The Gilded Age and Industrialization

Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction: Harper’s Weekly, March 17, 1877

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: “Colonel Agramonte’s Cavalry Charging on the Mob, at the Halstead street Viaduct, in Chicago, July 16,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 11, 1877

Major railroads in 1880 with time zones

Population growth: “Great Railway Station at Chicago--Departure of a Train,” Appleton’s Journal, 1870 supplement

Government support: Land grants to the railroads

Invention: Thomas Edison with the light bulb, invented in 1879

National markets: The first national brand, Uneeda Biscuit (1898, ad from 1900)

Sears and Roebuck Catalog, 1900

Gilded Age: Who coined the term?

Mark Twain

Capital: The race is on: "Admiral" Jim Fisk of the ERIE vs. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt New York Central Lines.

Labor: The Celebration of the Meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869.

A. J. Russell, “Chinese at Laying Last Rail UPRR,” stereoview

John D. Rockefeller, Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1917

Corporations had the same rights as persons The 14 th amendment: “Section. 1. …No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” US Supreme Court, 1886, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific RR co. “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Next! Cartoon in Puck, September 7, 1904

Henry Adams Criticized Corporations in His Autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, 1918

Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species (1859)

Herbert Spencer, author of social Darwinist doctrines of “survival of the fittest and “laissez faire”

Skull Types

Andrew Carnegie, Scottish immigrant who built a “vertically integrated” steel company that dominated the steel industry in the laste 19th century

Horatio Alger books promoted rags to riches stories

Conspicuous Display of Wealth, Millionaire’s Row, New York Carnegie MansionVanderbilt Chateau

Jacob Riis, Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street, c. 1889

“Driving the Rioters from Turner Hall,” Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1877

“The Haymarket Riot,” Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886

“The Haymarket Martyrs,” Anarchy and Anarchists, 1889

“The First Dynamite Bomb Thrown in America,” Chicago Inter-Ocean Supplement, 1886

Pin Protesting the Executions, Inscribed “Nov. 11, 1887”

“Justice Hurling a Bomb,” Graphic News, June 5, 1886

The Pullman Strike,

John D. Rockefeller Founds a Day Nursery for Children of Working Italian Women, 1895

U.S. Presidents, 1877-Present Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, 1881 Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, 2001-present