1. The Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1865-1900.
Or, Alternatively: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

2. The Second Industrial Revolution
Important overarching factors in the economic revolution that followed the Civil War were: abundant natural resources, a growing labor supply and market thanks to immigration, new capital for investment, and government protection that centered on protective tariffs, land grants, and the eviction of native Americans from western lands.
By 1913, the United States produced a third of the world’s entire industrial output. Half of all industrial workers labored in plants with more than 250 employees. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, making dreams of economic independence—owning a farm or workshop—unattainable for most. Between 1870 and 1920, a new working class developed, with 11 million Americans moving from farm to city and 25 million immigrating from overseas. Most new jobs were in industrial cities, whose rapid growth was best symbolized by New York, a city whose banks and stock exchange financed railroads, mines, and factories, thus sponsoring industrialization and westward expansion. The Great Lakes region was the center of industrialization, with iron, steel, machinery, chemicals, and food production in large cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago and countless smaller cities.

3. The Railroads
Between , the number of miles of railroad track tripled, then tripled again between
With these new railroads came new areas of commercial farming and a new national markets for goods. Because railroads tied up such enormous amounts of capital, labor, and goods, any crisis in the industry was bound to impact the entire economy.
Railroads helped foster the mass production, distribution, and marketing of goods, the very basis of an industrial economy.
The standardization and politicization of time. The creation of a managerial class.

6. Bright Ideas
Telegraph lines crossed the Atlantic and the continent, speeding the access to information.
Edison is famous for the light bulb, but the more revolutionary invention was probably his system for generating electric power, which was more efficient then steam or water and as a stable energy source powered industrial and urban growth.

7. The Dark Side of the Force
With this remarkable growth came new problems: competition was ruthless, and a few firms often controlled entire industries.
Firms like US Steel and Standard Oil had the resources to control the markets for their products and buy votes for friendly legislation and ruling. Workers, on the other hand, could be laid off or forced to accept pay reductions without warning or recourse.

8. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller
Carnegie: Scottish immigrant who worked as telegraph operator before using a job with the PA Railroad to build a steel empire. During the 1870’s depression, Carnegie used vertical integration—the controlling of every stage of production, manufacturing, and distribution.
Rockefeller: founder of Standard Oil who mastered “horizontal integration,” or acquiring competing firms, and then using vertical integration to control the market.
Robber barons, or captains of industry?

10. Workers, Part I
. Most industrial workers had semi-skilled jobs that required only managing a machine. These workers had no control over production and were easily replaced and dismissed during a strike or economic downturn. Regular and prolonged unemployment became widespread for these workers, some of whom became “tramps,” taking to roads and rail to search for employment.
Class divisions between the very rich, middle class, and very poor begin to appear.
By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half of the population and owned more property than the remaining 99 percent. Many wealthy Americans conspicuously consumed an aristocratic lifestyle of luxury goods, exclusive clubs, colleges, and social events. Not far from the homes of the wealthy were the slums of the urban poor. The difference between the two worlds was captured in Matthew Smith’s 1868 best-seller, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, which began with an engraving contrasting a $2 million dollar mansion with the slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis published a book of photographs, How the Other Half Lives, documenting the poor’s wretched existence in New York City.

11. Westward the Course of Empire
What does Frederick Jackson Turner argue about the west?
The “West” is actually many West’s (Middle-West, North West, Far West, Trans-Mississippi West).
Government action is needed to help clear the west…why?
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he argued that the frontier had forged American culture’s distinctive qualities: individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility. Turner argued that the frontier had been a “safety valve,” which drew away the dissatisfied in the East, and therefore mitigated social unrest. Very influential at the time, Turner’s idea drew on long-standing notions that the West offered economic opportunity and freedom to newcomers. Many farmers, gold-rush miners, and immigrants did find economic opportunity in the West, but there the accuracy of Turner’s interpretation ended. Migrants to the West moved in groups, usually families, not as individuals; the West was not an empty space but rather was inhabited by Indians, who had to be dispossessed by whites for the frontier to be settled; and the West was not a paradise of small farms, but an area with industrial mining and agriculture, landlords, railroads, Chinese contract laborers, and, until the Civil War, African-American slaves.

12. The Middle Border
More land comes into US between than in the previous 250 years.
Farming in the middle border was difficult, requiring irrigation and a family effort to make the labor profitable. While RR’s increased ability to market goods, they also meant farms were increasingly subject to fluctuations in the global market. Expensive equipment also resulted in a cycle of debt for many farmers.

13. Cowboys… Will go 8-8 this season and miss the playoffs.
Cattle ranching booms after the Civil War. Railroad depots at places like Wichita Kansas become destinations for cattle drives from Texas. Ended in the 1880’s with the introduction of fenced in farms and barbed wire.
In the far west, cities such as SF and LA become urban centers thanks to oil discoveries and development of manufacturing companies.

14. And Indians
As the West(s) became integrated into the US economy, the fate of the Plains Indians was sealed.
Buffalo, the staple of the Plains Indians existence, were ruthlessly hunted, and the US Army destroyed native villages in the name of ending Indian resistance.
In 1877, O.O. Howard chased the Nez Perce 1700 miles across the west, forcing their surrender and removal to Oklahoma.

15. Resistance 1876: Battle of Little Bighorn
1870’s-1880’s: Resistance by the Apache in the Southwest.
Resistance only delays the inevitable. The admission of six new states (CO, ND, SD, MT, WA, ID, and WY) mean a flood of white settlers. Most natives are removed to reservations where they live in poverty.

16. Redrawing Native Life
Indians’ idea of freedom, resting on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and control of ancestral lands, clashed with the values and interests of most white Americans.
In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, which fragmented the lands of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be given to Indian families, with the rest of the land to be sold to white buyers. Indians who accepted the farms and “adopted the habits of civilized life” would be offered American citizenship. Though the policy led to the loss of much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions, whites benefited enormously, taking much of the best Indian lands, including much of Oklahoma.
. Nearly all believed that the federal government should persuade or force the Plains Indians to give up their land, religion, communal property, nomadic way of life, and gender relations, and adopt Christianity, private property, and small farming on reservations, where men would work the fields and women would work in the home

17. Destruction
In the late 1880’s, some natives practice the Ghost Dance. Large numbers congregated as leaders predicted the demise of whites, and the return of the buffalo.
The US government reacts by sending troops to Indian reservations in case of revolt.
December 1889, Massacre at Wounded Knee

18. Gilded Age Politics
Political corruption was pervasive. William H. Tweed led a corrupt political machine in NYC that defrauded the government of millions. Tweed’s base of power was the working poor and immigrants to whom he provided jobs and favors in return for votes. Railroad magnates like Leland Stanford bought votes in Western legislatures, and in national politics, lawmakers support bills that benefit companies they invest in or provide them with stock/salaries.
During the Crédit Mobilier scandal, a corporation formed by Union Pacific Railroad stockholders made contracts with itself, at government expense and for huge profits, and gave stock to influential politicians. And the Whiskey Ring in the Grant administration united Republicans officials, tax collectors, and whiskey manufacturers in a scheme that defrauded the federal government of millions in tax dollars.

19. National Politics
The parties were closely divided, and in most presidential elections between 1876 and 1892, the margin separating the major candidates was less than 1 percent of the popular vote.
In 1874, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, which started a period of political stalemate in which little new legislation was passed for twenty years.
Only briefly did either party control both the Congress and the White House. One-term presidents followed: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James A. Garfield in 1881 (succeeded by Chester A. Arthur after his assassination that year), Grover Cleveland in 1884, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Cleveland again in 1892.

21. Corruption, Economy, and Reform
Both parties became controlled by party managers closely aligned with business interests.
Reform efforts; In 1883, the Civil Service Act substituted a merit system for federal employees, which replaced political appointments with competitive examinations. In 1887, responding to protests against unfair railroad practices, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to ensure that rates charged to farmers and merchants were “reasonable.” The ICC was the first federal agency to regulate the economy, but it could not itself set rates, and thus had little effect. Though Congress soon passed the Sherman Antitrust Act (1893)-- which banned combinations and practices restraining free trade--- its language was too vague for its laws to be enforced and it also had little effect
. Republicans supported a high tariff to protect American industry and pursued a fiscal policy based on reducing spending, paying off the nation’s debt, and withdrawing from circulation all greenbacks—the paper money issued during the Civil War. The Democrats opposed a high tariff, but because the leadership was still tied to New York banks and finance, they opposed demands from their agricultural base for an increase in the money supply.

22. The Grange
Protests over railroad policies among farmers and local merchants suffering very high freight rates led to the formation of the Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange. Founded in 1867, the Grange established cooperatives for storing and marketing farm goods in order to force railroads to lower their prices. In some states, the Grange pressured state legislatures to investigate railroad rates and, in some cases, regulate them. A resurgent labor movement also called for economic regulation, in the form of eight-hour laws limiting the workday. Although a few state legislatures passed these laws, they lacked means of enforcement and had little effect.

23. The Problem of Freedom in the Gilded Age
Many Americans believed that something was terribly wrong in the nation’s social development, and their talk of “better classes” and “dangerous classes” became the rule as labor strife was recurrent..
If wage labor was no longer a temporary condition, did the US still give people the chance for economic independence?
The emergence of a permanent class of wage earners challenged traditional American ideas of freedom. Did America still offer opportunities to ordinary citizens to gain economic independence? To many, it seemed that wage labor was no longer a temporary condition on the way to economic autonomy, nor did the West seem a refuge from deprivation in the East. Many Americans saw the concentration of wealth in this period as natural and a sign of progress, however, and mainstream economics held that wages were determined by supply and demand and should not be artificially changed by government or labor unions. The link between freedom and equality forged in the Revolution and strengthened by the Civil War no longer seemed relevant. Reformers in the Liberal Republican movement, which challenged Grant in the 1872 elections, even argued that universal male suffrage was a mistake, as the poor and workers might use the vote to threaten property. Instead, they urged a return to property qualifications for the vote.

24. Social Darwinism
Evolution was a natural process in both nature and society. Government could only corrupt society by regulating the society or economy to the advantage of the poor or workers, who simply were less able to adapt to changing conditions.
Social Darwinists believed giant corporations had evolved to become dominant in the economy because they had better adapted, and to restrict their operations would be to reverse progress. Poverty, it was believed, was caused by a lack of character or absence of self-reliance.

25. Contract Theory and the Court
. By the 1880s, liberty of contract, not equality before the law regardless of race, came to define the meaning of the 14th amendment.
State and federal courts regularly struck down state laws that regulated business, such as maximum-hour laws, as an illegal interference with the rights of employers to use their property as they saw fit and the rights of employees to choose the conditions of their work. Initially, the Supreme Court accepted laws regulating firms that represented a “public interest,” such as railroads (Munn v. Illinois).
However, the courts generally favored businesses whenever they complained of a loss of economic freedom, struck down laws granting workers’ rights, and limited the Sherman Antitrust Act. Most famously, in Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court struck down a state law establishing maximum hours for bakers, arguing that it interfered with the right of contract between employers and employees.
Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the workplace, and as long as independent individuals freely contracted with each other, neither government nor unions had a right to interfere with working condition. Workers’ demands that government enforce an eight-hour day or provide unemployment relief struck liberals as a perversion of governmental authority that threatened liberty.

26. The Labor Question
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877-demonstrates worker solidarity and power, but also federal willingness to use troops to crush strikes.
Terrance Powderly and the KOL-the first attempt to unite skilled and unskilled workers in a labor organization. Labor reformers in this era presented a wide range of hopes and demands, from anarchism and socialism to the eight-hour day and a desire for a “cooperative commonwealth.” They all agreed that new social conditions were highly unequal and required drastic change. The labor movement challenged the prevailing definition of freedom as liberty of contract, arguing that Americans had lost control over their livelihoods and their government.

28. Haymarket
On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers across the country went on strike and protested for the eight-hour day.
In Chicago, where a vibrant labor movement brought together radical socialists and anarchists, immigrant workers, and native-born antimonopoly laborites, a strike by iron molders at the giant McCormick plant that produced agricultural machinery turned violent. Company strikebreakers and private police battled the strikers, and on May 3, 1886, four strikers were killed by police. A rally held the next day to protest their deaths ended in a bomb explosion—to this day, no one knows the identity of the bomber—and police opened fire, leading to the deaths and injury of more police and bystanders. Police in Chicago and elsewhere used the bombing as an opportunity to arrest and suppress labor radicals. The McCormick strike ended in defeat, and eight anarchists, mostly immigrants, were charged with the bombing. With little evidence and flawed proceedings, they were convicted. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and the remaining three were imprisoned until their sentences were commuted several years later. The “Haymarket martyrs” soon became symbols of labor’s bloody struggle for rights in America.
The Haymarket affair took place amid multiple efforts across the country by workers, mostly in the Knights of Labor, to run candidates and organize worker-based parties at the local and state levels. The most celebrated campaign took place in 1886 in New York, where Henry George ran for mayor on the United Labor ticket and almost defeated the Democratic candidate. The events of 1886 suggested that labor might become a powerful political force. In fact, the Knights of Labor quickly declined after 1886, unions began to avoid politics, and the Democrats and Republicans proved successful at winning workers’ votes.