crow*Knights of Labor*Laissez-faire (explain the policy of laissez-faire and its effect the growth of American industry?)*Robber BaronsScalawagSharecroppingSherman Anti Trust ActSpoils SystemTenure of Office ActThe GrangeWhiskey Ring

Know the 14th amendment inside out and its significance.

Be able to describe how American changed in the 2nd half of the 19th century.

Was Reconstruction a success for the North? For the South? For the blacks?

Pennsylvania

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2. The 14th amendment would have a long lasting effect on the history of the united states and on the future of individual freedoms for our citizens.

Describe exactly what the 14th amendment said. Be specific. What impact did it have on reconstruction and the future?

3.THE UNITED STATES GREW AND CHANGED RAPIDLY IN THE PERIOD FROM 1865-1900. DESCRIBE THE CHANGES ON THE ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL LEVELS. CHARACTERIZE WHAT YOU BELIEVE THE US STOOD FOR AS WE ENTERED THE 20TH CENTURY. DO YOU FEEL THAT THE GOVERNMENT POLICY OF FAVORING THE INDUSTRIALISTS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE WORKING MAN WAS NECESSARY? BE SPECIFIC.

4.WHAT ROLE DID THE FARMERS HAVE IN RESTRICTING THE GROWTH OF THE CATTLE INDUSTRY IN THE US?

5.HOW WERE RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION AND CONGRESS'S STRUGGLE WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON RELATED?

6.EXPLAIN THE POLICY OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE AND ITS EFFECT THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY?

7.FREEDMAN'S BUREAU

8.DISPUTED ELECTION OF 1876

9.KINGHTS OF LABOR

10.ROBBER BARONS

11.INTERSTATE COMMERCE ACT

12.CREDIT MOBILIER SCANDAL

13.CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT

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STUDY THESE ITEMS BEFORE TAKING THE EXAMTerm DefinitionCarpetbagger Northerners who came South during

Reconstruction to pursue their own economic, political and social advancements. P.412

Freedman Former slaves as distinguished from blacks who had been free before the Civil War.

Jim Crow A system of racial segregation in the Post Civil War South. P.557.

Laissez-faire American economic policy in last 19th century of government "hands-off" when it came to business activities.

Robber Barons Industrialists who became very rich by bribery, corrupt practices and government policy.

Scalawag Term used by Southerners to denote southern traitors who joined the Republican Party.

Sharecropping A farm system where a tenant farmer rents land from a landlord. He then uses the land the way he wishes and pays rent with a previously agreed upon share of the crops. P.415-6.

Tenure of Office Act Act passed by Radical Republicans in 1867 to try to diminish Andrew Johnson's power. It said that any official the president appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate could not be removed without the advice and consent of the Senate. This was put in to stop Johnson from firing Sec. of War Stanton who was planning a harsh martial law takeover in the South. This became the basis of Johnson's impeachment when he fired Stanton. This law has since been repealed.

The Grange Organization of farmers to establish a social environment for isolated farm families. Later became the basis of the first protest of the farmers against big business.

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The Nation DevelopsMust be submitted no later than February 16 

From 1865-1900 the United States finally came into its own as the leading industrial power in the world. This did not happen by accident nor did it happen overnight. Read Chapters 17-19 and then write at least a 3 page essay discussing the influences that caused this growth. Make sure to include the following in your answer: Industrial Revolution, Robber Barons, Rise of the Railroads, Opening of the West, Laissez Faire, Urbanization, The Labor Movement.

Instructions: Enter or paste your written work and/or click "Attachments" to upload your files.

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Chapter 17

IntroductionMark Twain, drawing on his observations of corruption during the Grant administration, produced a best-selling novel called The Gilded Age. The title of his book became synonymous with the "get rich quick" era from the 1870s to the end of the century. Twain satirized all reaches of society, drawing attention to the thin veneer that masked the dark underbelly of America. The enticements of the Gilded Age left few untouched. Twain himself had dreams of becoming rich, but he lost a fortune in risky investments. It proved as easy to lose a fortune as it was to make one. It was in this climate that industrialist giants like Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan came to make enormous amounts of money, define big business, and take a place in the consciousness of the American public. The growth of old industries and the creation of new ones, along with the rise of big business, signaled the coming of age of industrial capitalism. 

Old Industries Transformed, New Industries Born, pp. 429–436 In the years following the Civil War, American industry expanded mightily. Old industries were transformed into different, modern industries, with discovery and invention stimulating many new industries. Railroads were the key development in this change, creating a national market and spurring the growth of the steel industry. Business magnates like Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller pioneered the way in the booming capitalism of the Gilded Age.

Railroads: America's First Big BusinessAfter the Civil War, the United States built the largest railroad system in the world. Jay Gould's career as a railroad magnate parallels the rise of the railroads as the largest and most important industry in America. Although he was more interested in railroads as a tool for manipulating the stock market than as a provider of transportation, Gould contributed to the explosion of railroad building during the Gilded Age. To encourage railroad building, the federal and state governments provided the railroad companies with generous cash subsidies and land grants. States and local communities clamored to offer inducements to railroad builders, knowing that towns and villages along the tracks would grow and flourish. Built without any central planning, however, the railroads eventually became overextended and destructively competitive. By the time Jay Gould died in 1892, he had become a

symbol of all that was most troubling about the rise of big business in the Gilded Age. 

Andrew Carnegie, Steel, and Vertical IntegrationAndrew Carnegie became the premier "rags to riches" hero during the Gilded Age. He rose from humble Scottish origins as a child factory laborer to become one of the greatest industrialists of his day. He made his fortune in the steel industry using techniques learned from the railroad industry, a large amount of capital acquired from the stock market, and the newly developed Bessemer steel process. He eventually controlled all aspects of the steelmaking process, from iron ore mines, to railroads and ships, to the most modern factories. He ran them day and night. In the end, Carnegie used a business organization system called vertical integration (which eliminated all money-draining middlemen) to produce more steel than anyone in the world, and at the lowest prices. Not only could he undersell all competitors, but he also remained throughout his life the most renowned manufacturer of his day. Yet his achievements came through the ruthless exploitation of managers and workers.

John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and the TrustJohn D. Rockefeller organized the oil-refining industry amid a barrage of competition. Determined to defeat his competitors and become the single largest producer of refined oil products, Rockefeller used railroad rebates and various new and ingenious organizational techniques—like the trust and holding company—to gain a monopoly in the industry. He employed horizontal integration, moving to dominate only the refining process, but eventually organized vertically as well. Although he was philanthropic, Rockefeller's rise to billionaire status brought him public condemnation by those who feared industrial consolidation. His bad reputation was based at least in part on the work of Ida M. Tarbell, a journalist who wrote an exposé of the Standard Oil Company's business practices.

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New Inventions: The Telephone and ElectricityThe invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and of the electric lightbulb by Thomas Alva Edison in 1879 created new industries eventually dominated by giant corporations. Bell's American Bell Telephone Company grew within twenty-five years into a complex nationwide industry controlled by American Telephone and Telegraph. In 1892, the electric industry was consolidated, and Edison General Electric Company was bought out and its name shortened to General Electric.

From Competition to Consolidation, pp. 436-439Throughout the Gilded Age, industrialists built their empires, only to find them turned into giant corporations. Bankers played an important role in this transformation, which was in turn justified by the philosophy of social Darwinism and legally supported by the Supreme Court. 

J. P. Morgan and Finance CapitalismThe master of finance capitalism during the Gilded Age was J. P. Morgan. He began by reorganizing the struggling eastern railroads to eliminate competition and then did the same thing with railroads in the West. Often his reorganizations were better for stockholders than for the companies, which increasingly were run by managers with no interest in technological or organizational innovation. In 1898, he challenged Andrew Carnegie's control over the steel industry, buying him out and creating a gigantic corporation, U.S. Steel. There were still a handful of smaller steel companies, but as in many other industries, several large businesses combined into oligopolies, which set prices and divided markets. While Morgan made millions in commissions on these reorganized companies, his power came not from his personal wealth but from the billions of dollars he controlled. Morgan, even more than Carnegie or Rockefeller, left his stamp on the twentieth century and formed the model for corporate consolidation that economists and social scientists soon justified using a new social theory known as social Darwinism. 

Social Darwinism and the Gospel of WealthSocial Darwinism was a social philosophy that drew on the Darwinian scientific theory of "survival of the fittest" to explain how societies evolved. Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner argued that progress came only as a result of competition. The strong triumphed, and the weak perished. Neither government nor human intervention should be used to help the poor; otherwise the evolutionary process would

be corrupted. Social Darwinism curbed reform and justified massive economic inequity. Andrew Carnegie softened social Darwinism in his 1889 essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," in which he argued that those who made money ought to use their wealth to fund philanthropic endeavors. Yet while many praised his essay, few followed its prescriptions. Social Darwinism and Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" together were used to justify the wealth and success that America's millionaires had already achieved. 

Laissez-faire and the Supreme CourtThe economic idea of laissez-faire (meaning "let it alone") was based on the belief that a free and unregulated market would result in a more vibrant economy. The Supreme Court allied itself with business, granting corporations the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment by making corporations "persons" who could not be deprived of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law" and declaring income taxes and state regulation of railroads a violation of due process.

Politics and Culture, pp. 439–443Americans were entertained by and deeply engaged in politics in the Gilded Age. High voter participation was spurred by patronage and by efforts to resolve sectional, racial, gender, and religious tensions of the day with the ballot. 

Political Participation and Party LoyaltyPolitical patronage contributed to voter participation and party loyalty. Political incumbents controlled employment and rewarded those who shared their party affiliation with local, state, and federal jobs. Workers who owed their employment to patronage used their ballots and their wages to secure their party's position by voting the party line on election day and contributing to reelection campaign coffers.

Sectionalism and the New SouthChampioning the Democratic Party, southern elites encouraged all white males in the region to repudiate the "Negro rule" of the Republican Party in the wake of Reconstruction by voting for "the white man's party." Racial solidarity at the polls proved difficult as economic instability in the region spawned alternative third-party movements within the "solid South." 

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Gender, Race, and PoliticsChanging concepts of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior, of gender and gender roles, influenced politics throughout the nineteenth century. The adoption of universal (white) male suffrage early in the century expanded access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. At the same time, the political sphere was increasingly defined as a "masculine" space, with women relegated to the more "feminine" domestic sphere. 

Women's Politics: The Origins of the Suffrage and Temperance MovementsAmerican feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 to protest and challenge the gendered notion of political rights that flourished in the post-Civil War era. The Fourteenth Amendment formalized the link between citizenship, voting rights, and manhood implied by rigid concepts of gender roles with the addition of the word male to the Constitution.

Presidential Politics in the Gilded Age, pp. 443–446Next to the giant industrialists of the Gilded Age, the presidents of the era seem weak and ineffectual, their actions seldom remembered because so little was expected of them. Government was supposed to leave business alone, according to social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics, so the real action took place elsewhere: in state and local party politics and in the centers of business and industry. Yet, during this era, the presidents grappled with the issues of corruption and party strife and struggled toward the creation of new political ethics that would replace patronage with a civil service system.

Corruption and Party Strife Party corruption and factionalism dominated the period from the time of President Ulysses S. Grant through the 1880s. The "spoils system"—the use of government jobs to reward party loyalty—dominated the age; the selection of U.S. senators by state legislatures that often felt the pressure of powerful business interests was of particular concern. Reformers within the Republican Party, called "Mugwumps," consistently pressed for civil service reforms but with little success. Hard-nosed "Stalwart" Republicans mocked it as "snivel service" reform, while the more moderate "Half Breed" Republicans merely gave lip service to reform. In the end, little changed but the men who became president. Unable to control the Republican factions, President Hayes did not run for a second term; in 1880, the dark-horse Republican candidate James Garfield was elected

president.

Garfield's Assassination and Civil Service ReformGovernment bureaucracy increased in the years following the Civil War; it was largely driven by the spoils system, which was not a proper way to select qualified individuals and meant that politicians were harassed by job seekers. Within a few months of Garfield taking office, a crazed office seeker assassinated the president. His death spurred a call for civil service reform, but certain reforms—like written civil service examinations—threatened to turn the government over to an educated Yankee elite. Vice President Chester A. Arthur was a Stalwart, never having been elected to office before his 1880 election. But rather than discouraging civil service reform, he promoted it by signing the Pendleton Act of 1883, creating the nation's first permanent Civil Service Commission. 

Reform and Scandal: The Campaign of 1884The election campaign of 1884 may have been the most scandalous of the nineteenth century. The Republicans finally nominated the charismatic James G. Blaine, while the Democrats nominated newcomer Grover Cleveland. Personality, not issues, dominated the race, which quickly became "the vilest campaign ever waged." Cleveland's reputation was tainted by rumors that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. However, Blaine alienated the Irish voters he counted on for support when he did not oppose a clergyman's statement that Democrats (traditionally the party favored by Irish immigrants) were the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." In the end, the Democrat, Cleveland, won, thanks to Blaine's political blunders, Mugwump support, and Cleveland's own reputation for political honesty.

Economic Issues and Shifting Political Alliances, pp. 446–449 In 1888, Cleveland was voted out of office in favor of Republican Benjamin Harrison; in 1892, Cleveland was voted back in. This was due, in part, to the candidates' personalities, but after the election of 1884, national politics had begun to refocus on long-ignored issues. The tariff, federal regulation of railroads and trusts, and the desire for free and unlimited coinage of silver restructured American politics. 

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The Tariff and the Politics of ProtectionThe protective tariff was a tax on imported goods that encouraged and protected the growth of American industry. The tariff had been enlarged during the Civil War by Republicans, who continued to raise it at the behest of industrialists. By the 1880s, the amount of money sitting in the treasury's vaults presented a threat to prosperity, depriving the country of money that might have been used for investment purposes. Farmers resented the tariff, which caused the price of manufactured goods to be unnaturally high, but industrialists, producers of raw materials, and many workers supported it. Before the 1888 election, President Cleveland called for tariff reform, and by election time, he was arguing against high tariffs as an unfair tax on American consumers. The Republican nominee, Benjamin Harrison, pressed for continued high tariffs and more protection for business from foreign competition. Cleveland carried the popular vote, but Harrison won the electoral vote and the election. Harrison and his fellow Republicans quickly supported the McKinley tariff of 1890—the highest tariff in American history. But the Republicans misread public feeling regarding the tariff, and many were ousted from office in the off-year elections of 1890. In 1892, Harrison gave way to Cleveland, who won on a platform again calling for a lower tariff. 

Railroads, Trusts, and the Federal GovernmentWhile Americans were divided on the tariff, they increasingly were in agreement about the need to reform the practices of the railroads and the trusts. The Grange, an organization of farmers, first attacked the railroads by electing candidates to state office who passed laws regulating the railroads. After these laws were declared constitutional in the 1877 Munn v. Illinois case but unconstitutional in the 1886 Wabash v. Illinois case, the public demanded national legislation. This they received in the form of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to oversee railroad regulation. The commission was not strong enough to act as a brake on the railroads, however, and its major significance was in the precedent it set as a watchdog agency. Action against trusts followed a similar path. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 made monopolies illegal. However, it did not restrict holding companies and was used to cripple labor unions, which were defined by the courts as a "conspiracy in restraint of trade." Although the legislation largely was ineffective, it did testify to Americans' growing willingness to use the government to restrain big business in the public

interest.

The Fight for Free SilverThe currency fight was one of the most divisive of the Gilded Age. The deflationary aspects of the post-Civil War era created problems for all debtors, especially small farmers. Silver became the specie of choice of farmers in debt and of the powerful western mining interests. In 1878, Congress passed legislation that increased the money supply with cheap and plentiful silver. The act did not have the inflationary impact hoped for by farmers, and in 1890, supporters of silver money passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which increased the amount of silver the government bought but again did little to increase inflation. The 1890 Silver Purchase act was repealed in 1893 by President Cleveland, despite his party's support for silver money. 

Panic and DepressionIn 1893, a depression set in; over the winter of 1894—95, gold reserves dipped to alarmingly low levels. To preserve the gold standard, President Cleveland struck a deal with J. P. Morgan and a group of bankers; they agreed to purchase foreign gold and supply it to the treasury. The move brought on a storm of protest, even though Cleveland did not profit from the move, and J. P. Morgan realized only about $300,000. Ultimately, Cleveland saved the gold standard but did nothing to help the millions of Americans who suffered through one of the hardest winters in American history.

Conclusion: Business Dominates an Era, p. 449Mark Twain's label "The Gilded Age" endured for over a century as a fair representation of an era of political corruption, greed, and vulgarity. But the period was not without its share of achievements. By the end of that century, the country had reached industrial maturity. Whether the nation could curb the power of the industrialists and solve its plethora of economic and social problems remained to be seen.

Chapter 18

IntroductionThis chapter opens with a vignette about Native American students at the Indian boarding school at Hampton Institute in Virginia, a school designed to assimilate the children to white Christian culture. Opening its doors to Indians in 1878, Hampton Institute had originally been used to educate newly freed slaves. Indian parents resisted relinquishing their children to white control, which led the military to kidnap Indian children and send them to assimilation schools by train. Stripped of their Indian clothes and identities, their hair shorn off, the children were clothed in constraining uniforms and shoes. Their Indian names were changed, too, to Anglo ones. Boys were taught agriculture and manual arts, while girls were trained in domestic skills—an effort to make future generations of Indians self-sufficient and independent of U.S. government aid. The Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879, encouraged assimilation by having Indian students live with white families during summer vacations. Despite their educations, however, graduating students found it difficult to be accepted into white culture and no longer felt at ease on reservations. The settlement of the West and the resulting clash between white settlers, Native American peoples, and Hispanics as well as other immigrants were emblematic of the many issues facing Americans throughout the country in the Gilded Age.

Gold Fever and the Mining West, pp. 455–459The promise of adventure, gold, and instant riches lured many thousands of Americans to the West. Eager fortune hunters moved from panning gold in California to the blasting of hard rock silver ore to mining for copper in Nevada, New Mexico, and other sites across the West. As technology improved and the lure of riches grew, rural mountain areas were soon dotted with bustling communities. 

Mining on the Comstock LodeHenry Comstock discovered the "mother lode" of silver in Nevada's Washoe basin in 1859, as he, like other gold hunters, deserted the played-out California gold fields in search of richer finds. His discovery would yield more than $300 million worth of silver inside of two decades. Irish workers dominated the silver mines, while Chinese immigrants were forced to earn their living in service work. White American ambitions clashed with Native American ways, and the discovery of precious metals on the Comstock spelled disaster for the Native American population. Private industrialists with abundant financial resources and new technology came to dominate the mining concerns, driving individual miners away from ore sites and into the towns that sprang up in their shadow. Silver mining was brutal and dangerous work, and hundreds of men lost their lives in mining accidents. Merchants and service workers found that there was economic opportunity in providing for the needs of miners and mining firms. 

Territorial GovernmentFederally sponsored land policy helped promote westward expansion and migration, but settlers found that the government had little interest in them or larger territorial concerns once they had staked a claim. Organization and operation of the territories was a local affair with only the bare bones of governmental structure and personnel provided by the federal government. Territorial governorships were dispensed by the president as rewards for party loyalists rather than on the basis of merit or preparation. While these executive positions commanded high salaries, capital distribution from Washington was often slow and erratic, leaving territorial officers without sufficient funds to maintain local government and courts. Territorial leaders often succumbed to the charms of special-interest lobbyists who proffered cash in exchange for favorable policies, thus enhancing big industry's hold on the far West.

Land Fever, pp. 459–464Even more than the lure of gold, two factors stimulated the rapid settlement of the trans-Mississippi West. One was the Homestead Act of 1862, which promised free land to any citizen or prospective citizen who would live on it and farm it for five years; the other was the emergence of the railroads. Together, these factors pushed homesteaders across the frontier onto the Great Plains and across the Rocky Mountains. Not all who wanted to own land were able to do so. A growing number of Americans found themselves forced to work for wages on land that they would never own. Furthermore, the period from 1870 to

1900 witnessed the emergence of an industrial West that paralleled the rise of big business in the East. 

Moving West: Homesteaders and SpeculatorsFamilies who went west faced hardships, loneliness, and deprivation: Sod homes were built with regularity, but they were hardly substantial; the constant gathering of water and fuel were backbreaking necessities, often the work of women; and nutritious food was scarce until farms were fairly well established. Many of the people who profited from the West were land speculators selling land at prices far out of reach of poorer homesteaders. As such, many homesteaders could not find good land on which to settle because the best tracts already had been taken by speculators, railroads, and wealthier farmers. Homesteaders resorted to seeking land in the semiarid region known as the Great American Desert, hoping that farming the area would increase the rainfall. Many of them faced ruin because valuable topsoil, once ploughed up, blew away during periods of drought. By the early twentieth century, competition for land was considerable. 

Ranchers and CowboysThe American cowboy, a central figure in the West between 1865 and 1885, made his living driving large herds of cattle along the Chisholm and other trails from southwestern Texas to meet railroad lines in the central plains of Kansas. Beef cattle destined for the stockyard of Chicago commanded prices as high as $45 per head, though cowboys earned but a small share of the profit. The development of barbed wire in the 1870s transformed the cattle business. Cattle trailing gave way to penned ranching as entrepreneurs fenced the once-open plains, thus securing abundant grasslands for their private use. Fence wars were the result of smaller, less capitalized ranchers cutting barbed wire barriers to reclaim access to what were in fact public lands. Many small-time ranchers were forced to sell their lands and herds when they could no longer graze their herds on the open range. The heyday of the cowboy and of cattle ranching came to an abrupt end when thousands of cattle, overcrowded on fenced range, froze in the "Great Die Up" in the winters of 1886–87 and 1887–88. In the aftermath of the disaster, cattle ranchers would require even more work from poorly paid cowboys by intensifying the labor involved in the maintenance of their herds. 

Tenants, Sharecroppers, and MigrantsBecause of the growth of American agriculture

and the rising costs of agriculture for small farmers, the number of dispossessed farm laborers increased. Many became tenant or sharecropping farmers, particularly in the South. There, the crop lien system tied both poor black and white farmers to the land. Following the Mexican-American War, California Mexicans found themselves dispossessed of their family farms in the new state of California (1850), which demanded that they prove their Spanish- or Mexican-held land claims in court. California's Mexican cowboys—vaqueros—commanded decent wages until the 1870s, when the coming of the railroads ended the long cattle drives in the state, and they too resorted to earning money as migrant laborers. In Texas by the late 1890s, following the heyday of cattle ranching, ranchers turned their pastures into cotton sharecropper plots. In California, Chinese immigrants worked as migrant laborers in fields of sugar beets and fruit farms and were joined by Mexicans, Filipinos, and Japanese after 1882. 

Commercial Farming and Industrial CowboysAs the United States moved closer to the year 1900, fewer people lived in rural areas, while at the same time the number of farms grew. American farms were moving farther west and becoming more and more mechanized. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, crop production and efficiency increased, with fewer farmers growing more. The agricultural revolution clearly had changed the family farm. They became specialized, commercial businesses. The beginning of American "agribusiness" occurred, with the goal of producing money and not just crops. On the plains, many farmers replaced muscle power with an array of machines, and production soared as a result. Farmers remained in a web of dependency on the weather, credit, and the world market. As their crop prices dropped, their purchasing power also decreased. While the small family farmer struggled to survive theses changes in the economy, large-scale commercial farming flourished in the Gilded Age. The availability of large tracts of inexpensive land, new farming technology, abundant labor, and access to capital reserves allowed for the development of agriculturally based corporations on the scale of industrial giants like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. One of the most successful was Miller & Lux. Pioneering agribusiness leaders consolidated their power by using their wealth to control cattle and crop production and distribution as well as the development of state and regional water systems and the flow of migratory labor. As agribusiness fed on the food needs of a growing global marketplace, the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal increasingly was

displaced with an industrial ethos that viewed farms as "factories in the fields" and those who worked the land as mere extensions of agricultural implements. American farmers, displaced from their central role as keepers of the nation's democratic values, challenged this new ethos in the agrarian revolt and populist politics of the 1880s and 1890s.

A Clash of Cultures, pp. 464–473 A clash of cultures emerged in the American West, with Americans facing familiar problems, including the growing power of corporations, ethnic and racial animosities, and the exploitation of natural resources and labor. 

The Diverse Peoples of the West The West of the late nineteenth century, like the big eastern cities, was a polyglot place. Settling in the West were immigrants from Europe, China, and Japan as well as African Americans, Mormons, and New Englanders. African Americans venturing west—either as former slaves or as American army soldiers—often faced racism from hostile white settlers. Black settlements, small and isolated, were founded throughout the West. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Hispanics in the West welcomed the U.S. conquest of the region as an economic opportunity but soon found that discrimination undermined their chances of success. Mormons headed west in search of religious freedom as well as economic opportunities. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were driven from communities in the East in response to their unorthodox religious practices (polygamy) and aggressive proselytizing. Guided to Utah by Brigham Young after the murder of their founder, members of this self-sufficient sect combined their labor power and financial resources to build wealth in factories and industry as well as make the Great Salt Lake desert bloom with necessary foodstuffs. Despite their transformation of the territory, Utah was denied admittance to the Union until church elders were willing to conform to mainstream religious beliefs by rejecting the practice of polygamy in 1896. Chinese immigrants seeking wealth in the West experienced labor exploitation, discrimination, and racial violence. Legislation, such as California's foreign license laws, was designed to exclude more than 20,000 Chinese from working the state's gold fields, evidence of a growing prejudice against "coolie labor." Though they supplied the necessary labor to complete the nation's first transcontinental railroad, Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship status on the basis of their race. As the population grew, anti-Chinese sentiment intensified in the 1870s,

leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 barring further Chinese immigration. Working-class whites, threatened by the labor competition inherent in abundant, poorly paid, immigrant labor, organized violent attacks on the Chinese communities from Seattle to San Francisco. 

Indian WarsThe tribes of Native Americans were victims of the final push west. As a result of the gold rushes, the Mexican-American War, Oregon land fever, the availability of cheap land, and the construction of the transcontinental railroad, whites poured into the West and demanded government protection from the Indians. Treaties were signed with a few tribes, and reservations were created. But many tribes resisted. Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull continued to roam the Great Plains and hunt buffalo, even as the railroads systematically began destroying buffalo herds. The Sioux tribes actively resisted the onslaught of whites into the Black Hills of South Dakota, joining together and defeating Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. Yet, within five years, the leaders of the resistance were dead or captured. In 1923, the Sioux filed suit, demanding compensation for the Black Hills, which they believed had been illegally taken from them. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the government had illegally abrogated the Treaty of Fort Laramie and upheld an award of $122.5 million in compensation to the tribes. 

The Dawes Act and Indian Land AllotmentWhile the goal of assimilating Indians into American culture and society remained constant for the federal government and social reformers, the method changed with the 1887 passage of the Dawes Allotment Act. White Indian rights activists argued that the reservation system undermined the goal of assimilation by preserving collective land ownership and tribal culture. They proposed a new policy of assimilation modeled on the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of citizen farmers. The Dawes Act ended the reservation system, divided the land into 160-acre units to be distributed, along with the rights of citizenship, to each Indian head of household. The federal government retained title to the land and acted to sell "surplus" Indian land, a process that allowed up to 90 million acres for white settlement in Oklahoma and other parts of the Great Plains. The Dawes Act facilitated a devastating loss of tribal lands and fracturing of Native American cultural traditions before it was set aside by the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. 

The Last Acts of Indian Resistance

Indians did not accept American efforts to exterminate them or transform their culture. Resistance to white settlement and the expanded presence of the federal government flared in the southwestern territories where bands of Apaches waged guerrilla warfare against soldiers who sought to confine them to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona Territory. Mounting a campaign of divide and conquer in 1882, U.S. army general George Cook set Navajos, Paiutes, and rival bands of Apaches against those who resisted resettlement, successfully containing most of the Apaches. Still defiant, Geronimo, a Chiricahua Apache shaman, led warriors in a series of incisive strikes against white settlers, capturing horses and much-needed supplies. In 1885, he marshaled forces, including a fierce woman warrior named Lozen, against General George Cook. Weaving back and forth across the Mexican border, Geronimo first exhausted his enemy then slipped from Cook's grasp after being captured. Humiliated, Cook resigned and was replaced by General Nelson Miles, who organized a force of two thousand soldiers to capture Geronimo. Ragged from months of flight from U.S. forces, Geronimo's band of thirty-three Apaches evaded Miles's far superior numbers for five months. Finally pinned between Miles's forces and a troop of Mexican soldiers in September 1886, Geronimo and his tiny band surrendered. American authorities were determined to prevent further Apache uprisings and relocated Geronimo, his followers, and some five hundred other Apaches to Florida reservations. Within three years, one-fourth of their number had died from sickness and disease or had succumbed to depression and suicide. Geronimo died in 1909 and was buried in Oklahoma, rather than in his Apache homeland. He had lived to become a famous symbol of a bygone era, even appearing in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade as a symbol of the spirit of the Old West. On the plains, some tribes turned to nonviolent protest in the form of the Ghost Dance, a religion created in 1889 by Wovoka, a Paiute shaman. The religion promised that if Indians would unite and perform a special dance, whites would be destroyed in an apocalypse, and the world would return to a state of harmony. The dancers were nonviolent, but some Plains tribes taught that wearing white ghost shirts made participants immune to bullets. In December 1890, the Sioux chief Sitting Bull attempted to meet with Wovoka but was shot by an Indian agent. His people were cornered and massacred at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The slaughter marked a crushing blow to Indians' attempts to maintain their cultures. 

The West of the Imagination

Even as the Old West was dying, the myth of the West was being created. The dime novel created heroes out of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick, and Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill perpetuated the myth with his own world-touring Wild West show. Cody's show mixed the authentic with the romantic until reality itself blurred in the popular mind. Yet the reality of the historical West is every bit as dramatic as the fiction it started. 

Conclusion: The West, an Integral Part of Gilded Age America, p. 473 Westward expansion from the Mississippi valley to the southwestern desert and the Pacific coast doubled the size of the nation in the decades after the Civil War. Thousands of settlers flooded into territory occupied by Native Americans who violently resisted the invasion in a series of Indian wars from 1861 to 1890. Defeated, Native Americans witnessed the federal government replace tribal ownership with 160-acre land grants, forbid the practice of their religion and their language, and forcibly place Indian children in boarding schools as part of the project of assimilation. Additional racial and ethnic tensions were manifest in the West as native whites, Irish immigrants, and African Americans from the eastern seaboard jostled for position as laborers with displaced Mexicans and Chinese immigrants. Modern technology transformed industry and agricultural production, giving rise to powerful corporations whose owners controlled the region's natural resources and politics. Global market demand, the consolidation of industry, the spoils system, and the corruption of Gilded Age politics had an impact on the lives of western citizens as much as eastern citizens. Large-scale industry and the displacement of family farms by agribusiness challenged the old Jeffersonian agrarianism, testing the democratic underpinnings of the nation. The West, linked by transportation systems, the flow of capital and labor, and engaged in the discourse about national progress and political identity, developed as part of the modern American landscape.

Chapter 19IntroductionAs symbolized by the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the United States emerged as a major industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Large-scale immigration, urbanization, and technological innovation held out great promise for the future, even as these dramatic changes led to social dislocation, urban squalor, labor strife, and death. Constructed between 1869 and 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge stood as a testament to the wonders and horrors of America at the close of the nineteenth and opening of the twentieth century. Its construction cost the lives of twenty men and was considered both a work of art and an engineering marvel upon completion.

The Rise of the City, pp. 478–485By the end of the nineteenth century, the emergence of the modern city represented the most dramatic demographic development in the United States. From New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, cities exploded in size, fed in part by the rapid pace of global migrations, especially from southern and eastern Europe. 

The Urban Explosion, a Global Migration After the Civil War, industrial growth in the United States caused a large-scale redistribution of the population, as people who relied on agriculture moved to the cities to join the industrial labor force. Increasingly, agricultural workers from all over the world joined the migration to American cities and became part of the "human machine." During the 1870s, the industrialists drew on a population of cheap labor from the rural areas of the United States as well as from Canada, Europe, northern Mexico, China, and Japan. The peoples of the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, India, and most of Asia became tied to the industrial core of the late nineteenth century indirectly, working on plantations and railroads and in mines in their own countries. A revolution in transportation made it easier than ever before for workers to reach the factories. Over fourteen million European immigrants came to America in two waves in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Before 1880, most came from northern and western Europe. After 1880, immigrants increasingly came from southern and eastern Europe. The magnet drawing the immigrants almost always was America's industrialization process. It created low-paying jobs for unskilled workers and gave them a home in the cities. Ironically, the former rural peasants and villagers became urbanites overnight. By 1900, two-thirds of America's immigrant population resided in the

cities. Many immigrants intended to stay in the United States only as long as it took to make money; they had little interest in improved working conditions or labor unions. Others, like the Jews who were persecuted in eastern Europe, intended to remain permanently. 

Racism and the Cry for Immigration Restriction The ethnic diversity of the American labor force hampered the development of working-class consciousness and made organization difficult. Workers often found themselves pitted against one another, with ethnic rivalry playing a role in dividing the skilled northern and western European workers and the unskilled southern and eastern European workers. Even among educated people of the nineteenth century, the ethnic and religious differences of immigrants were perceived as racial characteristics. The racial notions of social Darwinism, of course, supported the claim of "white society" to racial superiority. At the other end of the scale were the African Americans and Asians who experienced racism in its most blatant form. African Americans began their migration north in search of equality. In an effort to leave behind the segregation and Jim Crow laws of the South, they found jobs on the bottom rung of the occupational ladder but still had to contend with racial discrimination in the North. On the West Coast, following the California gold rush, Asian immigrants soon became the scapegoats of the changing economy. Passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 slowed immigration from China to a trickle. Many Americans saw newcomers as impossible to assimilate. Criticism of the immense numbers of immigrants came from unions and old-stock aristocrats. A literacy test for new European immigrants passed through Congress but was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. Supporters of immigration restrictions would continue to press for greater reductions until their final success in the 1920s. 

The Social Geography of the CityCities of the United States were transformed in the late nineteenth century. They evolved from cities in which people lived near their workplaces and walked to work into cities where rich and middle-class people lived in concentric circles fanning out from the city center. In the outer circles, people had more money, lived in single-family homes, and commuted to work on streetcars. Slums developed near the factories, allowing the impoverished to walk to work. Cities also boasted an array of races and ethnicities, with distinctive neighborhoods that maintained immigrants' home cultures. With industrialization and urbanization came both great poverty and great wealth within the cities. Jacob Riis's book How the Other Half Lives(1890) graphically showed the poverty of the ghettos. The nouveaux riche (new rich) provided the grandeur and splendor of the age with their magnificent mansions and ostentatious costume parties. With 1 percent of the population owning more than half of the property in America, there were fears among some that the country was becoming a plutocracy.

At Work in the City, pp. 485–488Workers in American industry in the late nineteenth century worked in a variety of settings, ranging from skilled occupations in factories to piecework that was contracted within the home to construction to white-collar office work. This diversity of workers is illustrative of an industrial nation. 

America's Diverse WorkersCommon laborers formed the backbone of the American labor force. These "human machines" stood at the bottom of the country's economic ladder and generally came from the most recent immigrant groups. At the opposite end of the labor's hierarchy from common workers stood skilled craftsmen like iron puddler James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant and ironworker. His skill required using long poles to form 200-pound pig-iron balls of uniform size. For this, Davis made $7 a day, when he could get work. Although he earned a good daily wage, he could never rely on year-round work at any one factory. Two major depressions in the latter half of the nineteenth century made finding work harder. New England's textile mills illustrate the effects of mechanized factory labor during this period. For instance, a young weaver named Mary went to work in a textile mill at the age of twelve as a machine tender. By the time she was fourteen, mechanization had changed her job to watching the power looms. She worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, and made $1 a day. Even after she had worked in the mills for twenty

years, her family was still unable to save enough money for a house. Sadie Frowne was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew who worked in a Brooklyn sweatshop. She was a typical young, single woman wage earner of the late nineteenth century, working long hours for low wages. Discriminated against, women typically earned less money than their male counterparts. 

The Family Economy: Women and ChildrenWith the average working-class family living at or near the poverty level, it became necessary for children and women to work. Children tended machines as efficiently as adults and for less pay. Consequently, child labor increased decade after decade until after World War I. Boys who lived in the cities, some as young as six years old, plied their trades as bootblacks and newsboys. Many of the boys were homeless, orphaned, or cast off by their families. In New York City, the Children's Aid Society tried to better the situation of these, the city's youngest workers, by establishing lodging houses. The most common occupation for unmarried women shifted slowly from domestic service to factory work and then to office work by the end of the century. White married women, while seldom working outside the home, supplemented the family income by taking in boarders or performing piecework. Many African American married women worked outside the home as domestics in the homes of white families. Income from both wives and children proved essential to family survival. 

Managers and White CollarsWhen corporate development separated management from ownership at the end of the nineteenth century, a new class of managers took over the job of directing firms. These managers tended to be white men with high school diplomas or college degrees; they earned salaries significantly higher than the average laborer. Not all managers came from the middle class: Some managers worked their way up from the ranks of skilled workers. Captain William "Billy" Jones began his career on the shop floor as a ten-year-old apprentice on blast furnaces; he went on to earn a tremendous $25,000 per year as plant superintendent of Carnegie Steel Works. As an advocate of his laborers' well-being, Jones succeeded in shortening the shift from twelve to eight hours a day by convincing Carnegie that shorter hours would reduce absenteeism and accidents. 

"Typewriters" and SalesclerksThe advent of mechanization brought the adding machine, the cash register, and the typewriter to the office by the 1880s. Employers seeking literate employees turned to women because they worked for lower wages than men and had few other ways to use their educations. Middle-class white women came to dominate clerical work, which they appreciated not only because it was more genteel than factory work but also because they could make more money in fewer working hours. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, department stores became the symbol of a new consumer culture in the United States. Women who worked in department stores earned wages ranging from $3 a week for cash girls and stock clerks to an impressive $25 a week for buyers. Nonetheless, gender segregation meant that women's wages were kept low, and saleswomen were subject to harsh discipline. Still, employees of department stores considered themselves a cut above factory workers, even though their pay was often less.

Workers Organize, pp. 488–492The mechanization of the workplace made skilled jobs increasingly scarce and unskilled jobs most common. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie liked to invest in new machines that replaced skilled workers because it saved the company money. Consequently, wages fell, and workers found that they exerted less and less control over the workplace. Workers associated this with a loss of individualism and were spurred on to collective action. For instance, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 involved nearly 100,000 railroad workers coast to coast and brought railroad traffic to a halt throughout the nation. Workers learned what the power of collective action could do and would use it again in the future. 

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877As the panic of 1873 turned to economic depression and millions of Americans lost their jobs, workers for the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad walked out on strike to protest the railroad's announcement of a wage reduction. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began in West Virginia, quickly spread across the nation, and was joined by other sympathetic workers and their families. In short order, the nation lay paralyzed by the strike. Although the strike was organized spontaneously, it struck fear into the minds of the nation's political and business leaders. Clashes between workers and authorities not only halted business but also turned violent and cost the lives of twenty strike supporters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ultimately, President Rutherford B. Hayes called in federal troops, and the strike came to an end. The conflict

contributed both to an increase in anti-union sentiment among industrialists and a heightened sense of urgency among workers to organize and join labor unions. 

The Knights of Labor and the American Federation of LaborOne of the unions to benefit from the Railroad Strike of 1877 was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and revitalized after the 1877 strikes. Under the direction of Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, the union was opened to all workers regardless of skill, sex, race, or nationality. It grew from 50,000 to 700,000 members by 1885 because of its broad appeal and its interest in a wide spectrum of general reforms. There were rival unions, however. Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor (AFL), a skilled craftsworker-based federation of unions, advocated a "pure and simple" unionism. Unhappy with the Knights' broad reform goals and appeal to unskilled workers, the smaller AFL concentrated on "bread and butter" issues like better pay and working conditions. In 1886, certain events caused the downfall of the Knights and gave the AFL control of the organized labor movement. 

Haymarket and the Specter of Labor RadicalismRadical socialists and anarchists wanted social revolution but tried to gain popular support by championing the eight-hour day. They called for a general strike in support of it on May 1, 1886. In Chicago, radicals worked with the Knights of Labor (despite Powderly's disapproval) and the AFL (although Gompers did not want members to participate in a strike). On May Day, 45,000 workers paraded peacefully, but two days later, strikers at the McCormick reaper works attacked scabs and were then shot at by police. In response, radicals called for a rally in Haymarket Square. Turnout was low, and the crowd was dispersing, but the police chief brought in a force of men and demanded that the meeting break up. Somebody threw a bomb, and shooting broke out. Hysteria erupted nationwide as people spoke of the riot at Haymarket, the anarchism of unions and strikers, and the general fear of labor revolution. All eight of the defendants in the Haymarket trial were convicted, although witnesses could vouch that none of them had thrown the bomb: They were tried for their radical ideas, not their actions. Out of the Haymarket riot came the demise of the Knights of Labor and the dominance of the AFL, which avoided a direct connection. Organized labor under Gompers faced an uphill battle against the violence and radicalism associated with their movement.

At Home and at Play, pp. 493–494The industrialization process dramatically changed the workplace, with men increasingly working away from home and women staying home. As a result, a new ideology developed about the home and women's role in it. 

Domesticity and "Domestics"The separation of the workplace and the home led to a cultural ideology called the "cult of domesticity" that dictated women's role. This phrase came to describe the idea that the home constituted a refuge from the harshness of the outside world and that a woman's place was in the home, helping to make it a comfortable haven. More and more material possessions began to appear in middle-class homes in the decades following the Civil War. Possession of a house itself marked the gulf between the middle class and the working class. In middle- or upper-class homes, women relied more and more on domestic labor to carry the main burden of the housework. Domestics often were immigrants, usually from Ireland. They worked long hours with little privacy, and many preferred a job in a factory. 

Cheap AmusementsThe poor and working class found their leisure in the growing number of dance halls, music houses, ballparks, and amusement arcades. The saloon became the political, union, and social headquarters of the working classes. For couples, dance halls were most popular, although reformers feared that dance halls lured working girls into prostitution. Baseball became the national pastime for all classes of people by the 1870s. The popularity of amusement parks like Coney Island in New York signaled the rise of mass entertainment.

City Growth and City Government, pp. 494–500American cities were built without the help of comprehensive city planning. Instead, local politics and private enterprise built America's cities. 

Building Cities of Stone and SteelTechnology—particularly that of structural steel—transformed the urban landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern stone and steel bridges, like the Brooklyn Bridge, spanned America's rivers. Skyscrapers, modern sewage systems, cable car systems, and expansive city parks, schools, and public libraries developed as the greatest achievements within the cities, just as the system of municipal government came to be viewed as one of the cities' main failings. Yet the fruits of urban improvement were never enjoyed by the poor to the same extent as the rich. Sewer systems and public transit were more useful to the wealthy and middle-class city dwellers; parks often were too far away from poor neighborhoods to be accessible; and libraries were closed on Sunday, the one day of the week working-class people could visit them. 

City Government and the "Bosses"A major factor in the development of the city was the big-city boss. Because of the cities' expanding needs, a class of professional politicians emerged to oversee the social services of the city. Always creating a political

organization to rule the unruly city, the bosses provided services for their constituents. Bosses like William Marcy Tweed of New York were corrupt and often criminal, but their urban political machines provided jobs, shelter, and legal aid for immigrants to their cities. In return, the machine got the immigrants' votes. Replacing bosses in some cities were reform-minded and honest mayors, but many of them could not maintain their hold on office. Those who did, like Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit, championed working-class causes. Business elites benefited from boss rule as well, getting tax breaks and lucrative franchises. Ultimately, bosses served not as autocratic rulers but as power brokers between competing groups. 

White City or City of Sin?The 1893 world's fair was held in Chicago, Illinois, on fairgrounds called the White City. The White City's paradise of lagoons, fountains, wooded islands, gardens, and white-painted buildings (constructed from staff, a material similar to plaster of paris) represented the emergent industrial might of the United States with its inventions, manufactured goods, and growing consumer culture. But just like the Brooklyn Bridge, whose construction preceded it, the White City not only represented American triumph but also came to represent the flipside of late-nineteenth-century developments, standing in stark contrast to the poverty and hunger that was then ravaging its host city of Chicago. Indeed, the White City burned to the ground just over a year after its opening as federal troops and striking railway workers clashed on the fairgrounds that the city's unemployed and homeless had occupied during the winter of 1894. 

Conclusion: Who Built the Cities? pp. 500–501The new American cities teemed with life in the late nineteenth century. With the creation of mass transportation, new technology, immigration, corporate consolidation, and most importantly, the labor of millions of workers, cities witnessed architectural marvels and urban blight, the clash of big-city bosses and reformers, and conflict between workers and industrialists. For decades, the promise of America had been dominated by agrarian ideals. As economic turmoil gripped the nation in the mid-1890s, the question of whether or not the new cities could fulfill the American promise loomed large and unresolved.