(1865-1900)
1 The business of Railroads
(A) Eastern Trunk Lines
(1) Dozens of separate local lines
(2) Early Decades (1830-1860)
(3). Major route between most major cities
(4). New York Central Railroad, and Pennsylvania Railroad
-Western Railroads
(B) Federal land grants
(1) 80 Different Railroad companies
(2) More than 170 million acres of public land
(3) Homestead act
(4) Might increase value of lands and provide preferred rates for carrying the mail and transporting troops
(C) Transcontinental Railroads
(1) Land grants and loans
(2) Up employed thousands of war veterans and Irish immigrants, and also 6,000 chinese Immigrants
(3) Two railroads came together in May 10, 1869 at Utah
(4) In 1883, three other railroads were completed
(5) In 1893, a fifth railroad was finished
(6) Railroads helped settle the west, but many proved failures as businesses.
(D) Competition and Consolidation
(1) Often overbuilt new tech
(2) 1870s and 1880’s
(3) Railroads suffered from mismanagement and outright fraudulent activities
(4) Jay Gould
(5) Railroads competed by offering rebates
(6) Financial panic of 1893
(7) J. Pierpont Morgan (JPMORGAN)
(8) Consolidation made rail system more efficient
(9) Early 20th century expand powers of Interstate Commerce Commission
2 Industrial Empires
(A) Steel Industry
(1) Rise of Heavy Industry
(2) 1850’s
(3) Henry Bessemer – England
William Kelly
Both discovered blasting air
(B) Andrew Carnegie
(1) Leadership of Fast-growing steel industry
(2) Born in 1830 in Scotland, Carnegie, then immigrated to the U.S.
(3) Steel manufacturing began in the 1870’s
(C) U.S. Steel Corp.
(1) First Billion dollar company
(2) Largest enterprise in the world
(3) Employing 168,000 people and controlling more than 60% of the nation’s steel business
3 Rockefeller and the Oil Industry, Antitrust movement, Laissez-Faire Capitalism
(A) Conservative Economic Theories
(1) Wealth of Nations
(2) Invisible Hand Idealism
(3) American Industrialists appealed to laissez-faire theory to justify their methods of doing business
(B) Social Darwinism
(1) Charles Darwin’s Theory of natural selection in biology
(2) Race theories would continue to produce problems in the 20th Century.
(C) Gospel of Wealth
(1) Americans found religion more convincing than social darwinism.
(2) Carnegie distrubuted more than $350 million of his fortune to support the building of libraries, universities, and various public institutions.
4 Technology and Innovations
(A) Innovations
(1) Telegraph – Samuel F.B morse
(2) Railroads
(3) Transatlantic Cable – Cyrus
(4) Grains, Coal, and Steel
(5) Typewriter (1867)
(6) Telephone – Alexander Graham
(7) Cash Register (1879)
(8) Calculating Machine (1887)
(9) Adding Machine (1888)
(10) Camera – George Eastman (1888)
(11) Fountain Pen – Lewis E Waterman (1884)
(12) Safety Razor and Blade – King Gilette (1895)
(B) Edison and Westinghouse
(1) Possibly greatest inventor of the 19th Century
(2) Thomas Edison was a young telegraph operator and patented his first invention, a machine for recording votes, in 1869.
(3) Edison’s lab came more than a thousand patented inventions, including the phonograph, incandescent lamp, dynamo for generating electric power, mimeograph machine, and motion picture camera
(4) George Westinghouse – remarkable inventor
(5) George Westinghouse held more than 400 patents, responsible for developing air brake for railroads in 1869, the high-voltage alternating current in 1885.
(C) Marketing consumer goods
(1) Increased output of U.S. factories
(2) Increase of new consumer products
(3) Packaged foods of brand names like Kellogg and Post became common.
(4) Advertising and new marketing techniques not only promoted a consumer economy but also created a consumer culture in which shopping became a favorite pastime
5 Impact of industrialization
(A) Concentration of wealth
(1) 1890’s
(2) Richest 10% of U.S. population controlled 90% of nation’s wealth
(3) Industrialization created a new class of millionaires
(B) Horatio Alger myth
(1) Every alger novel portrayed a young man of modest means who becomes wealthy
(C) Expanding middle class
(1) Growth of large corporations
(2) Middle management was needed
(3) Middle-class employees increased the demand for services: professionals (doctors and lawyers), public employees, and storekeepers
(D) Wage Earners
(1) Wages were determined by laws of supply and demand
(2) low wages were justified by David Ricardo (1772-1823)
(E) Working Women
(1) Labor Force working
(2) Most were young and single
(F) Labor Discontent
(1) many workers were exposedd to chemicals and pollutants that cause chronic illness and early death
(2) Industrial workers rebelled against intolerable working conditions
6 The struggle of Organized Labor
(A) Industrial Warfare
(1) The Lockout
(2) Blacklists
(3) Yellow-dog contracts
(4) Calling in private guards and state militia
(5)Obtaining court injunctions
(B) Great railroad strike of 1887
(1) One of the worst outbreaks of labor violence
(2) Srike and violence ended but not before more than 100 people had been killed
