Topic 4: The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age: America’s Industrial Revolution

Reading Notes: American Yawp Chapter 16

I. Introduction

• "The Great Upheaval" - The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 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. (page 1)

II. The March of Capital

• Growing labor unrest accompanied industrialization (page 3)
• 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. (Page 3)
• Technological innovations and national investments slashed the costs of production and distribution. New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms. (page 3)
• 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...Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production. (page 4)

III. The Rise of Inequality

• 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...(pg7)
• “This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty. (pg. 7)
• By 1900, the richest 10 percent controlled perhaps 90 percent of the nation’s wealth. (page 7)
• The inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified the progress of species and societies. Spencer (Page 9)
• Republican dominance... 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. (page 9)

IV. The Labor Movement

•  American Workers
• difficult jobs for long hours and little pay
• unemployed one month out of the year
• 60 hours a week & still below the poverty line
• Wives & children forced to work to compensate
• Knights of Labor
• May 1, 1886 - bomb went off and KofL became associated with violence and radicalism
• The American Federation of Labor (AFL) 
• conservative alternative to the vision of KofL
• tried to avoid strikes

V. The Populist Movement

• 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. (page 16)
• 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. (page 16)
• 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. (page 16)
• 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. (page 17)
• 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. (page 19)

VI. William Jennings Bryan and the Politics of Gold

• 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). (page 20)
• Bryan was among the most influential losers in American political history. (page 22)

VII. The Socialists

• 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. (page 23)
• 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. (pg 24)

Reading Notes: American Yawp Chapter 18

II. Industrialization & Technological Innovation

• The railroads 
• created the first great concentrations of capital
• spawned the first massive corporations
• made the first of the vast fortunes 
• unleashed labor demands that united thousands of farmers and immigrants
• linked many towns and cities 
• creation of uniform time zones across the country
• gave industrialists access to remote markets
• the nation’s largest businesses
•  creation of innovative new corporate organization, advanced management techniques, and vast sums of capital
• spurred countless industries and attracted droves of laborers
•  created a national market, a truly national economy, and, seemingly, a new national culture
• The new scale of industrialized meat production transformed the landscape. Buffalo herds, grasslands, and old-growth forests gave way to cattle, corn, and wheat.
• Menlo Par - Edisons invention factory 
• By the middle of 1883, Edison had overseen the construction of 330 plants powering over sixty thousand lamps in factories, offices, printing houses, hotels, and theaters around the world.
• Electricity revolutionized the world. It not only illuminated the night, it powered the Second Industrial Revolution.

III. Immigration and Urbanization

• Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States.
• Industrial capitalism was the most important factor that drew immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920.
• Many immigrants, especially from Italy and the Balkans, always intended to return home with enough money to purchase land.
•  Immigrants from specific countries—and often even specific communities—often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. 

IV. The New South and the Problem of Race

• The New South - Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region’s economy in the North’s image.
• The reestablishment of white supremacy after the “redemption” of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a “New” South.
• 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.
• Lynching was not only the form of racial violence that survived Reconstruction. 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.
• Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives.
• laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests
• pay poll taxes
• Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans

V. Gender, Religion, and Culture

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Gilded Age Video 1: The Gilded Age: America's Industrial Revolution

• Gilded age - our industrial revolution (3 decades)
• A "Double-edged sword"
• Achievements: industrial revolution, economic might, entry into modernity, international prestige
• costs: social strife (capital vs labor; farmers vs big business; immigrants vs. nativists; racial conflict); collapse of the small family farm; urban problems; ecological destruction
• Agricultural Revolution: 10,000 BCE - enabled human settlement, cultural evolution, division of labor
• Industrial revolution: Late 18th century - 19th century (England, US, western Europe) - enabled transition towards modern capitalism

Gilded Age Video 2: Gilded Age Inventions

• Technological innovations:
• Railroads
• Communication
• Electric light bulb – allowed continued working after dark – workers could now work 12 – 14 hour days
• Typewriter – communicate faster
• Automobiles
• Cash registers
• Bessemer Converter – purification process for steel
• Business innovation:
• Economies of scale – the internal dynamic of business
• As the business expands – things become cheaper
• Can bargain with suppliers
• Promotes growth
• Corporations – limited liability, guarantee the shareholders are not liable for any debts, serves as an incentive to investors
• Corporate personhood – redefined corporations as people (legally)
• Vertical Integration
• One business owns the production, supply, and distribution
• Horizontal integration
• Buying out other rival companies in the industry. Buying out your competition
• Innovations in the workplace:
• “Taylorism” – wanted to increase efficiency within the works
• Produce as much as could as efficiently as could
• Repetitive routines
• Managerial class – more educated white men 

Gilded Age Video 3: Social Darwinism

• Social Darwinism - made it possible to justify the social status of the social elite and served as an ideology to explain why the poor are poor and to even neglect the poor in the name of progress. 
• Application of biological Darwinist principles (natural selection) to human society
• The rich are the most “fittest” of society
• Justifies Gilded Age social hierarchies: Survival of the fittest” (Herbert Spencer – applied it to the social hierarchies)
• Criticism – makes it possible to criticize the poor (They were born that way), social Darwinists stated that those who were poor were born that way
• misappropriate of Darwinism - taking descriptive analysis and using it to be prescriptive
• The Gospel of Wealth - 
• Andrew Carnegie - author
• Directed towards new social class of the Gilded Age: the wealthy “self-made man”
1. Industrial Elite
• Involvement with philanthropy
1. Use this wealth for a purpose
2. Help people out
• Not being too ostentatious with their wealth
1. Do not be too showy with your wealth
• Danger in inherited wealth and successive generations
1. Become unmotivated, unproductive and lazy
• Economic Individualism -
• Modern capitalist society and economy are composed of fundamental units
• The individual (hence less about the ‘collective’)
• Individuals hard work and dedication leads to success in modern capitalist society
• Must engage in hard work, must be dedicated and focused and be competitive in order to move up (hard work and mobility – working your way up)
• Criticism of economic individualism
• Conditions in life matter
• Eg. slaves – can you tell them that their hard work will help them move up?

Gilded Age Video 4: Merger of big business and government

•  How do all three branches of government contribute to the growth of corporate power?
• Executive - (Presidents) - inaction - Presidents were in the back seat and not in the front. 
• Presidential negativism - they allow big business and legislation to be in kahoot
• Judicial – (laws & courts) - corporations are people too; equal protection clause = applied to big business
• Legislative - (Senate and Congress) - legislators were already corrupt with big business. Passed laws that were favorable to big businesses
• This is why congress and the senate are now voted in
• How else can it be proved that the government favored the capitalist class rather than the labor class?
• The military was used to stop protests & killed many protestors
• US Army and national guards
• Passage of laws in favor of big business

Gilded Age Video 5: American Federation of Labor (AFL)

•  Development of the American "Working Class" - industrial workers - blue-collar workers
• "class consciousness" is the collective awareness of their class exploitation under the control of the capitalist class
• working class vs the capitalist class
• labor movement - working class getting together and protesting their working conditions & wages
• Social class trumps race and gender - they are all united & experience the same plight
• "class warfare" becomes the greatest threat to the stability of the economic status quo
• The Knights of Labor
• formed by Terence Powderly in 1869
• highly idealistic and utopian
• Inclusive in terms of race and gender- welcomed all - opposed the Chinese
• Aim - promote a worker's democracy
• 8-hour day, equal pay for women, end child labor
• free land, public ownership of railroads, income tax favorable to workers
• membership reaches 800,000 by the 1800s, becomes the most powerful union in the country
• Working class issues beyond the workplace
• Pivotal event - Haymarket Square 1886 Strike - meeting turned into a riot, and a bomb went off, & police were killed
• linked to violence and killing of police
• American Federation of Labor (AFL) 1886
• Founded by Samuel Gompers
• More conservative
• Focused only on workplace issues - higher wages, workplace safety, shorter workday
• craft unionism vs. industrial unionism - skilled workers
• harder to replace skilled workers
• use of labor strikes to advance their agenda

• The Populist Party - aka the people's party
• Agrarian Revolt > 3rd party challenge to political status quo
• The Populist Agenda leading to "worker's democracy"
• The "Free Silver" movement
• no uniform currency & no national bank
• the movement to adopt the gold standard & would devalue silver
• advocated for the use of silver
• Nationalization of railroads
• Graduated Tax reform
• favorable to the working class
• Direct election of senators
• get rid of big business influence
• Immigration restriction
• felt like immigration was a threat to workers
• Overall- a movement toward social justice and economic democracy
• Re-imagining a vision of Industrial America