Notes
The West
- The transcontinental railroad (1869), the Homestead Act (1862), and mining booms drew settlers west.
- The U.S. broke treaties and fought wars with Plains peoples. The near-destruction of the buffalo undermined their way of life. Battles included Little Bighorn (1876) and the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).
- The Dawes Act (1887) split reservation land into individual plots to force assimilation; Native nations lost about two-thirds of their land. Boarding schools tried to erase Native cultures.
- Chinese workers built much of the railroad but faced discrimination, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
Industrialization and big business
- Steel, oil and railroads boomed. Andrew Carnegie (steel) used vertical integration; John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) used horizontal integration and trusts to form monopolies.
- Laissez-faire ideas and Social Darwinism justified inequality; Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth called on the rich to give back.
- The Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) were early, weak attempts to regulate business.
Workers and cities
- Factory work was dangerous with long hours and low pay. Unions: the Knights of Labor (open to all), the American Federation of Labor (skilled workers, Samuel Gompers). Big strikes: the Great Railroad Strike (1877), Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), Pullman (1894).
- New immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe settled in crowded cities. Settlement houses like Jane Addams's Hull House helped them.
- Political machines like Tammany Hall gave services to immigrants in exchange for votes but were corrupt.
The Gilded Age and the South
- The Populist Party (1892) spoke for struggling farmers: an income tax, government ownership of railroads, and free coinage of silver.
- The "New South" built some industry but remained mostly agricultural. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation, upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ("separate but equal"). Poll taxes and literacy tests kept Black men from voting.
- Booker T. Washington urged economic self-help; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching.
Practice
It led to massive loss of Native land.
Owning each stage of production is vertical integration.
It applied "survival of the fittest" to society.
Samuel Gompers led this craft-union federation.
Reformers lived and worked in poor neighborhoods.
It was the first major law to restrict immigration based on nationality.
Farmers wanted inflation and fair railroad rates.
It allowed Jim Crow laws for decades.
Free response
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Free-response question
Answer (a), (b) and (c).
(a) Briefly describe ONE way workers responded to industrial working conditions between 1865 and 1898.
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They formed unions like the Knights of Labor and the AFL and went on strike, as in the Pullman Strike of 1894.
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(b) Briefly explain ONE reason these efforts often failed.
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Business owners hired replacement workers, courts issued injunctions, and the federal government sometimes sent troops to break strikes; violence like Haymarket also turned the public against unions.
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(c) Briefly describe ONE way the federal government tried to regulate big business in this period.
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The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) outlawed monopolies and trusts that restrained trade, though it was weakly enforced at first.
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