Notes
Industry and big business
- Steel (Bessemer process), railroads (transcontinental, 1869), oil, electricity and the telephone made the U.S. an industrial giant.
- Carnegie used vertical integration; Rockefeller used horizontal integration to build Standard Oil into a near monopoly.
- Supporters saw captains of industry; critics saw robber barons. Social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth offered competing views of wealth.
- The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) outlawed trusts that restrained trade.
Labor
- Long hours, low pay, child labor and danger led workers to form unions: the Knights of Labor and Gompers's AFL.
- Major conflicts: Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), Pullman (1894). Government usually sided with owners.
Immigration and cities
- "New" immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe came through Ellis Island; Asian immigrants came through Angel Island.
- Nativism produced the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
- Cities grew with tenements, political machines (Tammany Hall) and reformers such as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis.
The West and politics
- The Homestead Act and railroads drew settlers. Plains nations lost the buffalo and their land; the Dawes Act pushed assimilation; Wounded Knee (1890) ended major armed resistance.
- Reform began with the Pendleton Act and Interstate Commerce Act. Farmers built the Populist Party, whose ideas later shaped the Progressive Era.
Topics in this unit
Each topic has its own short notes and practice.
Practice
Something gilded is covered with a thin layer of gold over cheaper material.
Robber baron critics focused on unfair methods used to crush rivals.
After the 1886 bombing, many Americans linked unions with violence and radicalism.
Settlement houses like Hull House offered services to the urban poor.
Bryan argued the gold standard hurt farmers and workers by keeping money scarce.
The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservations and cost Native nations most of their land.
Free response
Write your answer first, then open the scoring guide.
Free-response question
Between 1870 and 1900, the United States changed from a mostly rural, farming nation into an industrial, urban one.
(a) Describe TWO factors that helped the rapid growth of American industry.
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Railroads created a national market and carried raw materials to factories. New technology like the Bessemer process made steel cheap, and immigrants supplied a large workforce.
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(b) Explain why workers formed labor unions during this period.
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Workers faced long hours, low wages, unsafe conditions and child labor, and one worker alone had little power against a large company. Unions let them use collective bargaining and strikes to demand better pay and conditions.
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(c) Describe ONE challenge new immigrants faced in American cities and ONE way they or others responded.
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Many immigrants faced nativist discrimination and lived in crowded, unsafe tenements. They formed ethnic neighborhoods and mutual aid groups, and reformers like Jane Addams created settlement houses offering classes and services.
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