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Political Cartoon #1

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How 10 Companies Own the World's Food Brands 

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How 10 Companies Own the World's Food Brands 

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Just when you think there's no end to the diversity of junk food lining supermarket aisles, an insanely detailed infographic comes along to set us all straight. Out of the hundreds of products at our disposal, only ten major corporations manufacture the bulk of what we toss in our shopping carts.

So whether you're looking to stock up on anything from orange soda to latte-flavored potato chips, Mondelez, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, and Unilever own just about everything you could hope to buy. It seems that six degrees of separation theory has been proven after all, if only because we all drink Diet Coke every now and then.

In order to visually elucidate that point, Oxfam International created a comprehensive infographic that reveals the extensive reach of the "Big 10" food and beverage companies. Unlikely ties between brands we largely don't associate with one another show how easy it is to be misinformed about the American food system. For example, PepsiCo produces Quaker granola bars, and Nestlé makes Kit Kat bars but also frozen California Pizza Kitchen pies. To the surprise of many, Pineapple Fanta isn't sourced straight from the mythical Fanta Islands, but canned right alongside Barq's root beer at the Coca-Cola factory.

Obviously, the horrors extend far beyond our own shattered daydreams. Massive corporations squash entrepreneurial diversity and make it nearly impossible for startups and small businesses to compete. According to Oxfam's report, "The world's largest food and beverage companies have a lot of power - but you have more. And because they're not using theirs enough to help poor communities or the planet, you can use yours to change the way they do business."

If you're looking to avoid contributing to the Big 10 world takeover, try shopping at local farmers' markets and maybe skip out on soda and highly processed foods altogether. Your body will thank you for it in the long run anyway.

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This Infographic Shows How Only 10 Companies Own All The World's Food Brands

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Just when you think there's no end to the diversity of junk food lining supermarket aisles, an insanely detailed infographic comes along to set us all straight. Out of the hundreds of products at our disposal, only ten major corporations manufacture the bulk of what we toss in our shopping carts.

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Political Cartoon #2

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PPT

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Political Cartoon #3

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From Don't Know Much About History

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Who Were the Robber Barons   from Don't Know Much About History

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From You Will Love History

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Video from You Will Love History

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If you want to explain America's economic growth in a nutshell, chalk it up to GD and L, Gerard Depardieu and Lohan. No, geography, demography and law. However, while we're on the topic, when was Gerard Depardieu and Lindsay Lohan have a baby? Stan, can I see it? Yes! YES!

Geographically, the U.S. was a huge country with all the resources necessary for an industrial boom. Like, we had coal and iron and later oil. Initially, we had water to power our factories, later replaced by coal, and we had amber waves of grain to feed our growing population, which leads to the demography.

America's population grew from 40 million in 1870 to 76 million in 1900, and a third of that growth was due to immigration, which is good for economies. Many of these immigrants flooded the burgeoning cities as America shifted from being an agrarian, rural nation to being an industrial, urban one.

Like, New York City became the center of commerce and finance, and by 1898, it had a population of 3.4 million people, and the industrial heartland was in the Great Lakes region. Chicago became the second largest city by 1900, Cleveland became a leader in oil refining, and Pittsburgh was the center of iron and steel production. And even today, the great city of Pittsburgh still employs 53 Steelers.

Last but not least was the law. The Constitution and its Commerce Clause made the U.S. a single area of commerce, like a giant customs union, and as we'll see in a bit, the Supreme Court interpreted the laws in a very business-friendly way.

Also, the American Constitution protects patents, which encourages invention and innovation, or at least it used to. Despite what Ayn Rand would tell you, the American government played a role in American economic growth by putting up high tariffs, especially on steel, giving massive land grants to railroads, and by putting Native Americans on reservations.

Also, foreigners played an important role. They invested their capital and involved Americans in their economic scandals, like the one that led to a depression in 1893. The U.S. was, at the time, seen by Europeans as a developing economy, and investments in America offered much higher returns than those available in Europe.

And the changes we're talking about here were massive: in 1880, for the first time, a majority of the workforce worked in non-farming jobs. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, rather than farming or owning their own businesses, and by 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world's total industrial output. Now bring out the Libertage, Stan! Awesome! And even better, we now get to talk about perennially underrated railroads. Let's go to the thought bubble.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The Industrial Economy: Crash Course US History #23

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If you want to explain America's economic growth in a nutshell, chalk it up to GD and L, Gerard Depardieu and Lohan. No, geography, demography and law. However, while we're on the topic, when was Gerard Depardieu and Lindsay Lohan have a baby? Stan, can I see it? Yes! YES!

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Triumph of Industry Vocab

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The Men Who Built America 1of8 A New War Begins

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Political Cartoon #6

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Printable Version Between 1869 and 1910, the value of American manufacturing rose from $3 billion to $13 billion. The steel industry produced just 68,000 tons in 1870, but 4.2 million tons in 1890. The central vehicle of this surge in economic productivity was the modern corporation.

In recent years, Americans have often been told that we have entered a "new economy." The older industrial economy, it is said, is giving way to a new global economy based on computers, the Internet, telecommunications, and entertainment. This is not the first new economy in American history. Following the Civil War, a new economy emerged in the United States resting on steam-powered manufacturing, the railroad, the electric motor, the internal combustion engine, and the practical application of chemistry. Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets.

The transformations that took place in American business following the Civil War involved far more than a change in industrial techniques or productivity. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production and mechanization. By the beginning of the 20th century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.

The rise of big business was accompanied by the emergence of a new class of millionaires. At the beginning of the Civil War, there were only 400 millionaires in the United States. By 1892, the number had risen to 4,047.

The emergence of the modern corporation was accompanied by many positive developments. Through mechanization, standardization, and economies of scale, economic productivity soared. Between 1890 and 1929, the average urban worker put in one less day of work a week and brought home three times as much in pay. The proportion of families confined to the drudgery of farm life declined by half. Families enjoyed comforts and conveniences that were unimaginable before 1890. By 1929, nine out of ten Americans had electricity and indoor plumbing; four-fifths had automobiles; two-thirds had radios; and nearly half refrigerators and phonographs. At the same time, infant mortality fell by two-thirds, and life expectancy increased by 20 years. In 1888, Charles E. Perkins, the president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad asked:

Have not the great merchants, great manufacturers, great inventors, done more for the world than preachers and philanthropists? Can there be any doubt that cheapening the cost of necessaries and conveniences of life is the most powerful agent of civilization and progress?

Yet the rise of big business also produced many anxieties. Corporations were accused of abusing workers, corrupting the political process, and producing shoddy, unsafe products. Many feared that corporate power allowed companies to fix prices and influence government decision-making.

Copyright 2021 Digital History

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Printable Version Between 1869 and 1910, the value of American manufacturing rose from $3 billion to $13 billion. The steel industry produced just 68,000 tons in 1870, but 4.2 million tons in 1890. The central vehicle of this surge in economic productivity was the modern corporation.

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The transcontinental railway was completed with a jubilant celebration on May 10, 1869, when the rails connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads were joined at Promontory, Utah.

The locomotive was not an invention of the Gilded Age. Indeed Americans had traveled by rail in the decades that preceded the Civil War. But such travel was risky.

This mural in El Paso County, TX, honors the thousands of Chinese workers who helped build the Southern Pacific Railroad and other transcontinental railroad systems.

Passengers often sat in the same room as a wood burner and had to be watchful of wayward sparks landing on their clothing. Braking systems were not always trustworthy. Several engines even exploded while trying to reach a destination.

Traveling also represented a tremendous investment in time. Rail passengers often had to change trains frequently because the width between tracks varied from company to company. Such a journey could be uncomfortable, boring, and dangerous.

Give Me a Brake

After the Civil War many rail problems were solved. George Westinghouse invented the air brake and trains could stop more reliably as a result. Railroad firms agreed on a standard width between tracks to reduce transfers. The Pullman Car Company produced sleeper cars and dining cars to make travel more comfortable.

The Transcontinental Railroad

Soon after the railroad made its appearance in the U.S. in the 1830s, Americans dreamed of linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by rail. A transcontinental railroad would allow for settlement of the west, open new markets for eastern manufacturers, and bring relief to overcrowded eastern cities.

Some even believed that it was divinely intended that Americans should control the whole of the continental U.S. In 1845, a Democratic journalist named John L. O'Sullivan coined the phrase "manifest destiny."

Manifest Destiny

"... the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federaltive development of self government entrusted to us....

Steaming locomotives would hasten western settlement, spread democratic values, and increase the size of the United States (Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico etc., were not yet states, only territories). Western settlement was a paramount national interest. As such, the federal government awarded the contract to link the coasts by rail to two companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific.

I've Been Working on the Railroad

Union Pacific workers, many of whom were Irish and Chinese immigrants, started at Omaha, Nebraska, and hammered their way westward. From Sacramento, California, the Central Pacific made its way eastward with the assistance of thousands of Chinese immigrants.

Those working on the railroad gave their sweat and sometimes their lives blasting through the often unforgiving terrain. Other dangers that workers faced were disease, searing summer heat, freezing temperatures in the mountains, Native American raids and the lawlessness and violence of pioneer towns.

The Golden Spike

The government declared that the two lines would merge at Promontory Summit near Ogden, Utah. On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, representing the Central Pacific Railroad, was provided the honor to hammer a golden spike into the ground that marked the completion of the coast-to-coast line. Celebrations erupted across the land. Even the Liberty Bell tolled once again to commemorate the occasion.

Soon, other transcontinental lines were constructed and travel across the continent became worlds simpler, less expensive, and much faster, than by the old Conestoga wagon.

On the Right Track

The engineering achievement was monumental. The costs of the operation to railroads were enormous. Tens of thousands of workers had to be paid, sheltered, and fed. Tons of steel and wood were required.

However, the economic incentives to railroads were enormus. The government offered generous loans to companies who were willing to assume the risk. The greatest reward was land. For each mile of track laid by the Central and Union Pacific Railroads, the companies received 640 acres of public land. In other rail projects, state governments often kicked in additional acres for a growing number of rail companies.

The Interstate Commerce Commission

All in all, the railroads received nearly 200 million acres of land from the U.S. government for fulfilling contracts. Directors of some railroads made fortunes. Foremost among the railroad tycoons were Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, and Jay Gould.

But freight railroad abuses grew rampant. Money lined the pockets of greedy public officials who awarded generous terms to the railroads. Railroad companies set their own shipping rates.

Sometimes it was more expensive for a small farmer to ship goods to a nearby town than to a faraway city. Because the companies kept their rates secret, one farmer could be charged more than another for the same freight transport.

To reduce competition, railroad companies established pools. These were informal arrangements between companies to keep rates above a certain level. Consequently, the public suffered. Finally, in 1887, Congress responded to public outcry by creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to watch over the rail industry. This was the nation's first regulatory agency. Due to inconcise wording in its enabling legislation, the ICC was largely ignored until the early 20th century.

But the public also reaped great benefits. Eastern businessmen could now sell their goods to California citizens. As a result of improved transportation all Americans had access to more goods at a cheaper price. The westward movement was greatly accelerated. Those seeking a new start in life could much more easily "go west.".

No industrial revolution can occur without a transport web. The nation was now bound together by this enormous network and its citizens were ready to reap the rewards.

It is a grand 'anvil chorus' ... It is played in triple time, 3 strokes to the spike. There are 10 spikes to a rail, 400 rails to a mile, 1,800 miles to San Francisco - 21,000,000 times those sledges to be swung. -Harper's Weekly description of work on the transcontinental railway
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Binding the Nation by Rail [ushistory.org]

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The transcontinental railway was completed with a jubilant celebration on May 10, 1869, when the rails connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads were joined at Promontory, Utah. The locomotive was not an invention of the Gilded Age. Indeed Americans had traveled by rail in the decades that preceded the Civil War.

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The Men Who Built America 2of8 Oil Strike

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Robber Barons or Captains of Industry DBQ

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Robber Barons or Captains of Industry DBQ

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The Men Who Built America 3of8 A Rivalry is Born

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The Men Who Built America 4of8 Blood is Spilled

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The Men Who Built America 5of8 A New Rival Emerges

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The Men Who Built America 6of8 Owning It All

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The Men Who Built America 7of8 Taking the White House

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The Men Who Built America 8of8 The New Machine

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Ch 16 Capital and Labor

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The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads' financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers' wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends). Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down railroad traffic-the nation's economic lifeblood-across the country.

Panicked business leaders and friendly political officials reacted quickly. When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called out state militias to break them and restore rail service. Many strikers destroyed rail property rather than allow militias to reopen the rails. The protests approached a class war. The governor of Maryland deployed the state's militia. In Baltimore, the militia fired into a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more. Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania. The head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, suggested that if workers were unhappy with their wages, they should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."Law enforcement in Pittsburgh refused to put down the protests, so the governor called out the state militia, who killed twenty strikers with bayonets and rifle fire. A month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying dozens of buildings, over a hundred engines, and over a thousand cars. In Reading, strikers destroyed rail property and an angry crowd bombarded militiamen with rocks and bottles. The militia fired into the crowd, killing ten. A general strike erupted in St. Louis, and strikers seized rail depots and declared for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Federal troops and vigilantes fought their way into the depot, killing eighteen and breaking the strike. Rail lines were shut down all across neighboring Illinois, where coal miners struck in sympathy, tens of thousands gathered to protest under the aegis of the Workingmen's Party, and twenty protesters were killed in Chicago by special police and militiamen.

Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania militiamen were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. When militia in West Virginia refused to break the strike, federal troops broke it instead. On the orders of the president, American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines. Soldiers moved from town to town, suppressing protests and reopening rail lines. Six weeks after it had begun, the strike had been crushed. Nearly 100 Americans died in "The Great Upheaval." Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States.

Growing labor unrest accompanied industrialization. The greatest strikes first hit the railroads only because no other industry had so effectively marshaled together capital, government support, and bureaucratic management. Many workers perceived their new powerlessness in the coming industrial order. Skills mattered less and less in an industrialized, mass-producing economy, and their strength as individuals seemed ever smaller and more insignificant when companies grew in size and power and managers grew flush with wealth and influence. Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize and battle against the power of capital.

The post-Civil War era saw revolutions in American industry. Technological innovations and national investments slashed the costs of production and distribution. New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms. National credit agencies eased the uncertainties surrounding rapid movement of capital among investors, manufacturers, and retailers. Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.

By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management, or Taylorism, after its noted proponent, Frederick Taylor. The precision of steel parts, the harnessing of electricity, the innovations of machine tools, and the mass markets wrought by the railroads offered new avenues for efficiency. To match the demands of the machine age, Taylor said, firms needed a scientific organization of production. He urged all manufacturers to increase efficiency by subdividing tasks. Rather than having thirty mechanics individually making thirty machines, for instance, a manufacturer could assign thirty laborers to perform thirty distinct tasks. Such a shift would not only make workers as interchangeable as the parts they were using, it would also dramatically speed up the process of production. If managed by trained experts, specific tasks could be done quicker and more efficiently. Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production. Building on the use of interchangeable parts in Civil War-era weapons manufacturing, American firms advanced mass production techniques and technologies. Singer sewing machines, Chicago packers' "disassembly" lines, McCormick grain reapers, Duke cigarette rollers: all realized unprecedented efficiencies and achieved unheard-of levels of production that propelled their companies into the forefront of American business. Henry Ford made the assembly line famous, allowing the production of automobiles to skyrocket as their cost plummeted, but various American firms had been paving the way for decades.

Cyrus McCormick had overseen the construction of mechanical reapers (used for harvesting wheat) for decades. He had relied on skilled blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft horse-drawn machines. But production was slow and the machines were expensive. The reapers still enabled massive efficiency gains in grain farming, but their high cost and slow production times put them out of reach of most American wheat farmers. But then, in 1880, McCormick hired a production manager who had overseen the manufacturing of Colt firearms to transform his system of production. The Chicago plant introduced new jigs, steel gauges, and pattern machines that could make precise duplicates of new, interchangeable parts. The company had produced twenty-one thousand machines in 1880. It made twice as many in 1885, and by 1889, less than a decade later, it was producing over one hundred thousand a year.

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world. The American economy had lagged behind Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the United States was the world's leading manufacturing nation. Thirteen years later, by 1913, the United States produced one third of the world's industrial output-more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.

Firms such as McCormick's realized massive economies of scale: after accounting for their initial massive investments in machines and marketing, each additional product lost the company relatively little in production costs. The bigger the production, then, the bigger the profits. New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating. Retailers and advertisers sustained the massive markets needed for mass production, and corporate bureaucracies meanwhile allowed for the management of giant new firms. A new class of managers-comprising what one prominent economic historian called the "visible hand"-operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution. Even more important to the growth and maintenance of these new companies, however, were the legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of massed capital.

The costs of mass production were prohibitive for all but the very wealthiest individuals, and, even then, the risks would be too great to bear individually. The corporation itself was ages old, but the actual right to incorporate had generally been reserved for public works projects or government-sponsored monopolies. After the Civil War, however, the corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively, investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.

But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments. Once the efficiency gains of mass production were realized, profit margins could be undone by cutthroat competition, which kept costs low as price cutting sank into profits. Companies rose and fell-and investors suffered losses-as manufacturing firms struggled to maintain supremacy in their particular industries. Economies of scale were a double-edged sword: while additional production provided immense profits, the high fixed costs of operating expensive factories dictated that even modest losses from selling underpriced goods were preferable to not selling profitably priced goods at all. And as market share was won and lost, profits proved unstable. American industrial firms tried everything to avoid competition: they formed informal pools and trusts, they entered price-fixing agreements, they divided markets, and, when blocked by antitrust laws and renegade price cutting, merged into consolidations. Rather than suffer from ruinous competition, firms combined and bypassed it altogether.

Between 1895 and 1904, and peaking between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy. Competition melted away in what is known as "the great merger movement." In nine years, four thousand companies-nearly 20 percent of the American economy-were folded into rival firms. In nearly every major industry, newly consolidated firms such as General Electric and DuPont utterly dominated their market. Forty-one separate consolidations each controlled over 70 percent of the market in their respective industries. In 1901, financier J. P. Morgan oversaw the formation of United States Steel, built from eight leading steel companies. Industrialization was built on steel, and one firm-the world's first billion-dollar company-controlled the market. Monopoly had arrived.

Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen. Massive new companies marshaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits that created unheard-of fortunes. But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions. The notion of a glittering world of wealth and technological innovation masking massive social inequities and deep-seated corruption gave the era its most common label, the Gilded Age, which drew from the title of an 1873 satirical novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Warner. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with unprecedented inequalities. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans. "This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times," economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.

The great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons, including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such as J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bankers such as J. P. Morgan, won fortunes that, adjusted for inflation, are still among the largest the nation has ever seen. According to various measurements, in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one fourth of the nation's assets; the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent. And inequality only accelerated. By 1900, the richest 10 percent controlled perhaps 90 percent of the nation's wealth.

As these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them. In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species. It was not until the 1870s, however, that those theories gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other scientists in the United States and, in turn, challenged the social, political, and religious beliefs of many Americans. One of Darwin's greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin's theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest. The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration-it would encourage the survival of the weak.

"There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection," the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. "All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak." By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders. Social Darwinism identified a natural order that extended from the laws of the cosmos to the workings of industrial society. All species and all societies, including modern humans, the theory went, were governed by a relentless competitive struggle for survival. The inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified the progress of species and societies. Spencer's major work, Synthetic Philosophy, sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States by the time of his death in 1903. Gilded Age industrial elites, such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, inventor Thomas Edison, and Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller, were among Spencer's prominent followers. Other American thinkers, such as Yale's William Graham Sumner, echoed his ideas. Sumner said, "Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence."

But not all so eagerly welcomed inequalities. The spectacular growth of the U.S. economy and the ensuing inequalities in living conditions and incomes confounded many Americans. But as industrial capitalism overtook the nation, it achieved political protections. Although both major political parties facilitated the rise of big business and used state power to support the interests of capital against labor, big business looked primarily to the Republican Party.

The Republican Party had risen as an antislavery faction committed to "free labor," but it was also an ardent supporter of American business. Abraham Lincoln had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads, and during the Civil War the Republican national government took advantage of the wartime absence of southern Democrats to push through a pro-business agenda. The Republican congress gave millions of acres and dollars to railroad companies. Republicans became the party of business, and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Republican candidates won all but four. Republicans controlled the Senate in twenty-seven out of thirty-two sessions in the same period. Republican dominance maintained a high protective tariff, an import tax designed to shield American businesses from foreign competition. Southern planters had opposed this policy before the war but now could do nothing to stop it. It provided the protective foundation for a new American industrial order, while Spencer's social Darwinism provided moral justification for national policies that minimized government interference in the economy for anything other than the protection and support of business.

The ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass of American industrial laborers. American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions. Industrial work ebbed and flowed with the economy. The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line. Among the working poor, wives and children were forced into the labor market to compensate. Crowded cities, meanwhile, failed to accommodate growing urban populations and skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers seeking higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions had struck throughout the antebellum era, but organized unions were fleeting and transitory. The Civil War and Reconstruction seemed to briefly distract the nation from the plight of labor, but the end of the sectional crisis and the explosive growth of big business, unprecedented fortunes, and a vast industrial workforce in the last quarter of the nineteenth century sparked the rise of a vast American labor movement.

The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize. Union memberships began to climb. The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all laborers, including women (the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers). By 1886, the Knights had over seven hundred thousand members. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision, the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the organization of workers into local unions.

In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould's rail companies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thousand workers struck against Gould's rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor, to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould's companies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers countered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization regrouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country.

In Chicago, police forces killed several workers while breaking up protesters at the McCormick reaper works. Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square the following day, which police also proceeded to break up. But as they did, a bomb exploded and killed seven policemen. Police fired into the crowd, killing four. The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism. Eight Chicago anarchists were arrested and, despite no direct evidence implicating them in the bombing, were charged and found guilty of conspiracy. Four were hanged (and one died by suicide before he could be executed). Membership in the Knights had peaked earlier that year but fell rapidly after Haymarket; the group became associated with violence and radicalism. The national movement for an eight-hour day collapsed.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights' expansive vision of a "producerist" economy and advocated "pure and simple trade unionism," a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes. But workers continued to strike.

In 1892, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at one of Carnegie's steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania. After repeated wage cuts, workers shut the plant down and occupied the mill. The plant's operator, Henry Clay Frick, immediately called in hundreds of Pinkerton detectives, but the steel workers fought back. The Pinkertons tried to land by river and were besieged by the striking steel workers. After several hours of pitched battle, the Pinkertons surrendered, ran a bloody gauntlet of workers, and were kicked out of the mill grounds. But the Pennsylvania governor called the state militia, broke the strike, and reopened the mill. The union was essentially destroyed in the aftermath.

Still, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the industrial landscape. In 1894, workers in George Pullman's Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country. Thousands of workers struck and national railroad traffic ground to a halt. Unlike in nearly every other major strike, the governor of Illinois sympathized with workers and refused to dispatch the state militia. It didn't matter. In July, President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of American soldiers to break the strike, and a federal court issued a preemptive injunction against Debs and the union's leadership. The strike violated the injunction, and Debs was arrested and imprisoned. The strike evaporated without its leadership. Jail radicalized Debs, proving to him that political and judicial leaders were merely tools for capital in its struggle against labor. But it wasn't just Debs. In 1905, the degrading conditions of industrial labor sparked strikes across the country. The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw over twenty thousand strikes and lockouts in the United States. Industrial laborers struggled to carve for themselves a piece of the prosperity lifting investors and a rapidly expanding middle class into unprecedented standards of living. But workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

"Wall Street owns the country," the Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. "It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." Farmers, who remained a majority of the American population through the first decade of the twentieth century, were hit especially hard by industrialization. The expanding markets and technological improvements that increased efficiency also decreased commodity prices. Commercialization of agriculture put farmers in the hands of bankers, railroads, and various economic intermediaries. As the decades passed, more and more farmers fell ever further into debt, lost their land, and were forced to enter the industrial workforce or, especially in the South, became landless farmworkers.

The rise of industrial giants reshaped the American countryside and the Americans who called it home. Railroad spur lines, telegraph lines, and credit crept into farming communities and linked rural Americans, who still made up a majority of the country's population, with towns, regional cities, American financial centers in Chicago and New York, and, eventually, London and the world's financial markets. Meanwhile, improved farm machinery, easy credit, and the latest consumer goods flooded the countryside. But new connections and new conveniences came at a price.

Farmers had always been dependent on the whims of the weather and local markets. But now they staked their financial security on a national economic system subject to rapid price swings, rampant speculation, and limited regulation. Frustrated American farmers attempted to reshape the fundamental structures of the nation's political and economic systems, systems they believed enriched parasitic bankers and industrial monopolists at the expense of the many laboring farmers who fed the nation by producing its many crops and farm goods. Their dissatisfaction with an erratic and impersonal system put many of them at the forefront of what would become perhaps the most serious challenge to the established political economy of Gilded Age America. Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through the cooperatives of the Farmers' Alliance and later through the politics of the People's (or Populist) Party.

Mass production and business consolidations spawned giant corporations that monopolized nearly every sector of the U.S. economy in the decades after the Civil War. In contrast, the economic power of the individual farmer sank into oblivion. Threatened by ever-plummeting commodity prices and ever-rising indebtedness, Texas agrarians met in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877 and organized the first Farmers' Alliance to restore some economic power to farmers as they dealt with railroads, merchants, and bankers. If big business relied on its numerical strength to exert its economic will, why shouldn't farmers unite to counter that power? They could share machinery, bargain from wholesalers, and negotiate higher prices for their crops. Over the following years, organizers spread from town to town across the former Confederacy, the Midwest, and the Great Plains, holding evangelical-style camp meetings, distributing pamphlets, and establishing over one thousand alliance newspapers. As the alliance spread, so too did its near-religious vision of the nation's future as a "cooperative commonwealth" that would protect the interests of the many from the predatory greed of the few. At its peak, the Farmers' Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances.

The alliance's most innovative programs were a series of farmers' cooperatives that enabled farmers to negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased. These cooperatives spread across the South between 1886 and 1892 and claimed more than a million members at their high point. While most failed financially, these "philanthropic monopolies," as one alliance speaker termed them, inspired farmers to look to large-scale organization to cope with their economic difficulties.But cooperation was only part of the alliance message.

In the South, alliance-backed Democratic candidates won four governorships and forty-eight congressional seats in 1890. But at a time when falling prices and rising debts conspired against the survival of family farmers, the two political parties seemed incapable of representing the needs of poor farmers. And so alliance members organized a political party-the People's Party, or the Populists, as they came to be known. The Populists attracted supporters across the nation by appealing to those convinced that there were deep flaws in the political economy of Gilded Age America, flaws that both political parties refused to address. Veterans of earlier fights for currency reform, disaffected industrial laborers, proponents of the benevolent socialism of Edward Bellamy's popular Looking Backward, and the champions of Henry George's farmer-friendly "single-tax" proposal joined alliance members in the new party. The Populists nominated former Civil War general James B. Weaver as their presidential candidate at the party's first national convention in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892.

At that meeting the party adopted a platform that crystallized the alliance's cooperate program into a coherent political vision. The platform's preamble, written by longtime political iconoclast and Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly, warned that "the fruits of the toil of millions [had been] boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few." Taken as a whole, the Omaha Platform and the larger Populist movement sought to counter the scale and power of monopolistic capitalism with a strong, engaged, and modern federal government. The platform proposed an unprecedented expansion of federal power. It advocated nationalizing the country's railroad and telegraph systems to ensure that essential services would be run in the best interests of the people. In an attempt to deal with the lack of currency available to farmers, it advocated postal savings banks to protect depositors and extend credit. It called for the establishment of a network of federally managed warehouses-called subtreasuries-which would extend government loans to farmers who stored crops in the warehouses as they awaited higher market prices. To save debtors it promoted an inflationary monetary policy by monetizing silver. Direct election of senators and the secret ballot would ensure that this federal government would serve the interest of the people rather than entrenched partisan interests, and a graduated income tax would protect Americans from the establishment of an American aristocracy. Combined, these efforts would, Populists believed, help shift economic and political power back toward the nation's producing classes.

In the Populists' first national election campaign in 1892, Weaver received over one million votes (and twenty-two electoral votes), a truly startling performance that signaled a bright future for the Populists. And when the Panic of 1893 sparked the worst economic depression the nation had ever yet seen, the Populist movement won further credibility and gained even more ground. Kansas Populist Mary Lease, one of the movement's most fervent speakers, famously, and perhaps apocryphally, called on farmers to "raise less corn and more Hell." Populist stump speakers crossed the country, speaking with righteous indignation, blaming the greed of business elites and corrupt party politicians for causing the crisis fueling America's widening inequality. Southern orators like Texas's James "Cyclone" Davis and Georgian firebrand Tom Watson stumped across the South decrying the abuses of northern capitalists and the Democratic Party. Pamphlets such as W. H. Harvey's Coin's Financial School and Henry D. Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth provided Populist answers to the age's many perceived problems. The faltering economy combined with the Populist's extensive organizing. In the 1894 elections, Populists elected six senators and seven representatives to Congress. The third party seemed destined to conquer American politics.

The movement, however, still faced substantial obstacles, especially in the South. The failure of alliance-backed Democrats to live up to their campaign promises drove some southerners to break with the party of their forefathers and join the Populists. Many, however, were unwilling to take what was, for southerners, a radical step. Southern Democrats, for their part, responded to the Populist challenge with electoral fraud and racial demagoguery. Both severely limited Populist gains. The alliance struggled to balance the pervasive white supremacy of the American South with their call for a grand union of the producing class. American racial attitudes-and their virulent southern strain-simply proved too formidable. Democrats race-baited Populists, and Populists capitulated. The Colored Farmers' Alliance, which had formed as a segregated sister organization to the southern alliance and had as many as 250,000 members at its peak, fell prey to racial and class-based hostility. The group went into rapid decline in 1891 when faced with the violent white repression of a number of Colored Farmers' Alliance-sponsored cotton picker strikes. Racial mistrust and division remained the rule, even among Populists, and even in North Carolina, where a political marriage of convenience between Populists and Republicans-fusion-resulted in the election of Populist Marion Butler to the Senate. Populists opposed Democratic corruption, but this did not necessarily make them champions of interracial democracy. As Butler explained to an audience in Edgecombe County, "We are in favor of white supremacy, but we are not in favor of cheating and fraud to get it."

By the middle of the 1890s, Populism had exploded in popularity. The first major political force to tap into the vast discomfort of many Americans with the disruptions wrought by industrial capitalism, the Populist Party seemed poised to capture political victory. And yet, even as Populism gained national traction, the movement was stumbling. The party's often divided leadership found it difficult to shepherd what remained a diverse and loosely organized coalition of reformers toward unified political action. The Omaha platform was a radical document, and some state party leaders selectively embraced its reforms. More importantly, the institutionalized parties were still too strong, and the Democrats loomed, ready to swallow Populist frustrations and inaugurate a new era of American politics.

William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860-July 26, 1925) accomplished many different things in his life: he was a skilled orator, a Nebraska congressman, a three-time presidential candidate, U.S. secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and a lawyer who supported prohibition and opposed Darwinism (most notably in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial). In terms of his political career, he won national renown for his attack on the gold standard and his tireless promotion of free silver and policies for the benefit of the average American. Although Bryan was unsuccessful in winning the presidency, he forever altered the course of American political history.

Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, in 1860 to a devout family with a strong passion for law, politics, and public speaking. At twenty, he attended Union Law College in Chicago and passed the bar shortly thereafter. After his marriage to Mary Baird in Illinois, Bryan and his young family relocated to Nebraska, where he won a reputation among the state's Democratic Party leaders as an extraordinary orator. Bryan later won recognition as one of the greatest speakers in American history.

When economic depressions struck the Midwest in the late 1880s, despairing farmers faced low crop prices and found few politicians on their side. While many rallied to the Populist cause, Bryan worked from within the Democratic Party, using the strength of his oratory. After delivering one speech, he told his wife, "Last night I found that I had a power over the audience. I could move them as I chose. I have more than usual power as a speaker. . . . God grant that I may use it wisely."He soon won election to the House of Representatives, where he served for two terms. Although he lost a bid to join the Senate, Bryan turned his attention to a higher position: the presidency of the United States. There, he believed he could change the country by defending farmers and urban laborers against the corruptions of big business.

In 1895-1896, Bryan launched a national speaking tour in which he promoted the free coinage of silver. He believed that bimetallism, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers' debts. In contrast, Republicans championed the gold standard and a flat money supply. American monetary standards became a leading campaign issue. Then, in July 1896, the Democratic Party's national convention met to choose their presidential nominee in the upcoming election. The party platform asserted that the gold standard was "not only un-American but anti-American." Bryan spoke last at the convention. He astounded his listeners. At the conclusion of his stirring speech, he declared, "Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." After a few seconds of stunned silence, the convention went wild. Some wept, many shouted, and the band began to play "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Bryan received the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Republicans ran William McKinley, an economic conservative who championed business interests and the gold standard. Bryan crisscrossed the country spreading the silver gospel. The election drew enormous attention and much emotion. According to Bryan's wife, he received two thousand letters of support every day that year, an enormous amount for any politician, let alone one not currently in office. Yet Bryan could not defeat McKinley. The pro-business Republicans outspent Bryan's campaign fivefold. A notably high 79.3 percent of eligible American voters cast ballots, and turnout averaged 90 percent in areas supportive of Bryan, but Republicans swayed the population-dense Northeast and Great Lakes region and stymied the Democrats.

In early 1900, Congress passed the Gold Standard Act, which put the country on the gold standard, effectively ending the debate over the nation's monetary policy. Bryan sought the presidency again in 1900 but was again defeated, as he would be yet again in 1908.

Bryan was among the most influential losers in American political history. When the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party nominated the Nebraska congressman in 1896, Bryan's fiery condemnation of northeastern financial interests and his impassioned calls for "free and unlimited coinage of silver" co-opted popular Populist issues. The Democrats stood ready to siphon off a large proportion of the Populists' political support. When the People's Party held its own convention two weeks later, the party's moderate wing, in a fiercely contested move, overrode the objections of more ideologically pure Populists and nominated Bryan as the Populist candidate as well. This strategy of temporary "fusion" movement fatally fractured the movement and the party. Populist energy moved from the radical-yet-still-weak People's Party to the more moderate-yet-powerful Democratic Party. And although at first glance the Populist movement appears to have been a failure-its minor electoral gains were short-lived, it did little to dislodge the entrenched two-party system, and the Populist dream of a cooperative commonwealth never took shape-in terms of lasting impact, the Populist Party proved the most significant third-party movement in American history. The agrarian revolt established the roots of later reform, and the majority of policies outlined within the Omaha Platform would eventually be put into law over the following decades under the management of middle-class reformers. In large measure, the Populist vision laid the intellectual groundwork for the coming progressive movement.

American socialists carried on the Populists' radical tradition by uniting farmers and workers in a sustained, decades-long political struggle to reorder American economic life. Socialists argued that wealth and power were consolidated in the hands of too few individuals, that monopolies and trusts controlled too much of the economy, and that owners and investors grew rich while the workers who produced their wealth, despite massive productivity gains and rising national wealth, still suffered from low pay, long hours, and unsafe working conditions. Karl Marx had described the new industrial economy as a worldwide class struggle between the wealthy bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, such as factories and farms, and the proletariat, factory workers and tenant farmers who worked only for the wealth of others. According to Eugene Debs, socialists sought "the overthrow of the capitalist system and the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery." Under an imagined socialist cooperative commonwealth, the means of production would be owned collectively, ensuring that all men and women received a fair wage for their labor. According to socialist organizer and newspaper editor Oscar Ameringer, socialists wanted "ownership of the trust by the government, and the ownership of the government by the people."

The socialist movement drew from a diverse constituency. Party membership was open to all regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion. Many prominent Americans, such as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, became socialists. They were joined by masses of American laborers from across the United States: factory workers, miners, railroad builders, tenant farmers, and small farmers all united under the red flag of socialism. Many united with labor leader William D. "Big Bill" Haywood and other radicals in 1905 to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "Wobblies," a radical and confrontational union that welcomed all workers, regardless of race or gender. Others turned to politics.

The Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901, carried on the American third-party political tradition. Socialist mayors were elected in thirty-three cities and towns, from Berkeley, California, to Schenectady, New York, and two socialists-Victor Berger from Wisconsin and Meyer London from New York-won congressional seats. All told, over one thousand socialist candidates won various American political offices. Julius A. Wayland, editor of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, proclaimed that "socialism is coming. It's coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it . . . you can feel it in the air." By 1913 there were 150,000 members of the Socialist Party and, in 1912, Eugene V. Debs, the Indiana-born Socialist Party candidate for president, received almost one million votes, or 6 percent of the total.

Over the following years, however, the embrace of many socialist policies by progressive reformers, internal ideological and tactical disagreements, a failure to dissuade most Americans of the perceived incompatibility between socialism and American values, and, especially, government oppression and censorship, particularly during and after World War I, ultimately sank the party. Like the Populists, however, socialists had tapped into a deep well of discontent, and their energy and organizing filtered out into American culture and American politics.

The march of capital transformed patterns of American life. While some enjoyed unprecedented levels of wealth, and an ever-growing slice of middle-class workers won an ever more comfortable standard of living, vast numbers of farmers lost their land and a growing industrial working class struggled to earn wages sufficient to support themselves and their families. Industrial capitalism brought wealth and it brought poverty; it created owners and investors and it created employees. But whether winners or losers in the new economy, all Americans reckoned in some way with their new industrial world.
1. William Graham Sumner on Social Darwnism (ca.1880s) William Graham Sumner, a sociologist at Yale University, penned several pieces associated with the philosophy of Social Darwinism. In the following, Sumner explains his vision of nature and liberty in a just society. 2. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Selections (1879) In 1879, the economist Henry George penned a massive bestseller exploring the contradictory rise of both rapid economic growth and crippling poverty. 3. Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth (1889) Andrew Carnegie, the American steel titan, explains his vision for the proper role of wealth in American society. 4. Grover Cleveland's Veto of the Texas Seed Bill (1887) Amid a crushing drought that devastated many Texas farmers, Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill designed to help farmers recover by supplying them with seed. In his veto message, Cleveland explained his vision of proper government. 5. The "Omaha Platform" of the People's Party (1892) In 1892, the People's, or Populist, Party crafted a platform that indicted the corruptions of the Gilded Age and promised government policies to aid "the people." 6. Dispatch from a Mississippi Colored Farmers' Alliance (1889)
The Colored Farmers' Alliance, an African American alternative to the whites-only Southern Farmers' Alliance, organized as many as a million Black southerners against the injustices of the predominately cotton-based, southern agricultural economy. Black Populists, however, were always more vulnerable to the violence of white southern conservatives than their white counterparts. Here, the publication The Forum publishes an account of violence against Black Populists in Mississippi.
7. Lucy Parsons on Women and Revolutionary Socialism (1905) Lucy Parsons was born into slavery in Texas, married a white radical, Albert Parsons, and moved to Chicago where they both worked on behalf of radical causes. After Albert Parsons was executed for conspiracy in the aftermath of the Haymarket bombing, Lucy Parsons emerged as a major American radical and vocal advocate of anarchism. In 1905, she spoke before the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). 8. "The Tournament of Today" (1883) "Print shows a jousting tournament between an oversized knight riding horse-shaped armor labeled "Monopoly" over a locomotive, with a long plume labeled "Arrogance", and carrying a shield labeled "Corruption of the Legislature" and a lance labeled "Subsidized Press", and a barefoot man labeled "Labor" riding an emaciated horse labeled "Poverty", and carrying a sledgehammer labeled "Strike". On the left is seating "Reserved for Capitalists" where Cyrus W. Field, William H. Vanderbilt, John Roach, Jay Gould, and Russell Sage are sitting. On the right, behind the labor section, are telegraph lines flying monopoly banners that are labeled "Wall St., W.U.T. Co., [and] N.Y.C. RR"." 9. Lawrence Textile Strike (1912) In 1912, The Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or the "Wobblies") organized textile workers in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. This photo shows strikers, carrying American flags, confronting strikebreakers and militia bayonets.
This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke, with content contributions by Andrew C. Baker, Nicholas Blood, Justin Clark, Dan Du, Caroline Bunnell Harris, David Hochfelder Scott Libson, Joseph Locke, Leah Richier, Matthew Simmons, Kate Sohasky, Joseph Super, and Kaylynn Washnock.
Recommended citation: Andrew C. Baker et al., "Capital and Labor," Joseph Locke, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Recommended Reading

Beckert, Sven. Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Chambers, John W. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Fink, Leon. Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. New York City: Pantheon Books, 2006.

Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944.

Johnson, Kimberley S. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Lamoreaux, Naomi R. The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. New York: Norton, 1987.

Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

End Notes

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The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads' financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers' wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends).

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Ch 18 Life in Industrial America

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When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. He described a rushed and crowded city, a "huge wilderness" with "scores of miles of these terrible streets" and their "hundred thousand of these terrible people." "The show impressed me with a great horror," he wrote. "There was no color in the street and no beauty-only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot." He took a cab "and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress." Kipling visited a "gilded and mirrored" hotel "crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere." He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. "I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again." Kipling said American newspapers report "that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress."

Chicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business. Chicago, for instance, became America's butcher. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four fifths of the meat bought by American consumers. Kipling described in intimate detail the Union Stock Yards, the nation's largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city's vast agricultural hinterland to the nation's dinner tables. "Once having seen them," he concluded, "you will never forget the sight." Like other notable Chicago industries, such as agricultural machinery and steel production, the meatpacking industry was closely tied to urbanization and immigration. In 1850, Chicago had a population of about thirty thousand. Twenty years later, it had three hundred thousand. Nothing could stop the city's growth. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3.5 square miles and left a third of its residents homeless in 1871, but the city quickly recovered and resumed its spectacular growth. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was home to 1.7 million people.

Chicago's explosive growth reflected national trends. In 1870, a quarter of the nation's population lived in towns or cities with populations greater than 2,500. By 1920, a majority did. But if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. Mirroring national immigration patterns, Chicago's newcomers had at first come mostly from Germany, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, but, by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant city. In 1900, nearly 80 percent of Chicago's population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants.

Kipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United States. The rise of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the further making of a mass culture, the creation of great concentrated wealth, the growth of vast city slums, the conquest of the West, the emergence of a middle class, the problem of poverty, the triumph of big business, widening inequalities, battles between capital and labor, the final destruction of independent farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.

The railroads created the first great concentrations of capital, spawned the first massive corporations, made the first of the vast fortunes that would define the Gilded Age, unleashed labor demands that united thousands of farmers and immigrants, and linked many towns and cities. National railroad mileage tripled in the twenty years after the outbreak of the Civil War, and tripled again over the four decades that followed. Railroads impelled the creation of uniform time zones across the country, gave industrialists access to remote markets, and opened the American West. Railroad companies were the nation's largest businesses. Their vast national operations demanded the creation of innovative new corporate organization, advanced management techniques, and vast sums of capital. Their huge expenditures spurred countless industries and attracted droves of laborers. And as they crisscrossed the nation, they created a national market, a truly national economy, and, seemingly, a new national culture.

The railroads were not natural creations. Their vast capital requirements required the use of incorporation, a legal innovation that protected shareholders from losses. Enormous amounts of government support followed. Federal, state, and local governments offered unrivaled handouts to create the national rail networks. Lincoln's Republican Party-which dominated government policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction-passed legislation granting vast subsidies. Hundreds of millions of acres of land and millions of dollars' worth of government bonds were freely given to build the great transcontinental railroads and the innumerable trunk lines that quickly annihilated the vast geographic barriers that had so long sheltered American cities from one another.

As railroad construction drove economic development, new means of production spawned new systems of labor. Many wage earners had traditionally seen factory work as a temporary stepping-stone to attaining their own small businesses or farms. After the war, however, new technology and greater mechanization meant fewer and fewer workers could legitimately aspire to economic independence. Stronger and more organized labor unions formed to fight for a growing, more-permanent working class. At the same time, the growing scale of economic enterprises increasingly disconnected owners from their employees and day-to-day business operations. To handle their vast new operations, owners turned to managers. Educated bureaucrats swelled the ranks of an emerging middle class.

Industrialization also remade much of American life outside the workplace. Rapidly growing industrialized cities knit together urban consumers and rural producers into a single, integrated national market. Food production and consumption, for instance, were utterly nationalized. Chicago's stockyards seemingly tied it all together. Between 1866 and 1886, ranchers drove a million head of cattle annually overland from Texas ranches to railroad depots in Kansas for shipment by rail to Chicago. After travelling through modern "disassembly lines," the animals left the adjoining slaughterhouses as slabs of meat to be packed into refrigerated rail cars and sent to butcher shops across the continent. By 1885, a handful of large-scale industrial meatpackers in Chicago were producing nearly five hundred million pounds of "dressed" beef annually. The new scale of industrialized meat production transformed the landscape. Buffalo herds, grasslands, and old-growth forests gave way to cattle, corn, and wheat. Chicago became the Gateway City, a crossroads connecting American agricultural goods, capital markets in New York and London, and consumers from all corners of the United States.

Technological innovation accompanied economic development. For April Fool's Day in 1878, the New York Daily Graphic published a fictitious interview with the celebrated inventor Thomas A. Edison. The piece described the "biggest invention of the age"-a new Edison machine that could create forty different kinds of food and drink out of only air, water, and dirt. "Meat will no longer be killed and vegetables no longer grown, except by savages," Edison promised. The machine would end "famine and pauperism." And all for $5 or $6 per machine! The story was a joke, of course, but Edison nevertheless received inquiries from readers wondering when the food machine would be ready for the market. Americans had apparently witnessed such startling technological advances-advances that would have seemed far-fetched mere years earlier-that the Edison food machine seemed entirely plausible.

In September 1878, Edison announced a new and ambitious line of research and development-electric power and lighting. The scientific principles behind dynamos and electric motors-the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical power, and vice versa-were long known, but Edison applied the age's bureaucratic and commercial ethos to the problem. Far from a lone inventor gripped by inspiration toiling in isolation, Edison advanced the model of commercially minded management of research and development. Edison folded his two identities, business manager and inventor, together. He called his Menlo Park research laboratory an "invention factory" and promised to turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so." He brought his fully equipped Menlo Park research laboratory and the skilled machinists and scientists he employed to bear on the problem of building an electric power system-and commercializing it.

By late fall 1879, Edison exhibited his system of power generation and electrical light for reporters and investors. Then he scaled up production. He sold generators to businesses. By the middle of 1883, Edison had overseen construction of 330 plants powering over sixty thousand lamps in factories, offices, printing houses, hotels, and theaters around the world. He convinced municipal officials to build central power stations and run power lines. New York's Pearl Street central station opened in September 1882 and powered a square mile of downtown Manhattan. Electricity revolutionized the world. It not only illuminated the night, it powered the Second Industrial Revolution. Factories could operate anywhere at any hour. Electric rail cars allowed for cities to build out and electric elevators allowed for them to build up.

Economic advances, technological innovation, social and cultural evolution, demographic changes: the United States was a nation transformed. Industry boosted productivity, railroads connected the nation, more and more Americans labored for wages, new bureaucratic occupations created a vast "white collar" middle class, and unprecedented fortunes rewarded the owners of capital. These revolutionary changes, of course, would not occur without conflict or consequence (see Chapter 16), but they demonstrated the profound transformations remaking the nation. Change was not confined to economics alone. Change gripped the lives of everyday Americans and fundamentally reshaped American culture.

Industry pulled ever more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. America's urban population increased sevenfold in the half century after the Civil War. Soon the United States had more large cities than any country in the world. The 1920 U.S. census revealed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas. Much of that urban growth came from the millions of immigrants pouring into the nation. Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States.

By the turn of the twentieth century, new immigrant groups such as Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews made up a larger percentage of arrivals than the Irish and Germans. The specific reasons that immigrants left their particular countries and the reasons they came to the United States (what historians call push and pull factors) varied. For example, a young husband and wife living in Sweden in the 1880s and unable to purchase farmland might read an advertisement for inexpensive land in the American Midwest and immigrate to the United States to begin a new life. A young Italian man might simply hope to labor in a steel factory long enough to save up enough money to return home and purchase land for a family. A Russian Jewish family persecuted in European pogroms might look to the United States as a sanctuary. Or perhaps a Japanese migrant might hear of fertile farming land on the West Coast and choose to sail for California. But if many factors pushed people away from their home countries, by far the most important factor drawing immigrants was economics. Immigrants came to the United States looking for work.

Industrial capitalism was the most important factor that drew immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Immigrant workers labored in large industrial complexes producing goods such as steel, textiles, and food products, replacing smaller and more local workshops. The influx of immigrants, alongside a large movement of Americans from the countryside to the city, helped propel the rapid growth of cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. By 1890, immigrants and their children accounted for roughly 60 percent of the population in most large northern cities (and sometimes as high as 80 or 90 percent). Many immigrants, especially from Italy and the Balkans, always intended to return home with enough money to purchase land. But what about those who stayed? Did the new arrivals assimilate together in the American melting pot-becoming just like those already in the United States-or did they retain, and sometimes even strengthen, their traditional ethnic identities? The answer lies somewhere in between. Immigrants from specific countries-and often even specific communities-often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. They formed vibrant organizations and societies, such as Italian workmen's clubs, Eastern European Jewish mutual aid societies, and Polish Catholic churches, to ease the transition to their new American home. Immigrant communities published newspapers in dozens of languages and purchased spaces to keep their arts, languages, and traditions alive. And from these foundations they facilitated even more immigration: after staking out a claim to some corner of American life, they wrote home and encouraged others to follow them (historians call this chain migration).

Many cities' politics adapted to immigrant populations. The infamous urban political machines often operated as a kind of mutual aid society. New York City's Democratic Party machine, popularly known as Tammany Hall, drew the greatest ire from critics and seemed to embody all of the worst of city machines, but it also responded to immigrant needs. In 1903, journalist William Riordon published a book, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, which chronicled the activities of ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt elaborately explained to Riordon the difference between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft": "I made my pile in politics, but, at the same time, I served the organization and got more big improvements for New York City than any other livin' man." While exposing corruption, Riordon also revealed the hard work Plunkitt undertook on behalf of his largely immigrant constituency. On a typical day, Riordon wrote, Plunkitt was awakened at two a.m. to bail out a saloonkeeper who stayed open too late, was awakened again at six a.m. because of a fire in the neighborhood and spent time finding lodgings for the families displaced by the fire, and, after spending the rest of the morning in court to secure the release of several of his constituents, found jobs for four unemployed men, attended an Italian funeral, visited a church social, and dropped in on a Jewish wedding. He returned home at midnight.

Tammany Hall's corruption, especially under the reign of William "Boss" Tweed, was legendary, but the public works projects that funded Tammany Hall's graft also provided essential infrastructure and public services for the city's rapidly expanding population. Water, sewer, and gas lines; schools, hospitals, civic buildings, and museums; police and fire departments; roads, parks (notably Central Park), and bridges (notably the Brooklyn Bridge): all could, in whole or in part, be credited to Tammany's reign. Still, machine politics could never be enough. As the urban population exploded, many immigrants found themselves trapped in crowded, crime-ridden slums. Americans eventually took notice of this urban crisis and proposed municipal reforms but also grew concerned about the declining quality of life in rural areas.

While cities boomed, rural worlds languished. Some Americans scoffed at rural backwardness and reveled in the countryside's decay, but many romanticized the countryside, celebrated rural life, and wondered what had been lost in the cities. Sociologist Kenyon Butterfield, concerned by the sprawling nature of industrial cities and suburbs, regretted the eroding social position of rural citizens and farmers: "Agriculture does not hold the same relative rank among our industries that it did in former years." Butterfield saw "the farm problem" as part of "the whole question of democratic civilization." He and many others thought the rise of the cities and the fall of the countryside threatened traditional American values. Many proposed conservation. Liberty Hyde Bailey, a botanist and rural scholar selected by Theodore Roosevelt to chair a federal Commission on Country Life in 1907, believed that rural places and industrial cities were linked: "Every agricultural question is a city question."

Many longed for a middle path between the cities and the country. New suburban communities on the outskirts of American cities defined themselves in opposition to urban crowding. Americans contemplated the complicated relationships between rural places, suburban living, and urban spaces. Los Angeles became a model for the suburban development of rural places. Dana Barlett, a social reformer in Los Angeles, noted that the city, stretching across dozens of small towns, was "a better city" because of its residential identity as a "city of homes." This language was seized upon by many suburbs that hoped to avoid both urban sprawl and rural decay. In Glendora, one of these small towns on the outskirts of Los Angeles, local leaders were "loath as anyone to see it become cosmopolitan." Instead, in order to have Glendora "grow along the lines necessary to have it remain an enjoyable city of homes," they needed to "bestir ourselves to direct its growth" by encouraging not industry or agriculture but residential development.

"There was a South of slavery and secession," Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. "That South is dead." Grady captured the sentiment of many white southern business and political leaders who imagined a New South that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture. He promoted the region's economic possibilities and mutual future prosperity through an alliance of northern capital and southern labor. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region's economy in the North's image. They wanted industry and they wanted infrastructure. But the past could not be escaped. Economically and socially, the "New South" would still be much like the old.

A "New South" seemed an obvious need. The Confederacy's failed insurrection wreaked havoc on the southern economy and crippled southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four million enslaved Americans-representing the wealth and power of the antebellum white South-threw off their chains and walked proudly forward into freedom.

Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass "Jim Crow" laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The reestablishment of white supremacy after the "redemption" of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a "New" South. Perhaps nothing harked so forcefully back to the barbaric southern past than the wave of lynchings-the extralegal murder of individuals by vigilantes-that washed across the South after Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or fabricated crimes or for no crimes at all, white mobs murdered roughly five thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Lynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly common. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the man's wife, Sam Hose was captured by a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching quickly spread, and specially chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a can of kerosene over his body and burned him alive.

At the barbaric height of southern lynching, in the last years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were most frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where southern Black people were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of white landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over five hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish Black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women's rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton-who would later become the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate-endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week." When opponents argued that lynching violated victims' constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, "Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution."

Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching advocate, lost three friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South's lynching culture and exposed the myth of the Black rapist. The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United States. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed bill was never enacted.

Lynching was not only the form of racial violence that survived Reconstruction. White political violence continued to follow African American political participation and labor organization, however severely circumscribed. When the Populist insurgency created new opportunities for black political activism, white Democrats responded with terror. In North Carolina, Populists and Republicans "fused" together and won stunning electoral gains in 1896. Shocked White Democrats formed "Red Shirt" groups, paramilitary organizations dedicated to eradicating black political participation and restoring Democratic rule through violence and intimidation. Launching a self-described "white supremacy campaign" of violence and intimidation against black voters and officeholders during the 1898 state elections, the Red Shirts effectively took back state government. But municipal elections were not held that year in Wilmington, where Fusionists controlled city government. After manning armed barricades blocking black voters from entering the town to vote in the state elections, the Red Shirts drafted a "White Declaration of Independence" which declared "that that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin." 457 white Democrats signed the document. They also issued a twelve-hour ultimatum that editor of the city's black daily paper flee the city. The editor left, but it wasn't enough. Twelve hours later, hundreds of Red Shirts raided the city's armory and ransacked the newspaper office anyway. The mob swelled and turned on the city's black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses and opening fire on any Black person they found. Dozens were killed and hundreds more fled the city. The mob then forced the mayor, the city's aldermen, and the police chief, at gun point, to immediately resign. To ensure their gains, the Democrats rounded up prominent fusionists, placed them on railroad cars, and, under armed guard, sent them out of the state. The mob installed and swore in their own replacements. It was a full-blown coup.

Lynching and organized terror campaigns were only the violent worst of the South's racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life also reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples, and white men, ever anxious of relationships between Black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police the racial divide.

In politics, de facto limitations of Black voting had suppressed Black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters with physical and economic threats. And then, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented de jure, or legal, disfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor white and poor Black Americans alike), effectively denying Black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.

With white supremacy secured, prominent white southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South's economy and convincing the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the recent past. A kind of civic religion known as the "Lost Cause" glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to a mythic imagined past inhabited by contented and loyal slaves, benevolent and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had little to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for home and honor, not the continued ownership of human beings. The New South, then, would be built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded by political and social custom.

Henry Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women's groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and celebrated Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Across the South, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but across the country. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the South against the corruption of African American and northern "carpetbag" misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed film director David W. Griffith adapted Dixon's novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The film almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination.

While Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the South into the modern world. The railroads became their focus. The region had lagged behind the North in the railroad building boom of the midnineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region's rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. The rising popularity of the automobile after the turn of the century only increased pressure for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.

Along with new transportation networks, New South boosters continued to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. While agriculture-cotton in particular-remained the mainstay of the region's economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region, and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally flee the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunity for rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen.

In most cases, as in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. African American women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for white families. As poor as white southern mill workers were, southern Black people were poorer. Some white mill workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew up alongside factories were whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.

That a "New South" emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and World War I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality but if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, however, the New South looked much like the Old. Boosters such as Henry Grady said the South was done with racial questions but lynching and segregation and the institutionalization of Jim Crow exposed the South's lingering racial obsessions. Meanwhile, most southerners still toiled in agriculture and still lived in poverty. Industrial development and expanding infrastructure, rather than re-creating the South, coexisted easily with white supremacy and an impoverished agricultural economy. The trains came, factories were built, and capital was invested, but the region remained mired in poverty and racial apartheid. Much of the "New South," then, was anything but new.

In 1905, Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller donated $100,000 (about $2.5 million today) to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Rockefeller was the richest man in America but also one of the most hated and mistrusted. Even admirers conceded that he achieved his wealth through often illegal and usually immoral business practices. Journalist Ida Tarbell had made waves describing Standard Oil's long-standing ruthlessness and predilections for political corruption. Clergymen, led by reformer Washington Gladden, fiercely protested the donation. A decade earlier, Gladden had asked of such donations, "Is this clean money? Can any man, can any institution, knowing its origin, touch it without being defiled?" Gladden said, "In the cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people by the hundreds robbed of their little all to build up the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster that a human being may become."

Despite widespread criticism, the board accepted Rockefeller's donation. Board president Samuel Capen did not defend Rockefeller, arguing that the gift was charitable and the board could not assess the origin of every donation, but the dispute shook Capen. Was a corporate background incompatible with a religious organization? The "tainted money debate" reflected questions about the proper relationship between religion and capitalism. With rising income inequality, would religious groups be forced to support either the elite or the disempowered? What was moral in the new industrial United States? And what obligations did wealth bring? Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie popularized the idea of a "gospel of wealth" in an 1889 article, claiming that "the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth" was the moral obligation of the rich to give to charity. Farmers and labor organizers, meanwhile, argued that God had blessed the weak and that new Gilded Age fortunes and corporate management were inherently immoral. As time passed, American churches increasingly adapted themselves to the new industrial order. Even Gladden came to accept donations from the so-called robber barons, such as the Baptist John D. Rockefeller, who increasingly touted the morality of business. Meanwhile, as many churches wondered about the compatibility of large fortunes with Christian values, others were concerned for the fate of traditional American masculinity.

The economic and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-including increased urbanization, immigration, advancements in science and technology, patterns of consumption and the new availability of goods, and new awareness of economic, racial, and gender inequalities-challenged traditional gender norms. At the same time, urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented new opportunities to challenge traditional gender and sexual norms. Many women, carrying on a campaign that stretched long into the past, vied for equal rights. They became activists: they targeted municipal reforms, launched labor rights campaigns, and, above all, bolstered the suffrage movement.

Urbanization and immigration fueled anxieties that old social mores were being subverted and that old forms of social and moral policing were increasingly inadequate. The anonymity of urban spaces presented an opportunity in particular for female sexuality and for male and female sexual experimentation along a spectrum of orientations and gender identities. Anxiety over female sexuality reflected generational tensions and differences, as well as racial and class ones. As young women pushed back against social mores through premarital sexual exploration and expression, social welfare experts and moral reformers labeled such girls feeble-minded, believing even that such unfeminine behavior could be symptomatic of clinical insanity rather than free-willed expression. Generational differences exacerbated the social and familial tensions provoked by shifting gender norms. Youths challenged the norms of their parents' generations by donning new fashions and enjoying the delights of the city. Women's fashion loosed its physical constraints: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose. The newfound physical freedom enabled by looser dress was also mimicked in the pursuit of other freedoms.

While many women worked to liberate themselves, many, sometimes simultaneously, worked to uplift others. Women's work against alcohol propelled temperance into one of the foremost moral reforms of the period. Middle-class, typically Protestant women based their assault on alcohol on the basis of their feminine virtue, Christian sentiment, and their protective role in the family and home. Others, like Jane Addams and settlement house workers, sought to impart a middle-class education on immigrant and working-class women through the establishment of settlement homes. Other reformers touted a "scientific motherhood": the new science of hygiene was deployed as a method of both social uplift and moralizing, particularly of working-class and immigrant women.

Women vocalized new discontents through literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" attacked the "naturalness" of feminine domesticity and critiqued Victorian psychological remedies administered to women, such as the "rest cure." Kate Chopin's The Awakening, set in the American South, likewise criticized the domestic and familial role ascribed to women by society and gave expression to feelings of malaise, desperation, and desire. Such literature directly challenged the status quo of the Victorian era's constructions of femininity and feminine virtue, as well as established feminine roles.

While many men worried about female activism, they worried too about their own masculinity. To anxious observers, industrial capitalism was withering American manhood. Rather than working on farms and in factories, where young men formed physical muscle and spiritual grit, new generations of workers labored behind desks, wore white collars, and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, appeared "black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, [and] paste-complexioned." Neurologist George Beard even coined a medical term, neurasthenia, for a new emasculated condition that was marked by depression, indigestion, hypochondria, and extreme nervousness. The philosopher William James called it "Americanitis." Academics increasingly warned that America had become a nation of emasculated men.

Churches too worried about feminization. Women had always comprised a clear majority of church memberships in the United States, but now the theologian Washington Gladden said, "A preponderance of female influence in the Church or anywhere else in society is unnatural and injurious." Many feared that the feminized church had feminized Christ himself. Rather than a rough-hewn carpenter, Jesus had been made "mushy" and "sweetly effeminate," in the words of Walter Rauschenbusch. Advocates of a so-called muscular Christianity sought to stiffen young men's backbones by putting them back in touch with their primal manliness. Pulling from contemporary developmental theory, they believed that young men ought to evolve as civilization evolved, advancing from primitive nature-dwelling to modern industrial enlightenment. To facilitate "primitive" encounters with nature, muscular Christians founded summer camps and outdoor boys' clubs like the Woodcraft Indians, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and the Boy Brigades-all precursors of the Boy Scouts. Other champions of muscular Christianity, such as the newly formed Young Men's Christian Association, built gymnasiums, often attached to churches, where youths could strengthen their bodies as well as their spirits. It was a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) leader who coined the term bodybuilding, and others invented the sports of basketball and volleyball.

Muscular Christianity, though, was about even more than building strong bodies and minds. Many advocates also ardently championed Western imperialism, cheering on attempts to civilize non-Western peoples. Gilded Age men were encouraged to embrace a particular vision of masculinity connected intimately with the rising tides of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Contemporary ideals of American masculinity at the turn of the century developed in concert with the United States' imperial and militaristic endeavors in the West and abroad. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders embodied the idealized image of the tall, strong, virile, and fit American man that simultaneously epitomized the ideals of power that informed the United States' imperial agenda. Roosevelt and others like him believed a reinvigorated masculinity would preserve the American race's superiority against foreign foes and the effeminizing effects of overcivilization.

But while many fretted about traditional American life, others lost themselves in new forms of mass culture. Vaudeville signaled new cultural worlds. A unique variety of popular entertainments, these traveling circuit shows first appeared during the Civil War and peaked between 1880 and 1920. Vaudeville shows featured comedians, musicians, actors, jugglers, and other talents that could captivate an audience. Unlike earlier rowdy acts meant for a male audience that included alcohol, vaudeville was considered family-friendly, "polite" entertainment, though the acts involved offensive ethnic and racial caricatures of African Americans and recent immigrants. Vaudeville performances were often small and quirky, though venues such as the renowned Palace Theatre in New York City signaled true stardom for many performers. Popular entertainers such as silent film star Charlie Chaplin and magician Harry Houdini made names for themselves on the vaudeville circuit. But if live entertainment still captivated audiences, others looked to entirely new technologies.

By the turn of the century, two technologies pioneered by Edison-the phonograph and motion pictures-stood ready to revolutionize leisure and help create the mass entertainment culture of the twentieth century. The phonograph was the first reliable device capable of recording and reproducing sound. But it was more than that. The phonograph could create multiple copies of recordings, sparking a great expansion of the market for popular music. Although the phonograph was a technical success, Edison at first had trouble developing commercial applications for it. He thought it might be used for dictation, recording audio letters, preserving speeches and dying words of great men, producing talking clocks, or teaching elocution. He did not anticipate that its greatest use would be in the field of mass entertainment, but Edison's sales agents soon reported that many phonographs were being used for just that, especially in so-called phonograph parlors, where customers could pay a nickel to hear a piece of music. By the turn of the century, Americans were purchasing phonographs for home use. Entertainment became the phonograph's major market.

Inspired by the success of the phonograph as an entertainment device, Edison decided in 1888 to develop "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." In 1888, he patented the concept of motion pictures. In 1889, he innovated the rolling of film. By 1891, he was exhibiting a motion-picture camera (a kinetograph) and a viewer (a kinetoscope). By 1894, the Edison Company had produced about seventy-five films suitable for sale and viewing. They could be viewed through a small eyepiece in an arcade or parlor. They were short, typically about three minutes long. Many of the early films depicted athletic feats and competitions. One 1894 film, for example, showed a six-round boxing match. The catalog description gave a sense of the appeal it had for male viewers: "Full of hard fighting, clever hits, punches, leads, dodges, body blows and some slugging." Other early kinetoscope subjects included Indian dances, nature and outdoor scenes, re-creations of historical events, and humorous skits. By 1896, the Edison Vitascope could project film, shifting audiences away from arcades and pulling them into theaters. Edison's film catalog meanwhile grew in sophistication. He sent filmmakers to distant and exotic locales like Japan and China. Long-form fictional films created a demand for "movie stars," such as the glamorous Mary Pickford, the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, the acrobatic comedian Buster Keaton, who began to appear in the popular imagination beginning around 1910. Alongside professional boxing and baseball, the film industry was creating the modern culture of celebrity that would characterize twentieth-century mass entertainment.

After enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States abandoned itself to industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and scope. The nature of labor shifted. A middle class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The Jim Crow South stripped away the vestiges of Reconstruction, and New South boosters papered over the scars. Industrialists hunted profits. Evangelists appealed to people's morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. In all of its many facets, by the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had been radically transformed. And the transformations continued to ripple outward into the West and overseas, and inward into radical protest and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.
1. Andrew Carnegie on "The Triumph of America" (1885)
Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie celebrated and explored American economic progress in this 1885 article, later reprinted in his 1886 book, Triumphant Democracy.
2. Henry Grady on the New South (1886) Atlanta newspaperman and apostle of the "New South," Henry Grady, won national recognition for his December 21, 1886 speech to the New England Society in New York City. 3. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Lynch Law in America" (1900) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born enslaved in Mississippi, was a pioneering activist and journalist. She did much to expose the epidemic of lynching in the United States and her writing and research exploded many of the justifications-particularly the rape of white women by Black men-commonly offered to justify the practice. 4. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) Henry Adams, the great grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, the son of a major American diplomat, and an accomplished Harvard historian, writing in the third person, describes his experience at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900 and writes of his encounter with "forces totally new." 5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913) Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing "The Yellow Wallpaper," a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women. In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece. 6. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, combined photography and journalism into a powerful indictment of poverty in America. His 1890, How the Other Half Lives shocked Americans with its raw depictions of urban slums. Here, he describes poverty in New York.
7. Rose Cohen on the World Beyond her Immigrant Neighborhood (ca.1897/1918) Rose Cohen was born in Russia in 1880 as Rahel Golub. She immigrated to the United States in 1892 and lived in a Russian Jewish neighborhood in New York's Lower East Side. Her, she writes about her encounter with the world outside of her ethnic neighborhood. 8. Mulberry Street (ca. 1900) At the turn of the century, New York City's Lower East Side 9. Coney Island (ca. 1910-1915) Amusement-hungry Americans flocked to new entertainments at the turn of the twentieth century. In this early-twentieth century photograph, visitors enjoy Luna Park, one of the original amusement parks on Brooklyn's famous Coney Island. became the most densely packed urban area in the world. This colorized photomechanical print from the Detroit Photographic depicts daily life on Mulberry Street, the area's central artery.
This chapter was edited by David Hochfelder, with content contributions by Jacob Betz, David Hochfelder, Gerard Koeppel, Scott Libson, Kyle Livie, Paul Matzko, Isabella Morales, Andrew Robichaud, Kate Sohasky, Joseph Super, Susan Thomas, Kaylynn Washnock, and Kevin Young.

Recommended citation: Jacob Betz et al., "Life in Industrial America," David Hochfelder, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Beckert, Sven. Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Briggs, Laura. "The Race of Hysteria: 'Overcivilization' and the 'Savage' Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology." American Quarterly 52 (June 2000). 246-273.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Cole, Stephanie, and Natalie J. Ring, eds. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012.

Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Hicks, Cheryl. Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Kasson, John F. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Random House, 1993.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Odem, Mary. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements. Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Putney, Clifford. Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951.

Notes

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When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. He described a rushed and crowded city, a "huge wilderness" with "scores of miles of these terrible streets" and their "hundred thousand of these terrible people."

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Printable Version He was hailed as "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The New York World, in 1901, called him "Our Greatest Living American, The Foremost Creative and Constructive Mind of This Country, Our True National Genius." He was portrayed in the movies by two different Hollywood stars, Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy.

He had 1,093 patents to his name and paved the way for many electricity based technologies years before the physics of electricity was understood. His inventions include the dictating machine, the electric light, the electrified railroad, the fluorescent lamp, the mimeograph machine, the movie camera, the phonograph, Portland cement, and wax paper. But his greatest invention was none of these--it was the development of the modern research laboratory and a research team.

Born in rural Ohio in 1847, Thomas Edison was the archetypal self-made titan who had risen from humble origins to become the most famous inventor in the world. He had little formal schooling and his outlook was quintessentially American: practical, optimistic, and suspicious of intellectuals. By the age of 10, he had a small chemical laboratory in his cellar and was operating a home made telegraph. When he was 12, he hawked newspapers, magazines, and candy on a train from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. He printed a newspaper and conducted experiments in the train's baggage room. When one of his experiments started a fire, he lost his job.

He was partially deaf, and was ridiculed by other students and never completed grade school. When a teacher pronounced his mind "addled," his mother took him out of school and taught him herself. His second wife would tap out conversations in Morse code on his knee. In later years, he said that his lack of hearing saved him from many distractions.

His started out as an itinerant telegraph operator, traveling from town to town; his first invention was a device that repeated Morse code at a slower speed, so he could more easily transcribe the messages. His first invention to make money was a ticker tape to convey stock market prices to brokerage houses. He became a millionaire in his forties.

He often worked 24 hours straight, except for five-minute naps. "Genius," he said, "was one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

When he announced the phonograph in 1877, a Yale University professor told the New York Sun that "The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous." After he announced that he had made an incandescent lamp, a board of inquiry convened by the British Parliament concluded that his claim was impossible and "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men."

Contrary to popular belief, he did not invent the light bulb. Rather, he figured out how to make it a durable and inexpensive consumer item. He promised to make bulbs "so cheap that only the wealthy can afford to burn candles." The key was to find a long-lasting filament. He tested over 6,000 different materials.

Far from being a solitary genius, Edison created the first modern research laboratory. Far from being a lone tinkerer, he employed as many as 200 laboratory assistants and machinists at his facilities in Menlo Park and West Orange, N.J. His West Orange factory had 10,000 employees in the mid-1910s. Edison demonstrated that it was possible to produce a steady stream of new inventions and technologies. Early in his career he said that his goal was "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."

He was also the first inventor to develop links with major corporations that were willing to finance his inventions. He formed links with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owned Western Union, the telegraph company, and with J.P. Morgan.

He made some mistakes. He championed direct current (DC), when George Westinghouse pushed for alternating current (AC), which could move efficiency over long distances. He stuck with a battery-powered electric car, while Henry Ford put out a cheaper gas-powered model. He spent millions on pre-fabricated concrete houses.

A prankster, he nicknamed his children Dot and Dash and proposed to his second wife in Morse code.

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Printable Version He was hailed as "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The New York World, in 1901, called him "Our Greatest Living American, The Foremost Creative and Constructive Mind of This Country, Our True National Genius." He was portrayed in the movies by two different Hollywood stars, Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy.

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Printable Version Toward the end of the 19th century, a New York neurologist named George M. Beard coined the term "neurasthenia" to describe a psychological ailment that afflicted a growing number of Americans. Neurasthenia's symptoms included "nervous dyspepsia, insomnia, hysteria, hypochondria, asthma, sick-headache, skin rashes, hayfever, premature baldness, inebriety, hot and cold flashes, nervous exhaustion, brain-collapse, or forms of 'elementary insanity.'" Among those who suffered from neurasthenia-like symptoms at some point in their lives were Theodore Roosevelt, settlement house founder Jane Addams, psychologist William James, painter Frederic Remington, and novelist Theodore Dreiser.

According to expert medical opinion, neurasthenia's underlying cause was "over-civilization." The frantic pace of modern life, nervous overstimulation, stress, and emotional repression produced debilitating bouts of depression, anxiety attacks, and nervous prostration. Fears of over-civilization pervaded late 19th century American culture. Social critics worried that urban life was producing a generation of pathetic, pampered, physically and morally enfeebled 97 pound weaklings. Modern Americans, in this view, were poor successors to the stalwart Americans who had fought the Civil War and tamed a continent.

A sharply falling birth rate sparked fears that the native-born middle class was, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, committing "race suicide" by allowing their numbers to be swamped by a flood of immigrants. A host of therapies promised to relieve the symptoms of neurasthenia, including such precursors of modern tranquilizers as Dr. Hammond's Nerve and Brain Pills. Sears even sold an electrical contraption called the Heidelberg Electric Belt, designed to reduce anxiety by sending electric shocks to the genitals. Many physicians prescribed physical exercise for men and rest cures for women. But the main form of release for late 19th century Americans from the pressures, stresses, and restrictions of modern life was by turning to sports, outdoor activities, and a vibrant popular culture.

Few Americans are unfamiliar with the wrenching economic transformations of the late 19th century, the consolidation of economic transformations of the late 19th century, the consolidation of industry, the integration of the national economy, and the rise of the corporation. But few Americans realize that this period also saw the birth of modern culture.

In the last years of the 19th century, an ethos of self-fulfillment, leisure and sensual satisfaction began to replace the Victorian spirit of self-denial, self-restraint, and domesticity. Visual images took their place beside words and reading, which had been the essence of Victorian high learning. A new respect for energy, strength, and virility overtook the genteel endorsement of eternal truths and high moral ideals. Above all, a varied culture deeply divided by class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and locality gave way to a vibrant, commercialized mass culture that provided all Americans with standardized entertainment and information.

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Printable Version Toward the end of the 19th century, a New York neurologist named George M. Beard coined the term "neurasthenia" to describe a psychological ailment that afflicted a growing number of Americans.

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Printable Version The new mood could be seen in a rage for competitive athletics and team sports. It was in the 1890s that boxing began to rival baseball as the nation's most popular sport, basketball was invented, football swept the nation's college campuses, and golf, track, and wrestling became popular pastimes. The celebration of vigor could also be seen in a new enthusiasm for such outdoor activities as hiking, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, camping, and bicycling.

A new bold, energetic spirit was also apparent in popular music, in a craze for ragtime, jazz, and patriotic military marches. The culture of toughness and virility appeared in the growth of nationalism (culminating in 1898 in America's "Splendid Little War" against Spain), the condemnation of sissies and stuffed shirts, and the growing popularity of aggressively masculine western novels such as Owen Wister's The Virginian.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the New Woman--personified by the tall, athletic Gibson Girl--supplanted the frail, submissive Victorian woman as a cultural ideal. The new woman began to work outside the home in increasing numbers, attend high school and college, and, increasingly, press for the vote. During the 1890s, American popular culture was in a full-scale revolt against the stifling Victorian code of propriety.

During the mid-19th century, urban reformers had responded to the rapid growth of cities by advocating the construction of parks to serve as rural retreats in the midst of urban jungles. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park, believed that the park's bucolic calm would instill the values of sobriety and self-control in the urban masses. But by the end of the century, it was clear that those masses had grown tired of sobriety and self-control. This was clearly seen at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where the most popular area was the boisterous, rowdy Midway. Here visitors rode the ferris wheel and watched "Little Egypt" and "hootchie-koochie girls" perform exotic dances.

Entrepreneurs were quick to satisfy the public's desire for fast-paced entertainment. During the 1890s, a series of popular amusement parks opened in Coney Island in New York. Unlike Central Park, Coney Island glorified adventure. It offered exotic, dreamlike landscapes and a loose, free social environment. At Coney Island men could remove their coats and ties and both sexes could enjoy rare personal freedom.

Central Park was supposed to reinforce self-control and delayed gratification. Coney Island was a consumer's world of extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry, and instant gratification. It attracted working-class Americans who longed for a taste of the good life. If a person could never hope to own a mansion in Newport, R.I., he or she could for a few dimes experience the exotic pleasures of Luna Park or Dreamland Park. Even the rides in the amusement park were designed to create illusions and break down reality. Mirrors distorted peoples' images and rides threw them off balance. At Luna Park, the "Witching Waves" simulated the bobbing of a ship at high sea, and the "Tickler" featured spinning circular cars that threw riders together.

In part, the desire for intense physical and emotional experience was met through sports, athletics, and out-of-door activities. But its primary outlet was vicarious--through mass culture. Craving more intense experience, eager to break free of the confining boundaries of genteel culture, Americans turned to new kinds of newspapers and magazines and new forms of commercial entertainment.

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Printable Version The new mood could be seen in a rage for competitive athletics and team sports. It was in the 1890s that boxing began to rival baseball as the nation's most popular sport, basketball was invented, football swept the nation's college campuses, and golf, track, and wrestling became popular pastimes.

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Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies. American culture also made a critical shift to commercialized forms of entertainment.

The Mass Market Newspaper

The urban tabloid was the first instrument to appear. It was pioneered by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and E.W. Scripp's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These popular newspapers differed dramatically from the upper-class and staunchly partisan political newspapers that had dominated 19th century journalism. They featured banner headlines, a multitude of photographs and cartoons, and an emphasis on local news, crime, scandal, society news, and sports. Large ads made up half a paper's content, compared to just thirty percent in earlier newspapers. For easier reading on street railways, page size was cut, stories were shortened, and the text heavily illustrated.

The Hungarian born Pulitzer migrated to the United States at the age of 17 and purchased the struggling New York World from financier Jay Gould. His newspaper crusaded against corruption and fraud. He pledged that the World would be "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates" and would "expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses...[and] serve and battle for the people." Using simple words, a lively style, and many illustrations, his newspaper could be read by many immigrants who understood little English. By 1905, the World had a circulation of two million.

Hearst developed the newspaper's entertainment potential. Entertainment was stick in trade of yellow journalism (named for the "yellow kid" comic strip that appeared in the Journal). Among the innovations he pioneered were the first color comic strips, advice columns, women's pages, fashion pages, and sports pages.

Scripps's legacy was the development of the business side of the modern American newspaper. From the early 1870s through his retirement in 1908, he established or bought more than 40 newspapers, stretching from Portland, Ore., to New York City. His biggest innovations were a national news service and a feature syndicate that provided all of his newspapers with common material. He claimed that he only needed two employees--a reporter and an editor--to start a newspaper, because he could rely on his news service and features syndicate. Syndicated material accounted for 25 to 35 percent of each issue and, at times, even up to half or three-quarters.

Instead of directly competing for established readers, he instead sought to serve new readers. In his opinion, most newspapers either ignored or were hostile to the working class. His news stressed labor issues and was directed to a less-educated audience. His newspapers sold for just a penny at a time when others sold for two cents for home delivery and five cents on the street. His papers were half the size of other papers of the time.

His papers exposed trusts, supported strikes, and favored government regulation of food and transportation industries, as well as government ownership of water and electric utilities. They advocated power for the common people by direct election of public office and through initiative, referendum, and recall. They offered advice on how to run a home on a limited budget.

The Mass Circulation National Magazine, the Bestseller, and Records

Also during the 1890s the world of magazine publishing was revolutionized by the rise of the country's first mass circulation national magazines. After the Civil War, the magazine field was dominated by a small number of sedate magazines-like The Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribner's--written for "gentle" reader with highly intellectual tastes. The poetry, serious fiction, and wood engravings that filled these monthly's pages rigidly conformed to upper-class Victorian standards of taste. These magazines embodied what the philosopher George Santayana called the "genteel tradition," the idea that art and literature should reinforce morality not portray reality. Art and literature, the custodians of culture believed, should transcend the real and uphold the ideal. Poet James Russell Lowell spoke for other genteel writers when he said that no man should describe any activity that would make his wife or daughter blush.

The founders of the nation's first mass-circulation magazines considered the older "quality" magazines stale and elitist. In contrast, their magazines featured practical advice, popularized science, gossip, human interest stories, celebrity profiles, interviews, "muckraking" investigations, pictures, articles on timely topics--and a profusion of ads. Instead of cultivating a select audience, the new magazines had a very different set of priorities. By running popular articles, editors sought to maximize circulation, which, in turn, attracted advertising that kept the magazine's price low. By 1900, the nation's largest magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal reached 850,000 subscribers--more than eight times the readership of Scribner's or Harper's.

The end of the 19th century also marked a critical turning point in the history of book publishing, as marketing wizards like Frank Doubleday organized the first national book promotional campaigns, created the modern best seller, and transformed popular writers like Jack London into celebrities. The world of the Victorian man of letters, the defender of "Culture" against "Anarchy," had ended.

At the International Exposition in Paris in 1878, 30,000 people lined up to see the first demonstration of Thomas Edison's phonograph. The phonograph was treated as a dictation machine for a decade after Thomas Edison invented it in 1877. It was not until 1890 that cylinders of recorded music were first sold. In 1901, cylinders gave way to discs.

Advertising

In 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) launched the first million dollar national advertising campaign. It succeeded in making Uneeda biscuits and their water-proof "In-er-Seal" box popular household items. During the 1880s and 1890s, patent medicine manufacturers, department stores, and producers of low price packaged consumer goods (like Campbell Soups, H.J. Heinz, and Quaker Oats), developed modern advertising techniques. Where earlier advertisers made little use of brand names illustrations, or trademarks, the new ads made use of snappy slogans and colorful packages. As early as 1900, advertisements began to use psychology to arouse consumer demand by suggesting that a product would contribute to the consumer's social and psychic well-being. To induce purchases, observed a trade journal in 1890, a consumer "must be aroused, excited, terrified." Listerine mouthwash promised to cure "halitosis." Scott tissue claimed to prevent infections caused by harsh toilet paper.

By stressing instant gratification and personal fulfillment in their ads, modern advertising helped undermine an earlier Victorian ethos emphasizing thrift, self-denial, delayed gratification, and hard work. In various ways, it transformed Americans from "savers" to "spenders" and told them to give in to their desire for luxury.

The Purveyors of Mass Culture

The creators of the modern instruments of mass culture tended to share a common element in their background. Most were "outsiders"--recent immigrants or Southerners, Midwesterners, or Westerners. Joseph Pulitzer was an Austrian Jew, the pioneering "new" magazine editors, Edward W. Bok and Samuel Sidney McClure, were also first-generation immigrants. Where the "genteel tradition" was dominated by men and women from Boston's elite culture or upper-class New York, the men who created modern mass culture had their initial training in daily newspapers, commerce, and popular entertainment--and, as a result, were more in touch with popular tastes. As outsiders, the creators of mass culture betrayed an almost voyeuristic interest in what they called the "romance of real life," with high life, low life, power, and status.

The new forms of popular culture that they helped create shared a common style: simple, direct, realistic, and colloquial. The 1890s were the years when a florid Victorian style was overthrown by a new "realistic" aesthetic. At various levels of American culture, writers and artists rebelled against the moralism and sentimentality of Victorian culture and sought to live objectively and truthfully, without idealization or avoiding the ugly. The quest for realism took a variety of guises. It could be seen in the naturalism of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, with their nightmarish depictions of urban poverty and exploitation in the paintings of the "ashcan" school of art, with their vivid portraits of tenements and congested streets and in the forceful, colorful prose of tabloid reporters and muckraking journalists, who cut through the Victorian veil of reticence surrounding such topics as sex, political corruption, and working conditions in industry.

Mass Culture Blossoms

Although they relied on 19th century inventions, the most influential innovations in mass culture would take place after the turn-of-the-century. Thomas Edison first successfully projected moving pictures on a screen in 1896, but it would not be until 1903 that Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery"--the first American movie to tell a story --demonstrated the commercial appeal of motion pictures. And while Guglielmo Marconi proved the possibility of wireless communication in 1895, commercial radio broadcasting did not begin until 1920 and commercial television broadcasts until 1939. In the 20th century, these new instruments of mass communication would reach audiences of unprecedented size. By 1922, movies sold 40 million tickets a week and radios could be found in three million homes.

The emergence of these modern forms of mass communication had far-reaching effects upon American society. They broke down the isolation of local neighborhoods and communities and ensured that for the first time all Americans, -- regardless of their class, ethnicity, or locality -- began to share standardized information and entertainment.

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Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies.

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Printable Version During the late 19th century, a radical transformation took place in the way in which American business was structured and operated. The most obvious contrast involved the corporation's larger size and capitalization. The typical business establishment before the 1870s was financed by a single person or by several people bound together in a partnership. As a result, most businesses represented the wealth of only a few individuals. As late as 1880, the average factory had less than $1,800 in investment. Even the largest textile factories represented less than a million dollars in investment. In contrast, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was worth $600 million and U.S. Steel was valued at $1 billion.

Another contrast between the new corporate enterprises of the late 19th century and earlier businesses lies in the systems of ownership and management. Before the Civil War, almost all businesses were owned and managed by the same people. In the modern corporation, actual management was increasingly turned over to professional managers. Within corporations, a management revolution took place.

In the days before big business, business operations required little in the way of management and administration. Companies usually involved only a few partners and clerks. Usually, an owner oversaw all of a business' operations. To insure honesty in a distant office, a merchant might staff it with a relative.

As businesses grew larger, new bureaucratic hierarchies were necessary. A business' success increasingly depended on central coordination. To address this challenge, businesses created formal administrative structures, such as purchasing and accounting departments. Various levels of managers were established, clear lines of authority were devised, and formal rules were created to govern the company's operations. The managerial revolution helped to create a "new" middle class. Unlike the older middle class, which consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, and independent professionals, the new middle class was made up of white collar employees of corporations.

Yet another sweeping change in business operation was the corporation's increased size and geographical scale. Before the 1880s, most firms operated in a single town from a single office or factory. Most sales were made to customers in the immediate area. But the new corporate enterprises carried out their functions in widely scattered locations. As early as 1900, General Electric had plants in 23 cities.

In addition to carrying out business in an increasing number of locations, the new corporations also engaged in more kinds of business operations. Prior to the Civil War, merchants, wholesalers, and manufacturers tended to specialize in a single operation. But the late 19th century, greatly expanded their range of operations.

During the late 19th century, businesses typically grew as a result of vertical and horizontal integration. When a company integrated vertically, it brought together various phases in the process of production and distribution. Thus U.S. Steel took iron ore from the ground, transported it to its mills, turned it into steel and manufactured finished products, and shipped the products to wholesalers. Somewhat similarly, the great meat packing houses like Swift, which had 4,000 employees, and Armour, with 6,000, combined the business of raising, slaughtering, transporting, and wholesaling meat. Swift developed a fleet of refrigerator railroad cars, which allowed it to bring cattle and hogs to a central packing house in Chicago, where the company could make use of every part of the animal "except the squeal."

When a company integrated horizontally, it expanded into related fields of business. In the 1850s, an iron furnace might produce a single product such as cast iron or nails. But U.S. Steel produced a vast array of metal goods.

During the last third of the 19th century, the American economy was dramatically transformed. After 30 years of periodic economic crises marked by high unemployment and large numbers of business failures, business began to consolidate into progressively larger economic units.

Mythmakers sometimes look back on the late 19th century as the golden age of free enterprise. But it is important to emphasize that the rise of a new economy did not take place easily. Working conditions in many factories were appalling. Labor conflict was intense. Businesses were accused of price fixing, stock watering, and other abuses.

In the end, these abuses would bring about a political reaction. To address the problems of corporate power, the federal government instituted new forms of regulation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Printable Version During the late 19th century, a radical transformation took place in the way in which American business was structured and operated. The most obvious contrast involved the corporation's larger size and capitalization. The typical business establishment before the 1870s was financed by a single person or by several people bound together in a partnership.

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Printable Version By 1906, six large railroad systems controlled 95 percent of the nation's mileage. As early as 1904, the 2,000 largest firms in the United States made up less than one percent of the country's businesses. Yet they produced 40 percent of the nation's goods. By the early 20th century, many important sectors of the American economy were dominated by a handful of firms, a condition that economists call "oligopoly."

Why did business grow bigger? The classic explanation stresses such factors as:

the shift from water-powered to coal-powered factories, which freed manufacturers to locate their plants nearer to markets and suppliers.

transportation improvements that meant that firms could distribute their products to regional or national markets.

the development of new financial institutions--such as the stock market, commercial banks, and investment houses--that increased the availability of investment capital.

One of the pacesetters of the "new economy" was Montgomery Ward, the nation's first mail-order business. From its founding until 1926, Montgomery Ward owned no stories. It operated strictly on a mail order basis. Through its catalog, Ward brought consumer goods to a largely rural clientele.

To list these factors makes business growth seem like an orderly process. But this was not the way the process was experienced. The emergence of the modern corporation came largely as a response to economic instability.

During the late 19th century, business competition was cutthroat. In 1907, there were 1,564 separate railroad companies in the United States, and two years later there were 446 companies manufacturing steel. The challenges of competition were compounded by frequent economic contractions, or panics as they were known. Violent contractions gripped the country from 1873 to 1878 and from 1893 to 1897. There were briefer contractions in 1884, 1888, 1903, 1907, and 1911. During the panic of the mid-1870s, 47,000 businesses went bankrupt. In hard times, the competitive marketplace became a jungle and businessmen sought to find ways to overcome the rigors of competition.

Faced with recurring business slumps, mounting competition, and declining profits, the boldest businessmen experimented with new ways of creating financial stability. The first attempt to overcome destructive competition was the formation of pools or cartels. These were agreements among competitors to divide markets and forbid price cutting. As early as the 1870s, pools were formed to divide markets, fix production quotas, and set prices. Over the years, pools became trade associations, which devised methods for dividing markets and assisting failing firms.

The problem with pools was that they rarely survived an economic contraction. Financial depressions tempted some firms to cut prices and seek a larger share of the market.

Pools were too weak to solve the problem of competition because they were voluntary agreements. An alternative was the trust, under which owners of rival firms assigned their stock to a single board of trustees in return for non-voting, interest-bearing certificates. The trustees then fixed prices and marketing policies for all the companies. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was the first trust. Half a dozen industries followed, including alcohol distilling and sugar refining.

Trusts faced intense legal challenges on the grounds that they illegal restrained trade and violated the corporate charters of the participating firms. In 1890, Congress adopted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared trusts illegal. Trusts were then supplanted by a new legal entity, the holding company. This was a company with the power to purchase other companies. Perhaps the most famous holding company was General Motors, which purchased a number of automobile manufacturers.

A great surge in mergers took place in the American economy after 1897, when many of the largest corporations in such industries as steel and railroads were created. The number of mergers rose from 69 in 1897 to 303 in 1898 and 1,208 in 1899. By 1900, there were 73 combinations worth more than $10 million. Two thirds had been established in the previous three years.

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Printable Version By 1906, six large railroad systems controlled 95 percent of the nation's mileage. As early as 1904, the 2,000 largest firms in the United States made up less than one percent of the country's businesses. Yet they produced 40 percent of the nation's goods.

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Printable Version Andrew Carnegie did not believe that men of great wealth were robber barons, but trustees whose duty it was to devote their talents to the common good. This, he wrote, is "the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring 'Peace on earth, among men of Good-Will.'"

Drawing on the doctrine of St. Paul, that the rich had to be stewards of wealth, defenders of the Gospel of Wealth, like the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, argued that it was God's will that some men attained great wealth, and "in the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes." He concluded: "Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christ like."

In an 1889 essay, steel magnate Carnegie told his fellow business leaders, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." Carnegie believed that the wealthy should repay their debt to society. True to his beliefs, by his death in 1919 he had divested himself of more than 95 percent of his fortune. He built a library building for any town that would provide a site, stock the building with books, and guarantee maintenance expenses. He provided pensions for professors at universities that agreed to meet strict academic standards. In addition to funding music halls, outdoor swimming pools, and church organs, he also set up endowments to promote teaching and world peace.

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Printable Version Andrew Carnegie did not believe that men of great wealth were robber barons, but trustees whose duty it was to devote their talents to the common good. This, he wrote, is "the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring 'Peace on earth, among men of Good-Will.'" Drawing on the doctrine of St.

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Printable Version In 1895, an attorney named Joseph H. Choate persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to declare an income tax approved by Congress unconstitutional. Choate told the court that:

The act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communist in its purposes and tendencies and is defended here upon principles as communistic, as socialistic, what shall I call them, as populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.

As a result of the court decision in the case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., the United States did not institute an income tax until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913.

Choate rested his arguments partly on ideas associated with Charles Darwin, who published his theory of evolution in 1859. Darwin had argued that within nature, there was a process of competition within and between species, and that, through a process of natural selection, the fittest organisms prevail. Closely associated with the English theorist Hebert Spencer (1820-1903) and the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), Social Darwinism sought to apply the Darwinian principles of survival of the fittest and the struggle of existence to economics, ethics, and other realms of life. Social Darwinists like Spencer believed that this theory of evolution gave scientific validity to the notion that government should keep its hands off the economy.

Critics of Social Darwinism, including John Dewey and William James, rejected the notion that the process of social and economic change should occur unregulated, arguing that government should intervene to address the social ills that accompanied industrial development.

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Printable Version In 1895, an attorney named Joseph H. Choate persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to declare an income tax approved by Congress unconstitutional. Choate told the court that: The act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communist in its purposes and tendencies and is defended here upon principles as communistic, as socialistic, what shall I call them, as populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.

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Lesson 1 The Rise of Industry

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Lesson 2 The Railroads

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Lesson 3 Big Business

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"What a Funny Little Government!" Cartoonist Horace Taylor pokes fun at John D. Rockefeller in this cartoon which appeared in The Verdict, a partisan magazine of the day.

He was America's first billionaire.

In a pure sense, the goal of any capitalist is to make money. And John D. Rockefeller could serve as the poster child for capitalism. Overcoming humble beginnings, Rockefeller had the vision and the drive to become the richest person in America.

At the turn of the century, when the average worker earned $8 to $10 per week, Rockefeller was worth millions.

Robber Baron or Captain of Industry?

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)

What was his secret? Is he to be placed on a pedestal for others as a "captain of industry?" Or should he be demonized as a "robber baron." A robber baron, by definition, was an American capitalist at the turn of the 19th century who enriched himself upon the sweat of others, exploited natural resources, or possessed unfair government influence.

Whatever conclusions can be drawn, Rockefeller's impact on the American economy demands recognition.

Rockefeller was born in 1839 in Moravia, a small town in western New York. His father practiced herbal medicine, professing to cure patients with remedies he had created from plants in the area. John's mother instilled a devout Baptist faith in the boy, a belief system he took to his grave. After being graduated from high school in 1855, the family sent him to a Cleveland business school.

Young John Rockefeller entered the workforce on the bottom rung of the ladder as a clerk in a Cleveland shipping firm. Always thrifty, he saved enough money to start his own business in produce sales. When the Civil War came, the demand for his goods increased dramatically, and Rockefeller found himself amassing a small fortune.

He took advantage of the loophole in the Union draft law by purchasing a substitute to avoid military service. When Edwin Drake discovered oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Rockefeller saw the future. He slowly sold off his other interests and became convinced that refining oil would bring him great wealth.

Waste Not...

Rockefeller introduced techniques that totally reshaped the oil industry. In the mid-19th century, the chief demand was for kerosene. In the refining process, there are many by-products when crude oil is converted to kerosene. What others saw as waste, Rockefeller saw as gold. He sold one byproduct paraffin to candlemakers and another byproduct petroleum jelly to medical supply companies. He even sold off other "waste" as paving materials for roads. He shipped so many goods that railroad companies drooled over the prospect of getting his business.

Rockefeller demanded rebates, or discounted rates, from the railroads. He used all these methods to reduce the price of oil to his consumers. His profits soared and his competitors were crushed one by one. Rockefeller forced smaller companies to surrender their stock to his control.

Standard Oil - a Trust-worthy Company?

John D. Rockefeller had to perform a delicate balancing act to maintain his reputation as a philanthropist while living the live of a wealthy businessman.

This sort of arrangement is called a trust. A trust is a combination of firms formed by legal agreement. Trusts often reduce fair business competition. As a result of Rockefeller's shrewd business practices, his large corporation, the Standard Oil Company, became the largest business in the land.

As the new century dawned, Rockefeller's investments mushroomed. With the advent of the automobile, gasoline replaced kerosene as the number one petroleum product. Rockefeller was a bona fide billionaire. Critics charged that his labor practices were unfair. Employees pointed out that he could have paid his workers a fairer wage and settled for being a half-billionaire.

Before his death in 1937, Rockefeller gave away nearly half of his fortune. Churches, medical foundations, universities, and centers for the arts received hefty sums of oil money. Whether he was driven by good will, conscience, or his devout faith in God is unknown. Regardless, he became a hero to many enterprising Americans.

Rockefeller Foundation
Andrew Carnegie's essay, "Gospel of Wealth" (1889) struck a chord in John D. Rockefeller and strengthened his resolve to support worthy causes. Several major philanthropic institutions resulted. In 1913, the last, the Rockefeller Foundation, which has given away over $2 billion in grants, was chartered. This official website of the Foundation explains its various programs.

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The History of the Standard Oil Company
In 1904, "muckracker" Ida M. Tarbell wrote an expose history of the Standard Oil Company for McClure's Magazine. Tarbell's lengthy work begins with the discovery of crude oil and continues through the growth of Standard Oil trusts, anti-trust legislation, and legal battles culmination in the compromise of 1880. The full text is here on this website. Check the Table of Contents for the topic of interest, click on the appropriate pages from the main menu, then search for keywords.

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John D. Rockefeller was well known as a philanthropist. From hookworm eradication efforts to help for the hungry, the Rockefeller Foundation has worked to solve many of the world's and the country's ills.
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Even as a child, John Davison Rockefeller recognized an opportunity to make a profit. He bought candy at wholesale to sell to his siblings!
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The New Tycoons: John D. Rockefeller [ushistory.org]

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"What a Funny Little Government!" Cartoonist Horace Taylor pokes fun at John D. Rockefeller in this cartoon which appeared in The Verdict, a partisan magazine of the day. He was America's first billionaire. In a pure sense, the goal of any capitalist is to make money. And John D.

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By the time he died in 1919, Carnegie had given away $350,695,653. At his death, the last $30,000,000 was likewise given away to foundations, charities and to pensioners.

Oil was not the only commodity in great demand during the Gilded Age. The nation also needed steel.

The railroads needed steel for their rails and cars, the navy needed steel for its new naval fleet, and cities needed steel to build skyscrapers. Every factory in America needed steel for their physical plant and machinery. Andrew Carnegie saw this demand and seized the moment.

Humble Roots

Like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie was not born into wealth. When he was 13, his family came to the United States from Scotland and settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a small town near Pittsburgh. His first job was in a cotton mill, where he earned $1.20 per week.

His talents were soon recognized and Carnegie found himself promoted to the bookkeeping side of the business. An avid reader, Carnegie spent his Saturdays in the homes of wealthy citizens who were gracious enough to allow him access to their private libraries. After becoming a telegrapher for a short while, he met the head of a railroad company who asked his services as a personal secretary.

Millionaire Andrew Carnegie spoke against irresponsibility of the wealthy and sharply criticized ostentatious living.

During the Civil War, this man, Thomas Scott, was sent to Washington to operate transportation for the Union Army. Carnegie spent his war days helping the soldiers get where they needed to be and by helping the wounded get to hospitals. By this time, he had amassed a small sum of money, which he quickly invested. Soon iron and steel caught his attention, and he was on his way to creating the largest steel company in the world.

Vertical Integration: Moving on Up

The Bessemer Process

Carnegie became a tycoon because of shrewd business tactics. Rockefeller often bought other oil companies to eliminate competition. This is a process known as horizontal integration. Carnegie also created a vertical combination, an idea first implemented by Gustavus Swift. He bought railroad companies and iron mines. If he owned the rails and the mines, he could reduce his costs and produce cheaper steel.

Carnegie was a good judge of talent. His assistant, Henry Clay Frick, helped manage the Carnegie Steel Company on its way to success. Carnegie also wanted productive workers. He wanted them to feel that they had a vested interest in company prosperity so he initiated a profit-sharing plan.

All these tactics made the Carnegie Steel Company a multi-million dollar corporation. In 1901, he sold his interests to J.P. Morgan, who paid him 500 million dollars to create U.S. Steel.

Giving Back

Retirement did not take him out of the public sphere. Before his death he donated more than $350 million dollars to public foundations. Remembering the difficulty of finding suitable books as a youth, he helped build three thousand libraries. He built schools such as Carnegie-Mellon University and gave his money for artistic pursuits such as Carnegie Hall in New York.

Andrew Carnegie was also dedicated to peace initiatives throughout the world because of his passionate hatred for war. Like Rockefeller, critics labeled him a robber baron who could have used his vast fortunes to increase the wages of his employees. Carnegie believed that such spending was wasteful and temporary, but foundations would last forever. Regardless, he helped build an empire that led the United States to world power status.

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The New Tycoons: Andrew Carnegie [ushistory.org]

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By the time he died in 1919, Carnegie had given away $350,695,653. At his death, the last $30,000,000 was likewise given away to foundations, charities and to pensioners. Oil was not the only commodity in great demand during the Gilded Age. The nation also needed steel.

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J.P. Morgan invested in everything from Thomas Edison's electric company to railroads and steel companies to insurance firms.

Child of Privilege

Not all of the tycoons of the Gilded Age were rags-to-riches stories. J. Pierpont Morgan was born into a family of great wealth. His father had already made a name for himself in the banking industry. With Morgan's family resources, he enjoyed the finest business education money could buy.

He did not scratch and claw his way to the top of any corporate ladder. His father arranged for an executive track position at one of New York's finest banks. Regardless of his family's advantages, Morgan had a great mind of his own. He set out to conquer the financial world, and conquer it he did.

Morgan the Banker

Morgan's first business ventures were in banking. By 1860, he had already established his own foreign exchange office. He knew the power of investment. Not content to control just the banking industry, he bought many smaller ventures to make money.

During the Civil War, he paid the legally allowed fee to purchase a substitute soldier and evaded military service. Morgan made handsome profits by providing war materials. One of his enterprises sold defective rifles to the Union army. Upon later investigations, he was declared ignorant of the poor quality of his guns and was cleared of all charges.

After the war, he set out to corner the nation's financial markets. When the Panic of 1873 rocked the nation's economy, Morgan protected himself wisely and emerged in the aftermath as the king of American finance.

J.P. Morgan was one of the organizers of the World Fair held in Chicago in 1893.

Despite his label as a robber baron, Morgan felt his investments benefited America. His railroad dealings helped consolidate many smaller, mismanaged firms, resulting in shorter trips and more dependable service. Two times during financial panics he allowed the federal government to purchase his vast gold supplies to stop the spiral of deflation.

He owned a bridge company and a tubing company. His most renowned purchase was in 1901, when he bought the Carnegie Steel Company for $500 million to create U.S. Steel. Within ten years U.S. Steel was worth over a billion dollars.

Morgan's actions marked a shift in thinking among American industrialists. He proved that it was not necessary to be a builder to be successful. Smart investment and efficient consolidation could yield massive profits. Young entrepreneurs shifted their goals to banking in the hopes of mirroring Morgan's success.

Trouble with the Government

For all his accomplishments, he was harshly criticized. The first decade of the twentieth century brought challenges to Morgan from the government. His Northern Securities railroad company was deemed illegal under federal antitrust law, the first such action by the national government. He was investigated by Congress for his control of the financial markets. Even U.S. Steel was forced to relinquish its monopoly.

Things you don't see everyday: A cancelled check for three million dollars from J.P. Morgan to the Northern Pacific Syndicate.

Jaded by the criticism, Morgan moved to Europe, where he lived his final days. He was a favorite target of intellectuals who claimed that such tycoons robbed the poor of their deserved wealth. He was a hero to enterprising financiers across the land who dreamed of following his example. That is, of course, unless they were destroyed by his shrewd, fierce tactics.

Alan Greenspan on Banking History
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, presents a concise view of the history of banking in the United States in this speech he delivered in 1998. You'll find nothing but facts from an economist's perspective. But what facts and what an economist!

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History of the White Star Line
Immigrants and the wealthy all needed fast transatlantic travel and J.P. Morgan sought to provide it. Learn more about the White Star Line,which launched the ill-fated Titanic three years after Morgan purchased it.

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On April 15, 1912, the luxury liner Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Did J.P. Morgan have a role in the disaster?
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The New Tycoons: J. Pierpont Morgan [ushistory.org]

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J.P. Morgan invested in everything from Thomas Edison's electric company to railroads and steel companies to insurance firms. Not all of the tycoons of the Gilded Age were rags-to-riches stories. J. Pierpont Morgan was born into a family of great wealth. His father had already made a name for himself in the banking industry.

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Social Darwinism fueled the popularity of "Friendly visitors" in the field of social work. These upper class women believed it was their Christian duty to help the poor by providing positive moral role models.

Not everybody was getting rich. The new wealthy class, although more prominent, larger, and richer than any class in American history, was still rather small.

People soon began to ask fundamental questions. How did one get rich in America? Was it because of a combination of hard work and intelligence? Was it because of inheritance? Did education and skill play a role? Or was it simply luck?

Old attitudes about the importance of inheritance were still prevalent, but new ideas also emerged. Among the most popular were Social Darwinism, the Gospel of Wealth, and Algerism.

Surivival of the Fittest

When a popular conception of "survival of the fittest" grew from Charles Darwin's idea of the process of natural selection in the wild, the world was forever changed. Church leaders condemned him as a heretic, and ordinary people everywhere cringed at the idea that humans may have evolved from apes. It was inevitable that intellectuals would soon point Darwin's concepts at human society.

These Social Darwinists, led by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, believed that the humans who were the most fit became the most successful. Whatever people had the necessary skills to prosper - perhaps talent, brains, or hard work - would be the ones who would rise to the top. Why were some people poor? To the Social Darwinist, the answer was obvious. They simply did not have the required skills.

Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina

Social Darwinists went further in their application of Darwin. Darwin stated that the weaker members of a species in nature would die and that over time only the stronger genes would be passed on. Social Darwinists believed the same should happen with humans. They opposed government handouts, or safety regulations, or laws restricting child labor. Such actions would coddle the weak, and the unfit would be allowed to survive.

Gospel of Wealth

Some Americans tried to reconcile their Christian beliefs with Social Darwinism. Because the Church had been such an opponent of Darwin's ideas, it was difficult for religious folks to accept Social Darwinism.

Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller both agreed that the most successful people were the ones with the necessary skills. But they each believed that God played a role in deciding who got the skills.

Because God granted a select few with the talent to be successful, Christian virtue demanded that some of that money be shared. This is where the difference lies between the hardcore Social Darwinist and the proponent of the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie and Rockefeller became philanthropists - wealthy citizens who donated large sums of money for the public good.

Horatio Alger wrote popular rags-to-riches novels, such as Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York. Many of these books were written as an example to young boys, teaching that the virtues of hard work would eventually pay off.

Horatio Alger's American Dream

A third influence American thinking was Horatio Alger. Alger was not an intellectual; rather, he wrote dime novels for the hordes of immigrant masses rushing to America's shores. Although he penned many stories, each book answered the question of how to get rich in America. Alger believed that a combination of hard work and good fortune - pluck and luck, in his words - was the key.

A typical Alger story would revolve around a hardworking immigrant who served on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, perhaps as a stock boy. One day he would be walking down the street and see a safe falling from a tall building. Our hero would bravely push aside the hapless young woman walking below and save her life. Of course, she was the boss's daughter. The two would get married, and he would become vice-president of the corporation.

This is what the masses wished to believe. Success would not come to a select few based on nature or divine intervention. Anyone who worked hard could make it in America if they caught a lucky break. This idea is the basis for the "American Dream."

Is Alger's dream a reality or just folklore? There simply is no answer. Thousands of Americans have found this idyllic path, but as many or more have not.

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence." -Herbert Spencer, 1851
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Over 27 million visited the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, some traveling on Pullman coaches at 80 mph, all to see the greatest cultural and entertainment event in the history of the world.
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Mark Twain parodied Horatio Alger's formulaic rags-to-riches stories in his short story "The Story of the Good Little Boy." In the end, the goody-goody hero doesn't marry the boss's daughter; he gets blown to smithereens.
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New Attitudes Toward Wealth [ushistory.org]

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Social Darwinism fueled the popularity of "Friendly visitors" in the field of social work. These upper class women believed it was their Christian duty to help the poor by providing positive moral role models. Not everybody was getting rich. The new wealthy class, although more prominent, larger, and richer than any class in American history, was still rather small.

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You Will Love History The Age of Big Business