Chapter 22 - The Industrial Era Dawns (1865-1900)

Question 1

Crédit Mobilier Scandal

Answer 1

Railroad company who overcharged for construction

Charged $73 million for some $50 million worth of strenuous work

Insiders bribed congressmen to look the other way

Question 2

“Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt

Answer 2

• Facilitated the connection and expansion of the older eastern network railroads for success of western lines
• Popularized the steel rail for improving the old iron tracks of the New York Central

Eastern networks moved to standard gauge track

Westinghouse air brake increased safety

Question 3

Jay Gould

not very important

Answer 3

Financier who “boomed and busted” the stocks of the Erie, Kansas Pacific, Union Pacific, and the Texas and Pacific

Used speculative trickery

Question 4

Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois

1886

Answer 4

Supreme Court decreed that individual states had no power to regulate interstate commerce

Not necessarily a popular victory over a corporate one

Federal government would confine “mechanical monster” if needed

Question 5

Interstate Commerce Act

1887

Answer 5

• Prohibited rebates and pools
• Required railroads to oublish their rates openly
• Forbade unfair discrimination against shippers and outlawed extra charge for a short haul than a long one over the same line

Set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)

ICC - “red-letter” law that provided an orderly forum where competing business interests could resolve conflicts in peaceful ways and intended to stabilize, not revolutionize, the existing business system

Question 6

Richard Olney

not very important

Answer 6

A leading corporation lawyer

Noted that the ICC can be made of great use to the railroads, satisfying the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads

Question 7

Alexander Graham Bell

Answer 7

Invented the telephone in 1876

A vast communications network was built on his invention

Question 8

Thomas Alva Edison

Answer 8

• A versatile inventor best known for created the electric lightbulb in 1879
• Also created the phonograph, mimeograph, dictaphone, and the moving picture

Not a pure scientist

His severe deafness allowed him to concentrate without distraction

Question 9

Andrew Carnegie

Answer 9

• A business leader, dubbed the “steel king”
• Created the tactic of vertical integration
• Produced 1/4 of nation’s Bessemer steel by 1900

• Sold his company to J. P. Morgan for over $400 million (haggled him until he did so)
• Gave his wealthy to public libraries, pensions for professors, and other philanthropic purposes

Question 10

J. Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan

Answer 10

• A business leader, dubbed the “bankers’ banker”
• Depression of 1890s drove many businessmen, bled by cutthroat competition, to Morgan

Devised other schemes to eliminate “wasteful” competition

• Financed the reorganization of railroads, insurance companies, and banks
• Bought Carnegie’s company and launched U.S. Steel Corporation (capitalized at $1.4 billion, U.S. first billion dollar company)

Question 11

John D. Rockefeller

Answer 11

• A business leader, dubbed the “oil baron”
• Created the tactic of horizontal integration
• Created the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, Ohio

• Controlled 95% of all oil refines in U.S. by 1877
• Drake’s Folly - first oil well in Pennsylvania

Question 12

Vertical Integration

Answer 12

• Carnegie entrepreneurial tactic
• Combined all phases of manufacturing from mining to marketing in one organization

Ex: Carnegie’s miners scratched the ore from the earth in the Mesabi Range, Carnegie ships then floated it across the Great Lakes, finally Carnegie railroads delivered it to the furnaces at Pittsburgh

Question 13

Horizontal Integration

Answer 13

Rockefeller’s technique which allied with competitors to monopolize a given market

Question 14

Trust

Answer 14

• A device perfected by Rockefeller
• Used to describe any large-scale business combination

Controlled bothersome rivals

• Also created in sugar, tobacco, and leather
• Giant trusts sought refuge behind Fourteenth Amendment

Question 15

Standard Oil Company

1870-1911

Answer 15

• Owned by Rockefeller
• Soon dominated virtually the entire world petroleum market
• Stockholders in smaller oil companies assigned their stock to the board directors
• Combined and arranged the operations of the previously competing enterprises

Question 16

Interlocking Directorates

Answer 16

• J. P. Morgan’s method to ensure future peace with rival enterprises
• Morgan placed officers of his own banking group on their various boards of dictators

Question 17

(Henry Bessemer)/Bessemer Process

Answer 17

• Method of making cheap steel by “air-blowing” iron
• Named after a British inventor

William Kelly, a Kentucky manufacturer of iron kettles, actually created it a few years earlier

Question 18

Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth”

Answer 18

• Preached that the wealthy were only the temporary stewards of society’s riches
• The wealthy were obliged to assume moral responsibility for the uplift of the less fortunate

Question 19

Herbert Spencer

Answer 19

An English philospher who was mislabeled as a Social Darwinist

Coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”

Question 20

Social Darwinists

Answer 20

• Theorists that argued individuals won their stations in life by competing on the basis of their natural talents
• Believed in the phase “survival of the fittest” and natural selection

Explained why some nations were more powerful than others or had the right to dominate “lesser peoples” often defined by race

Question 21

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

1890

Answer 21

• Forbade combinations in restraint of trade, without any distinction between “good” trusts and “bad trusts”

Proved to be ineffective largely because it contained legal loopholes

• Effective in curbing labor unions or labor combinations deemed to be restraining trade
• Prosecution of trusts was neither vigorous nor successful because the act did NOT outline a punishment

Question 22

“Gibson Girl”

Answer 22

A magazine image of an independent and athletic “new woman” created in the 1890s by artist Charles Dana Gibson

Became the romantic ideal of the age

Question 23

National Labor Union

1866-1872

Answer 23

• Represented a giant bootstride by workers
• One of the earliest national scale unions to organize in the Americas or Europe, aiming to unify workers across locales and trades to challenge their powerful bosses

Attracted 600,000 members including the skilled, unskilled and farmers

Excluded the Chinese and barely made efforts to include women and blacks

Question 24

National Labor Union

1866-1872

Answer 24

• Represented a giant bootstride by workers
• One of the earliest national scale unions to organize in the Americas or Europe, aiming to unify workers across locales and trades to challenge their powerful bosses

Attracted 600,000 members including the skilled, unskilled and farmers

• Excluded the Chinese and barely made efforts to include women and blacks
• Called for arbitration of industrial disputes, eight-hour workday (won latter for government workers)
• Crippled by depression of 1870s

Question 25

Knights of Labor

Answer 25

• Officially known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor
• Began in 1869 as secret society, with private ritual, passwords, and special handshake
• Sought to include (almost) all workers in “one big union” - skilled and unskilled, whites and blacks, men and women

Secrecy forestalled possible reprisals by employers

Barred Chinese (supported Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and “nonproducers

Question 26

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

not very important

Answer 26

• An organizer for the first women Knights
• Started by agitating for the Knights in the Illinois coalfields

Question 27

Terence V. Powderly

Answer 27

• Became the Grand Master Workman of the Knights in 1879
• Urged laborers to save enough from their wages to buy mines
• Dedicated the Knights to achieving the “cooperative commonwealth”

Denounced the multimillionaires for laying the foundation for the fortune of the bodies and souls of living men and “wage-slavery”

Question 28

Samuel Gompers

not important

Answer 28

• A Jewish cigar maker born in a London tenement
• Removed from school at 10, brought to America at 13, and pressed into overtime service and rose in the labor ranks

• Demanded fairer share of labor and had no quarrel with capitalism
• Promoted better wages, hours, and working conditions

Question 29

Haymarket Square

1886

Answer 29

• A May Day strike where labor disorders broke out
• Police advanced on meeting called to protest alleged brutalities by authorities
• A dynamite bomb was thrown, killing and injuring several dozen people, including police

Hysteria swept Chicago

John P. Altgeld (governor of Illinois) pardoned 3 surviving anarchists

Question 30

American Federation of Labor (AF of L)

Answer 30

• Consisted of an elite association of self-governing national unions, each of which kept its independence, unifying overall strategy
• Samuel Gompers was mostly elected president
• No individual laborer could join the central organization

• Fell short of representing all workers
• Composed of skilled craftsmen—carpenters and bricklayers

Question 31

Closed Shop

Answer 31

• Authorized by Gomper’s “trade agreement” as an all-union labor
• Allowed only unionized employees to work for a certain company

Chief weapons were walkout and boycott

Question 32

Industrialization: Boon or Blight?

Answer 32

• Boon: historians believed that greater social mobility lessened class tensions (some argued otherwise), most men were self-made and greater opportunity distinguished the New World from the Old
• Blight: Critics believed it took away the traditions, values, and independence of native farmers and immigrant craftspeople; diminshed their spiritual “quality of life” and relatively few went from “rags to riches” whereas others had small improvements