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When Americans went to war in 1861, agriculture was the country’s leading source of economic growth. Forty years later, manufacturing had taken its place. During these years, the production of manufactured goods outpaced population growth. By 1900, three times as many goods per person existed as in 1860. Per capita income increased by over 2 percent a year.
Many people did not win any gains at all.
All the typical energy resources are abundant!
The USA quickly became the richest and most industrialized nation on earth.
Standardized currency, patent system, telegraph system, national postal service and rail service.
Legal protection of businesses, possibilities for organized labor, tolerance of monopolies.
By 1913, the USA produced 1/3 of the world's total industrial output.
America's population grew from 40 mil in 1870 to 76 mil by 1900, and 1/3 of those people were immigrants. By 1888, NYC had 3.4 mil people :)
Immigrants primarily came into cities.
Many immigrants left poverty and persecution in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, hoping to take advantage of democratic institutions and economic opportunity in the United States. For those who entered the country through New York City’s harbor after 1886, their first glimpse of America was often the Statue of Liberty. Despite the welcoming tone of Emma Lazarus’s poem, not all Americans were eager to receive them—even though some were fairly recent immigrants themselves.
Cornelius Vanderbilt - transportation, waterway shipping, railroads
Andrew Carnegie - steel industry
Leland Stanford - merchant and wholesaler, California railroad
John D. Rockefeller - bought up rivals, Standard Oil
They controlled prices and the market.
They bought up all steps of production (Armor "everything but the squeal").
They broke up unions and introduced lobbying.
The Irish immigrants primarily settled in cities, and worked in factories. The German immigrants (who had also been mostly farmers, think of Levi Strauss) ended up staying as farmers, and went out to the Midwest.
The Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston in 1894
The Chinese came to the US primarily as miners and railworkers.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was initiated in 1882 (there were roughly 105000 people of Chinese origin living mostly on the West Coast . . . they had been invited as guest workers).
Asian immigrants faced extra suppression; they were denied business licenses and their children were not considered covered by the 14th amendment until 1898.
This is the time when cities became segregated - public transport and roadways allowed the wealthy to move out and leave migrants and the poor to squalor.
Chicago World's Fair (the Chicago Columbian Exposition) was a world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.
Many of the immigrants to America were highly skilled professionals, including Joseph Pulitzer (from Hungary, emigrated in 1864), Irving Berlin (emigrated from Russia in 1892), Mother Mary Harris Jones (emigrated from Ireland in mid 1800s) . . . Andrew Carnegie was actually born in Scotland, so was John Muir.
Nikola Tesla moved to the US in 1884. At Colorado Springs, in May 1899, Tesla, several of his assistants, and a local contractor commenced the construction of Tesla's laboratory shortly after arriving in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a high altitude location where he would have more room than in his downtown New York City laboratory for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. He did aaaaaallll sorts of cool experiments there :)
1. What impact did the convergence of immigration, the influx of investment money, and technological change have on the United States after the Civil War?
2. How did the rise in the quantity of consumer goods affect daily life? What was lost? What was gained?
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
1870s-1900
“The Gilded Age” is a term that is often used to describe the late 19th century from around 1870 to 1900. It was coined by the author Mark Twain in the title of his 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. This term was the ideal description for the time, suggesting that society’s corruption was thinly covered, or gilded, with a layer of shiny gold that made it look shiny and appealing on the outside.
In the year 1800 it would scarcely have occurred to founding fathers such as Jefferson, Hamilton, or Madison, to consider that the role of the government was to regulate business.
The Constitution gave the right to control interstate commerce to the United States Congress, and in a case of Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall affirmed that it was the federal government's exclusive right to control interstate commerce.
During the Gilded Age, 1876-1900, Congress was known for being rowdy and inefficient. It was not unusual to find that a quorum could not be achieved because too many members were drunk or otherwise preoccupied with extra-governmental affairs. The halls of Congress were filled with tobacco smoke and spittoons were everywhere. One disgusted observer noted that not only did the members chew and spit incessantly, but their aim was bad. The atmosphere on the floor was described as an “infernal din.” The Senate, whose seats were often auctioned off to the highest bidder, was known as a “rich man's club,” where political favors were traded like horses, and the needs of the people in the working classes lay beyond the vision of those exalted legislators
During this period very little serious legislation was passed; between 1875 and 1896 only five major bills made it through Congress to the president's desk. Even discussion of the graduated income tax, by any definition a revolutionary measure, failed to arouse much interest or public debate. All the same, there was wide voter participation and interest in the political process; most elections saw about an 80% turnout. Yet unprecedented dilemmas being created by industrialization, urbanization, and the huge influx of immigrants were met with passivity and confusion.
Republicans
By the early 1900s, many Americans had left rural areas and moved to cities to take jobs in factories and offices. Although workers often lived in miserable conditions, city life attracted many newcomers because of an alluring consumer culture and new freedoms for young adults. Activist citizens started reform movements that worked for public education, labor rights, women’s rights, the safety of the nation’s food supply, and the conservation of natural resources— even though some of these movements often conflicted each other.
1. What was the appeal of city life for people migrating to urban areas?
2. How do you think government policies and advertising influenced consumer culture?
Characteristics of the Progressive Era include purification of the government, modernization, a focus on family and education, prohibition, and women’s suffrage.
Many Progressives sought to rid the government of corruption, and muckraking became a particular type of journalism that exposed waste, corruption, and scandal on a national level.
Two of the most important outcomes of the Progressive Era were the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the first of which outlawed the manufacturing, sale, or transport of alcohol, and the second of which enfranchised women with the right to vote.
-> 1933
Susan B. Anthony (February 15, 1820–March 13, 1906) was an American social reformer and feminist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and coworker in social-reform activities, primarily in the field of women’s rights. In 1852, they founded the New York Women’s State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was a woman. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Popularly known as the “Anthony Amendment” and introduced by Senator Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA), it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.
The national political leaders of the Progressive Era included Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette Sr., Charles Evans Hughes, and Herbert Hoover on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith on the Democratic side.
Theodore Roosevelt is often cited as the first Progressive president, known for his trust -busting activities.
Progressives did little for civil rights or the plight of African Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction, as the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of many racist southern laws.
Following the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, at age 42, succeeded to the office, becoming the youngest U.S. president in history. Leading his party and country into the Progressive Era, he championed his “Square Deal” domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness, broken trusts, railroads regulations, and pure food and drugs. Making conservation a top priority, he established a myriad of new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the nation’s natural resources. In foreign policy, he focused on Central America, where he began construction of the Panama Canal. His successful efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.
Muckrakers: A reform-oriented investigative journalist during the Progressive Era. The muckrakers’ work called attention to the problems of the time, including poor industrial working conditions, poor urban living conditions, and unscrupulous business practices. Prominent muckrakers included novelist Upton Sinclair, photographer Jacob Riis, and journalists Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens.
Upton Sinclair (September 20, 1878–November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle , which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat-packing industry and caused a public uproar that contributed, in part, to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of industrialized American from both the working man’s point of view and the industrialist’s. Novels such as King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927), and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.
From 1890 to 1921, reform movements created both more and less democracy in the United States, but both liberal and conservative reformers attempted to cope with a new country—more urban, more educated, and more diverse. Some reformers achieved greater democracy by improving work conditions, housing, education, and the conservation of natural resources, but other reformers stifled democracy by promoting racial segregation and limiting voting rights.
1. Why did these reform movements take place during this period?
2. How did some of these reform movements create more democracy, and how did some create less democracy