Chapter 17: Vocab Flashcards
Homestead Lockout
The 1892 lockout of workers at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill after Andrew Carnegie refused to renew the union contract. Union supporters attacked the guards hired to close them out and protect strikebreakers who had been employed by the mill, but the National Guard soon suppressed this resistance and Homestead, like other steel plants, became a non-union mill.
Management Revolution
An internal management structure adopted by many large, complex corporations that distinguished top executives from those responsible for day-to-day operations and departmentalized operations by function.
Vertical Integration
A business model in which a corporation controlled all aspects of production from raw materials to packaged products. “Robber barons” or industrial innovators such as Gustavus Swift and Andrew Carnegie pioneered this business form at the end of the Civil War.
Horizontal Integration
A business concept invented in the late nineteenth century to pressure competitors and force rivals to merge their companies into a conglomerate. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil pioneered this business model.
Trust
A small group of associates that hold stock from a group of combined firms, managing them as a single entity. Trusts quickly evolved into other centralized business forms, but progressive critics continued to refer to giant firms like United States Steel and Standard Oil as “trusts.”
Mass Production
A phrase coined by Henry Ford, who helped to invent a system of mass production of goods based on assembly of standardized parts. This system accompanied the continued deskilling of industrial labor.
Scientific Management
A system of organizing work developed by Fredrick W. Taylor in the late nineteenth century. It was designed to coax maximum output from the individual worker, increase efficiency, and reduce production costs.
Chinese Exclusion Act
The 1882 law that barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. It continued in effect until the 1940s.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
A nationwide strike of thousands of railroad workers and labor allies, who protested the growing power of railroad corporations and the steep wage cuts imposed by railroad managers amid a severe economic depression that had begun in 1873.
Greenback-Labor Party
A national political movement calling on the government to increase the money supply in order to assist borrowers and foster economic growth; “Greenbackers” also called for greater regulation of corporations and laws enforcing an eight-hour workday.
Granger Laws
Economic regulatory laws passed in some midwestern states in the late 1870s, triggered by pressure from farmers and the Greenback-Labor Party.
Knights of Labor
The first mass labor organization created among America’s working class. Founded in 1869 and peaking in strength in the mid-1880’s, the Knights of Labor attempted to bridge boundaries of ethnicity, gender, ideology, race, and occupation to build a “universal brotherhood” of all workers.
Anarchism
The advocacy of a stateless society achieved by revolutionary means. Feared for their views, anarchists became scapegoats for the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing.
Haymarket Square
The May 4, 1886, conflict in Chicago in which both workers and policemen were killed or wounded during a labor demonstration called by local anarchists. The incident created a backlash against all labor organizations, including the Knights of Labor.
Farmers’ Alliance
A rural movement founded in Texas during the depression of the 1870s that spread across the plains states and the South. The Farmers’ Alliance advocated cooperative stores and exchanges that would circumvent middlemen, and it called for greater government aid to farmers and stricter regulation of railroads.
