THE INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY
Chapter 18
AP US 2
Mrs. Carchidi
A MACHINE CULTURE
 The Centennial Exposition (1876)
• Held in Philadelphia, PA; the Centennial Exposition focused on main
attractions of the modern times
• Linoleum, root beer, bananas, bicycles, the Women's Building, and
Machinery Hall
• Telephone = Alexander Graham Bell
• Elevator = Elisha Otis
• Air Brake = George Westinghouse
• Corliss Engine (giant steam engine almost 4 stories high)
 John Greenleaf Whittier, aging American Poet feared the impact of new
industrial technologies on American life and compared it to the snake in the Garden
of Eden.
CORLISS
ENGINE
 Industrial growth was concentrated in the Northeast of the country with
banks and RR development
 Railroads were the most significant technical innovation of the 1800s.
 For everything RR read pages 444 to 451 including document on top of
page 449.
• RR led to integrated national economic system
• Federal & state gov’ts provided important incentives – land
grant acts
• Importance of Promontory, Utah
• Northern Securities Company (JP Morgan)
Steel
• Permitted construction
of longer bridges, taller
buildings, stronger RR
tracks, deadlier
weapons, better plows,
heavier machinery, and
faster ships.
• From the 1870s
onward steel output
became the worldwide
accepted measure of
industrial progress &
nations around the
globe vied for
leadership.
AN INDUSTRIAL
EMPIRE
CARNEGIE & STEEL
 Henry Bessemer of England and William Kelly of the
United States, independently of each other discovered that a
blast of hot air forced through molten iron burned off carbon
and other impurities resulting in steel of a more uniform and
durable quality. This process called the BESSEMER
PROCESS allowed for the mass production of high quality
low cost steel.
 Large Scale Steel Production
Needs:
• Access to Large
Iron Ore
Deposits
• Access to an
extensive
transportation
network
“vertical integration”
• A type of
organization in
which a single
company owns
and controls the
entire process
from obtaining
raw materials to
manufacture and
sale of the
finished product
ANDREW CARNEGIE
 Immigrated to the US from Scotland in 1848 at the age of 12
• 1st job as a Bobbin Boy making $1.20 a week
• Studied at night in bed, learned telegraphing and got a job at the
Pennsylvania RR
• 1859 became Divisional Superintendent for PA RR (he was 24)
• 1872 Carnegie began his investments in the Steel Industry
• 1890 Carnegie Steel Company one of only 2 companies in the
entire country that could produce more than one million tons of
steel per year.
 Read Carnegie’s article “Wealth”
(1889)
• A man who dies rich dies
disgraced
• Carnegie felt that rich men
had to responsibility to give
away their money – not
directly to the people but by
setting up fellowships,
libraries, music halls, etc.
• Carnegie underpaid his
workers and allowed Frick to
crush a violent strike at the
Homestead Plant in 1892
(see p. 465)
 1901 Carnegie sold Carnegie
Steel to JP Morgan
 JP created United States Steel
Company the first BILLION
DOLLAR COMPANY in history.
ROCKEFELLER & OIL
 Petroleum profitable as kerosene for lighting
• 1st Oil well was drilled inTitusville, PA
 1863 – John D. Rockefeller founded the first modern trust – the
Standard Oil Co.
T H E BU S I N E S S O F I N V E N T I O N
 George Eastman = photographic equipment
 Alexander Graham Bell with help from Thomas Edison make the Telephone
possible in people’s homes
 Cyrus Field = Transatlantic Cable (communication between Europe & the US
becomes almost instantaneous)
 Other inventions: typewriter, stock ticker, cash register, calculating machine,
adding machines, High speed spindles, automatic looms, electric sewing machines,
new processes for flour, canned meat, vegetables, condensed milk, packaged cereals,
refrigerated RR cars, etc.
 The Telephone and Electricity were the most important of all the inventions
of the late 19th century.
D I R E C T V S. A LT E R N AT I N G C U R R E N T
 Edison, with the backing of JP Morgan, founded the Edison Illuminating Co.
and used low voltage direct current for transmitting electricity.
• Direct current can only be transmitted about two miles so a series
of power stations had to be built to transmit the electricity to
homes. (by 1900 about 2,774 stations)
 Nikola Tesla, a Hungarian immigrant and former Edison employee, developed
alternating current motor, backed by George Westinghouse, that could convert
electricity into mechanical power that was transmitted easily over long distances.
 End Result – JP Morgan took controlling interest in Edison Illuminating Co.
away from Edison, bought Tesla’s rights to his patents from Westinghouse and
formed General Electric using Alternating Current.
THE SELLERS
 Advertising becomes common
• 1st advertising agency was N.W. Ayer & Son of Philadelphia
 New ways of selling include chain store, department store, brand name, mailorder
• 1st Department Store – John Wanamaker of Philadelphia, followed by R.
H. Macy in NY and Marshall Field in Chicago
• Mail-order Stores – Sears-Roebuck Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co.
• Chain Store – A&P grocery stores, F.W. Woolworth’s 5 & dime stores
 The consequence of advertising and large –scale retailing included:
• Americans becoming a consumer society
• The demands for goods increasing
• And a national market joined all parts of the nation
John Wanamaker, Philadelphia
Ad from Sears
Catalogue, 1909
Ad for Macy’s
new building in
NYC
THE WAGE EARNERS
 Working men, women & children
• Worked 6 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day (skilled workers = .20 cents per hours;
unskilled workers = .10 cents per hour)
• Safety standards were low & accidents were common (the U.S. had the worst
Industrial Accident Rate in the Western World at the time!)
• Women = 1870 15% over age 16 were employed; 1900 20% (YOUNG AND
SINGLE) once married most women stopped working – the exception was African
American Women who continued to work as domestic help.
• Children = 1900 1 out of every 5 boys and 1 out of every 10 girls between the ages
of 10 & 15 held jobs (boys were paid less than women and girls were paid less than
boys)
 Women in the professions
• Women entered formerly male occupations like secretaries, bookkeepers, typists,
telephone operators, and clerks in the new department stores.
• VERY FEW WOMEN entered the Professions
• Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor in the US when she graduated from
Geneva Medical College in 1849
• Arabella Mansfield became the first woman lawyer in the US 1869
• The FEMINIZATION of the Professions
• An overwhelming majority of women became nurses, schoolteachers, and librarians
• During feminization of these jobs, women became the workers while MEN
took management roles and most men left for other jobs, lowering the
profession’s status. (TEACHING is a PRIME EXAMPLE OF
FEMINIZATION)
THE WORKERS CONT.
Who benefitted
The Minorities
 In the industrial society white,
 Blacks labored on the fringes, usually
native born Protestant men
reaped the greatest rewards
in menial occupations
•
The last hired and the first fired,
they earned less than other workers
at almost every level of skill.
 Chinese (later Japanese) lived in
enclaves and suffered periodic attacks of
discrimination
•
CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT,
1882 prohibiting the immigration of
Chinese workers for 10 years
LABOR UNIONS
 KNIGHTS OF LABOR
• Founded by Uriah S. Stephens in Philadelphia, PA 1869
• 1879 Terence V. Powderly became the new Grand Master Workman (union
president)
• Aim== All Americans should receive equal benefits from the system
• Women and Minorities were allowed to be members
• Successful in small RR victories
• At its apex had 730,000 members
• Failed because it could not provide effective national leadership
Uriah Stephens
Terence V. Powderly
 American Federation of Labor
• Founded by Samuel Gompers a cigar maker by trade, a Jewish immigrant from
England who settled in New York City.
• Aim – to improve the “workingman’s welfare year by year”
• Higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions
• AFL limited women workers from joining its union an excluded black members through
the use of technical exams, and high initiation fees.
• GROWTH of the AFL: 1886 = 140,000; 1892= 250,000; 1901= 1 million; 1914 = 2
million. 1955 joined the CIO. Today as the AFL-CIO has 55 million members
LABOR UNREST
 David Ricardo’s Iron Law of Wages – Supply and demand, not the welfare of
their workers, dictated wages.
• Wanting a docile labor for force, employers fired union members, hired scabs to
replace strikers, and used the Court Injunction to force workers back on the job.
• Injunctions were used to break the Pullman Strike of 1894
 The U.S. had the greatest number of violent confrontations between capital and
labor in the industrial world.
• Between 1880 & 1900 there were more than 23,000 strikes involving 6.6 million
workers.
T H E H AY M A R K E T S QUA R E R I O T
 May, 1886 Police shot and killed two workers striking for an 8-hour workday.
• May 4, labor leaders called for a protest meeting at Haymarket
Square near downtown Chicago
• The Meeting was Peaceful when someone threw a bomb which
killed one policeman and fatally wounded 6 others.
• Police fired into the crowed and killed 4 people.
• No one knows who threw the bomb BUT…..
• Police rounded up 8 anarchist who were convicted of murder even though
there wasn’t any evidence
• 4 were hanged, 1 committed suicide, 3 remained in jail and were
pardoned by the governor in 1893.
• Haymarket Square linked the labor movement with anarchism in the
public mind which weakened the national labor movement.
THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE
1892 Henry Clay Frick & Andrew Carnegie cut the workers
salaries 20% at the Homestead Steel Plant.
• The Amalgamated Iron & Steel Workers struck; Frick Locked them
Out of the plant
• Frick hired the Pinkerton Agents (his own private army) to drive
the striking workers off the grounds of the plant.
• 3 detectives and 10 workers died in the battle that followed
• PA governor order the state militia to impose peace at Homestead
• Late July, the Homestead works reopened under military guard & in
November the strikers gave up
• (results: union was abolished – workers ended up taking pay cut,
working 13 straight days, 12 hours per day, no safety provisions in
the steel mills)