Name:______________________________________
Date:_______________________
Period:__________
Railroads, Robber Barons, and Unbridled Capitalism
1. Which historian showed his bias against capitalism in his book
The Robber Barons?
2. Which people built the greatest industrial nation the world had
ever seen?
3. What term is used by socialists to describe those who used the
capitalist system to build our nation during the 19th century?
List the three men who were accused, by socialists, of using the
capitalist system to exploit the working class, form anticompetitive trusts, and accumulated personal wealth?
4.
List four advantages of rail transport over roads, rivers, and canals:
17.
18.
19.
20.
21. What increased between the agricultural south and the
industrialized north?
22. What did the northern states institute to protect their industries
from foreign competition?
23. What region was negatively impacted by high tariffs?
24. What was discovered in California in January of 1848?
5.
6.
25. What got involved in the construction of a transcontinental
railroad in the mid-1800s?
7. Which Muckraker wrote the History of the Standard Oil
Company?
8. Who did she believe were a destructive force?
List the seven “Kings of Industry” and their corresponding
industries: (caption)
26. Name:
Industry:
9. What name was given to historians that criticized the socialist
view of the so called “Robber Barons”?
10. What was commerce limited to during the first 50 years of our
Republic’s history?
11. Who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during Gibbons
v. Ogden?
12. Prior to the Gibbons v. Ogden decision and according to the
original intent of the Constitution, what had no power to regulate
commerce within a state?
27. Name:
Industry:
28. Name:
Industry:
29. Name:
Industry:
30. Name:
Industry:
31. Name:
Industry:
13. What did the federal government assume power over during the
mid-1800s?
14. Where were railroads invented in the early 1800s?
32. Name:
Industry:
15. What was the first railroad company in the United States?
16. When was it established?
33. Which states opposed the construction of the Transcontinental
Railroad on Constitutional grounds?
34. In what year was the bill to build the Transcontinental Railroad
signed into law?
35. Who wrote, How Capitalism Saved America?
36. Who “succeeds financially by selling a newer, better, or less
expensive product on the free market without any government
subsidies…”?
List three things that James J. Hill did to encourage the development
of businesses that used the Great Northern Railroad:
50.
51.
37. Who calls the shots in a capitalist/free market economy?
52.
38. Who “succeeds primarily by influencing government to
subsidize…business or industry or to enact legislation or
regulation that harms his competitors”?
53. Who said, “the government should not furnish capital to these
companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to
enable them to conduct their business in competition with
enterprises [like mine] that have received no aid from the public
treasury.”?
54. Who becomes wealthy at the taxpayers’ expense and use the
power of government to protect their wealth?
39. Which railroad company began construction on the
Transcontinental Railroad in Sacramento?
40. How much of a bond subsidy per mile was given to Central
Pacific for track built on the plains?
41. How much of a bond subsidy per mile was given to Central
Pacific for track built between mountains?
42. How much of a bond subsidy per mile was given to Central
Pacific for track built over mountains?
43. How much public land was given to the railroads for every mile
of track laid?
1862:
1864:
44. Where did the Union Pacific Railroad meet the Central Pacific
Railroad?
45. In what year did the two railroads join?
46. How much land was given by the federal government to the two
railroad companies?
47. What European nation is larger than the land given to the two
Railroad companies?
48. What was the construction of the railroad like due to government
intervention? (caption)
49. Who built the Great Northern Railroad without any government
aid?
55. Who becomes wealthy only when they successfully meet their
customer’s demands?
“[James J. Hill] had built the best railroad in America and used it to
beat subsidized rivals time and again. He helped open the Northwest
to settlement…. He made a difference in the way the world worked….
He was the real hero in the drama of American transcontinental
railroads.”
Burton Folsom