1. ‘Robber Barons’ or Heroes of Industry?

2. Monopolies vs. Labor Unions: A Fair Fight?

3. Andrew Carnegie – Steel
John D. Rockefeller – Oil
J.P. Morgan – Banking, (Railroads, Steel)

4. How would you create a monopoly?
Vertical Integration:
Controlling modes of production and supply from top to bottom.
Horizontal Integration:
buy out competing producers

5. New Type of Business Entities

6. Two forms of Monopolies:
Holding companies: companies whose business was buying the stock of others
Trusts: competing companies turn stock over to trustees who ran all companies as one, paying dividends

7. Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Monopoly
Make products better and cheaper
Destroy Unions – keep pay low
Lured talent with stock options

8. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust
Rockefeller took Standard Oil from 2-3% of oil market to 90%
Tactics
Paid very low wages
Drove competition out of business

9. Social Darwinism
Herbert Spencer “survival of the fittest” evolution in human society - fittest rise to the top
How was this used to justify monopoly & gap between rich & poor?

10. Sherman Anti-trust Act, 1890
Prevent Monopolies from killing competition
Trusts couldn’t disrupt free trade between states or other countries
Irony: used more against unions and strikes than trusts in late 1800s

11. Problems in the workplace
Worker Reaction - Unions
Problems in the workplace
Terms of employment poor: day weeks, 12+ hour days, no vacation, no sick leave
Physical conditions poor: polluted and often dangerous
Wages low: so low that millions of women and children forced to work

12. Child Labor

13. Child Labor

14. “Galley Labor”

15. An injury to one is the concern of all!
Knights of Labor
The American Federation of Labor: 1886
Samuel Gompers
Collective bargaining
Threat of strikes
An injury to one is the concern of all!

16. The Corporate “Bully-Boys”: Pinkerton Agents

17. President Hayes authorize use of federal troops to stop the violence
Great Strike of 1877
80,000 railroad workers strike
Shut down most railroad traffic for week
Joined by many other workers
President Hayes authorize use of federal troops to stop the violence

18. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877

19. Haymarket Riot, May 4, 1886
3,000 gather to protest police killing of striker police sent in to disperse
A bomb kills 7 policemen
Public opinion begins to turn against unions and strikes, connecting them to Anarchy & violence

20. Pullman Strike, 1893
George Pullman lays off half of workers, cuts wages of rest, refuses to reduce rent
ARU, with Eugene Debs as spokesman, wants arbitration Pullman refuses
Pullman hires SCABS - President Cleveland orders in federal troops

21. The Socialists
Eugene V. Debs