Transcontinental Railroad = Risky
- Congress in response gave liberal money loans in 1862 + gave land to the railroad companies
- Used alternate mile square sections as a land grant
- Ex) Union Pacific Railroad - granted loan & money → Credit Mobilier construction $73 million dollar & bribed
congressman to get away with it
- Other side: Central Pacific Railroad → met at (st Utah, in 1869) ⇒ Connected from west to the center
- Killed Indians if they met them (but it was legally Indian's land)
- Criticism for giving away valuable land to railroad company who are so corrupt & Overoptimism on railroads placement →
lead to bankruptcy of multiple railroad companies
1. (1869) Union/Central Pacific Railroad’s Transcontinental Railroad (From Sacramento, CA to Omaha, Nebraska)
2. (1883) Northern Pacific Railroad (from Lake Superior to Puget Sound)
3. (1884) Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (Southwestern deserts to California)
4. (1884) Southern Pacific (New Orleans to San Francisco)
5. (1893) Great Northern (Duluth to Seattle north)
Cornelius Canderbilt → Famous person who became millionaire from railroad
- Adopted steel railroad & standing gauge of track width = reduces inconvenience
- Westinghouse air brake adopted
Jay Gould - used “stock watering” → inflating the stock
● Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad
○ Physical Unification (Created domestic market for raw materials/manufactured goods)
○ Urbanization - railroad can provide the transportation needed for the mass of people to live there
○ Immigration - Railroad brought new opportunities & easier transportation to those who want westward expansion
○ Environmental destruction - extinction of buffalo, overcropping of corns
○ Standard Time zone
○ Millionaires born = also sign of corruption → railroad companies bribed congressman/journalist → at first they
competed but then they formed “pool” to protect their profit
■ But many were late to respond to economic injustice because they viewed this as a progress
Depression of 1870
- Triggered farmers to finally protest about railroads ⇒ formed agrarian groups like “grange” → tried to regulate railroad
monopoly
- Wabash Case (1886) - individual states had no power to regulate interstate(railroad) commerce = federal gov should do it
-
(1887) Congress passed Interstate COmmerce Act - prohibited rebates/pools and required railroad to publish their
rates openly, restricted discrimination against shippers and charging more on short than long, setted up Interstate
Commerce Commission (ICC) to administer and enforce the new legislation
- In truth the “supervision” was very nominal & stabilize the business system
Why did the USA become an Industrial giant?
1. Abundant Capital (From civil war profiteering + borrowings from foreign capitalists)
2. Natural resources used effectively (ex. Iron from Minnesota Lake superior region)
3. Massive immigration = labor cheap & plentiful
4. American ingenuity → american inventiveness led to massive patents, which in return changed the lives of people
a. Stock ticker, typewriter → women now in the industry
b. Refrigerator car, electricity → urbanization
c. telephone ⇒ communication network built + attracted women to the switchboard
d. Edison = phonograph, mimeograph, dictaphone, moving picture, electric lightbulb = now ppl could use night
Emergence of Trust Titan
● Andrew Carnegie - Steel
○ Started the “vertical integration”: one organization does all phases of manufacturing
○ Steel = needed for railroad & bridge & some wanted for their house → 1850 bessemer process increased the
availability of steel + america having abundant iron, coal, and transportation, labor ⇒ steel boom in america
○ Actually disliked trust and used partnership of “pittsburgh millionaire”
○ Carnegie dedicated his last days giving away money for libraries/college etc.
● John Rockefeller - Oil
○ 1859 - Kerosene, derived from petroleum, was the major product → whale oil industry declined → but then electric
bulb came, and kerosene became an old thing → but they soon found that gasoline is needed for automobiles
○ “Horizontal integration”: allying w. Competitor to monopolize a market → he started “trust”
■ Trusts did give products at a cheap price… but still bad for the economy
■ Stockholders gave theirs to form standard oil company (1970) = he monopolized the world petroleum market
○ 1870 Standard Oil COmpany of Ohio → 1882 Trust ⇒ by 1877 Rockefeller controlled 95% of all the oil refineries
■ He had policy of rule or ruin cz he believed in the survival of the fittest & monopolized stuff
● J.P. Morgan - Banker
○ “Interlocking directorates” - placing officers of his own banking in rival enterprises
○ Reorganization of railroad, insurance companies, and bank
○ Got Carnegie’s company, watered it, and 1901 launched United States Steel Corporation = worth $1.4 billion
⇒ All done to reduce competition
Gospel of Wealth
- Just like Divine right, America’s plutocrats took “Gospel of Wealth” and/or survival of the fittest theories (Social Darwinist)
- “Millionaires are a produce of natural selection” → they were also poor at first
- They moved to places like “easy states” NJ or Kentucky where the restrictions are low (cz each state had different
stance on what to do w. Their company
Government Effort to stop Trust
- (1890) Sherman Antitrust Act - forbade combination of trust & restraints of trade ⇒ but was ineffective cz there’s loophole
- Instead it was used to restrain labor unions (cz it restrained trade)
South
- Supplier of raw materials
- Steel industry → “pittsburgh plus” pricing system + sole reliance on cotton export
- 1880, movement to move cotton mills to the South from north (for cheap & non-unionized labor + tax benefit)
- South =erners viewed the employment in the mills as a salvation (steady & wages)
Impact of New Industrial Revolution in America
1. Rise of standard of living (physical comforts)
2. Away from Jeffersonian ideals (tariff & “trust-busting” strong government)
3. Concept of time = now there’s official time using clock
4. “Gibson Girl” independent and athletic ‘new woman; → romanticized women ideal
5. Difference between labor class & middle class
6. Strong pressure for foreign trade → saturate the domestic market
Union
-
By 1872 there were 32 national unions
National Labor Union 1866 represented workers having over 600,000 members
Colored National Labor Union → for blacks, but they never worked together
1870 economic burst → Knights of Labor rises (they included everyone except nonproducers (liquor dealer, gamblers,
lawyers, bankers, stock brokers) ⇒ they campaigned for economic/social reform
- Producers’ cooperatives and codes for safety and health + eight hour work
- However came to downfall when they lost number of May Day strikes in 1886 → became weak by 1890s
●
American Federation of Labor (1886) - made by Samuel Compers
○ Federation of self-governing national unions → major goal of “trade agreement” and authorizing the “closed shop”
○ Used walkout and boycott and since there were many ppl they were able to pull out strikes better
○ Non political and moved through the panic of 1893 well, with 500,000 ppl later on
⇒ The efforts of this labor union began to change worker perception (ex. Labor Day as national holiday)
Expansion to the Great West (Arizona, New Mexico, “Indian Territory”, Utah)
Relationship w. Indians
- Expansion after the civil war 1865 → 1890;
- By this point native americans became nomadic traders and efficient buffalo hunters
- Americans spreading disease (typhoid, cholera, smallpox) + killing bisons by fun
- 1851 Treaty at Fort laramie and 1853 Fort Atkinson = beginning of reservation system in the west where they
established boundaries for each tribe → indians don’t have tribe/chief = problem rising
- 1860-90 “Period of Indian Wars”
- 1860s federal gov made the “Great Sioux reservation” & promised to give food, clothing & supplies ⇒ but the
officers were corrupt
- Constantly in warfare between US Army & Indians after the civil war
- Massacre in 1864 → 1866 Sioux war party, trying to block the construction of Bozeman Trail, attacked
US army killed them all = Indian Win
- 1874 Someone claimed that he discovered gold in sioux land → people fled in & sioux waged war on ppl ⇒ failed.
- Chief Joseph surrendered in 1877
- Railroad → ppl killed buffalo for fun & for the food → killed to point where it was in danger of complete extinction
- Now the Indians had no source of living because they were dependent on buffalo
- By 1880 양심있는 사람 드디어 등장 … 은 아닌듯 ㅋ 해결된 거 없음
- Helen Hunt Jackson → Published book called “A Century of Dishonor” + further published books on the
injustice
- Ghost Dance spread in 1890 → Battle of Wounded Knee
- 1887 Dawes Severalty Act: dissolved many tribes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set of
individual Indian family heads w. 160 acres → if you become “civilized” then you’ll have land in 25 years.
- 1879 Government fun on Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania
- Sended “field matrons” to the reservations to teach Native American women to preach the virtues
Mining
- “Pike pickers”
- 1849 California Gold Rush
- 1858 Colorado
- 1859 Comstock Lode in Nevada (had gold and silver and was consistent for over 30 years)
-
- Other places like Montana, Idaho, and other western states
“Helldorados” were formed + Women found opportunity running boarding houses or working as prostitutes → and actually got
voting rights in wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896)
Over time the surface gold were all gone & corporation had to appear to break the gold ores
Cowboy
- Long Drive (moving cattle from railroad station to another) ⇒ but was hard since they have many hardships (blizzard, cow
fever, indian attack, lack of grass, etc)
Homestead Act of 1862 = Used to encourage people to move west (그전까지는 돈벌려고 땅팔았음)
- It was kinda a fraud cz the land was so bad that 160 acres did not really benefited them
- Beyond the 100th meridian there was so little rain that it is not adequate for farming → the pioneers devised “dry farming”
method → but this led to the dust bowl later on
- 1874 Barbed wire - allowed people to build fences on trellis prairies
- Federal financial irrigation projects appeared later → made the west arable
Addition of new states (Jocz would tell me LOL)
Frontier Theory
Frontier = state of mind and a symbol of opportunity = now disappeared by the end of 1800s = also a safety valve) = kinda like a
dream place where they live a good life in wilderness
Agricultural modernization:
- Large-scale farmers increased & went for one crop as expensive machinery like twine binder (1870s) and combine (1880s)
came to crease efficiency dramatically.
- created breadbasket of the land (ex. California and Pennsylvania)
- But now farmers were dependent on world crop price (manufacturers had protection tariff but the farmers had nothing)
- +There were not enough dollars to go around so the price was falling down.
- They had to fight through high rates of interest → south severely sank back into tenants/sharecropping (similar to serfdom)
- 1890 Cotton Boll weevil (해충), Floods, droughts in trans mississippi west at 1887, taxes, and railroad companies
threatening them to not transport the food
- (1868) tried Greenback movement ⇒ failed
-
1867 National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry formed: aimed for enhancement of the lives of farmers through society.
Educational, and fraternal activities ⇒ later developed into improvement of the farmers collectively.
- Tried to manufacture harvesting machinery → failed
- Regions of mississippi valley에 grange많았음 → tried to regulate railway rates and storage fee through imposing laws
on state government → granger laws failed as the easterners had “lawyers”
- Wabash Decision of 1886 → destroyed Grangers’ influence
- 1878 - Greenback Labor Party → 1880 sent out a candidate for the presidential election
- 1870s - Farmers’ Alliance (White) & 1880s Colored Farmers’ National Alliance (Black) → Farmers’ Alliance later diverged into
Populist
Populist party
- Hate wall street and the money trust
- Wanted nationalizing railroad/telephone/telegraph; graduated income tax / create new federal “sub treasury” / free and
unlimited coinage of silver → This promoted by William Hope Harvey
- Calamity howler = “Mary E. Lease”
- Wobbly at south (racial difference) but became more stronger and stronger in west during the 1890s
Panic of 1893 = strengthened Populist argument
- Army was formed → ex Coxey’s army - he demanded for government to take action by inflationary public works program (to
resolve unemployment)
- Pullman Strike 1894: federal troops were set to quell down to strike -- >people involved in it got imprisoned without a jury trial
Mckinley(Republican) - WiN! vs. William Jennings Byran (Democrat)
- Free silver at this point became something closer to a religion
- Bryan forced free-trade issue to be a problem & wanted to start an inflation
- He slashed easterners & fear swept the easterns and they showed strong support to McKinley → factory owners tried
to threaten workers to vote for mckinley by telling them they’ll reduce payment if bryan won.
- Byran lost despite having strong foothold in south and west → shows how failing to get support from the eastern
laborers can lead him to lose election
- Significance of the election of 1896 (jocz help me)