A New Spirit of Reform 1872-1897. The Gilded Age The American worker hidden under the powerful few ...
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Transcript of A New Spirit of Reform 1872-1897. The Gilded Age The American worker hidden under the powerful few ...
A New Spirit of Reform1872-1897
The Gilded Age
The American worker hidden under the powerful few
Reform, or change needed – were the industries corrupt?
Railroad Credit Scandal
Union Pacific buys credit company Gives contracts from government to
Union Pacific Overpaid 50 million – stocks look
good? Led to investigation
President Grant
Corruption
Railroad credit scandal Cheated American Indians Illegal payments from whiskey
companies to avoid paying taxes. People were making millions off
the government
Political Corruption …..
Helped immigrates for votes
Boss Tweed – newspaper bribe
Election of 1884-Cleveland wins Interstate Commerce Act
Forced Railroad crossing state lines to charge customers the same fees for the same service.
C. Vanderbilt made a Fortune from building
railroads.
Great Northern Railroad
System – James Hill- “The
Empire builder
Reform was also needed with American workers
Labor Unions established: Strikers – stop
working to get better pay or conditions
Two groups formed AFL Nobel Order of Knights
Two Different Unions:
AFL : American Federation of Labor
-Skilled workers -peaceful
bargaining (talks)
Knights of Labor
Open to all workers Improve pay and
work conditions Strikes and boycotts
Ends with a bomb
Texas Longhorns; 400 ranches
-Ranching big business
-Cattle trails and railroads developed.
Meatpacking developed by Armour and Swift
Andrew Carnegie poor, from Scotland came
over at 12 worked on railroads
Started and invested in Carnegie Steel Co
Became a steel tycoon; railroads, bridges, buildings
Sold in 1901 to J P Morgan for 480 million; libraries, schools, medical research
Tech Boom– “Menlo Park wizard”
Thomas Edison – perfects light bulb, brings electricity to New York, invents many things….like the phonograph
Alexander Gram Bell – invents telephone
Other inventions: George Eastman – The Kodak
camera! Elisha Otis – the elevator! Edwin Drake – strikes oil in Titusville! Ford – gas engine and creates the
assembly line!
Vocabulary:
Selling stock – way for a corporation to make money
Entrepreneur – person who starts and organizes a business
Monopoly – a corporation that has little competition
Corporations
Stockholders – are those who buy shares in a company. The company is led by Board of Directors
Trusts – formed to gain dominance with several companies hence creating monopoly
To control the markets, business bought out their competition – horizontal combination
John D Rockefeller
-started Standard Oil -vertical integration
-owned 90% of pipelines
refined 84% of the oil
Vertical Integration
Control all industries required for production from raw material to the final delivery.
Raw Material Factory production Railroad for delivery
Manufacturing replaces agriculture
Suspension bridges ----Brooklyn bridge Refineries for crude oil---Rockefeller Railroads---Cornelius Vanderbilt Meat packing-----Amour and Gustavo Swift Steel for sky scrappers
US has tremendous natural resources- coal, iron, petroleum
Downside—factories caused pollution.