Industrial America, 1877-1910s Flashcards
The 1892 lockout of workers at the ____ 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 ____ like other steel plants, became a non-union mill.
Homestead Lockout (Strike)
Andrew Carnegie’s argument that corporate leaders’ success showed their “fitness” to lead society and that poverty demonstrated, on the contrary, lack of “fitness” to compete in the new economy. Carnegie advocated, however, that wealthy men should use their fortunes for the public good.
“Gospel of Wealth”
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.
management revolution
A business model in which a corporation controlled all aspects of production from raw materials to packaged products. Pioneered by Andrew Carnegie and others.
vertical 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.
horizontal integration
A small group of associates that hold stock from a group of combined firms, managing them as a single entity; U.S. Steel and Standard Oil
trust
A system of organizing work developed by Frederick W. Taylor in the late nineteenth century. It was designed to coax maximum output from the individual worker, increase efficiency, and reduce production costs.
scientific management
A nickname for the former Confederate states, used by boosters to describe the region’s economic diversification and growth of industrial jobs in the post–Civil War era; coal mining, timber industries, low wages, child labor.
New South
The 1882 law that barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. It continued in effect until the 1940s.
Chinese Exclusion Act
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.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
Economic regulatory laws passed in some midwestern states in the late 1870s, triggered by pressure from farmers
Granger Laws
The first mass labor organization created among America’s working-class; founded in 1869 and peaking in strength in the mid-1880s; attempted to bridge boundaries of ethnicity, gender, ideology, race, and occupation to build a “universal brotherhood” of all workers.
Knights of Labor
The advocacy of a stateless society achieved by revolutionary means; became scapegoats for the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing.
anarchism
The May 4, 1886, conflict in Chicago in which both workers and policemen were killed or wounded during a labor demonstration; the incident created a backlash against all labor organizations, including the Knights of Labor.
Haymarket Square
A rural movement founded in Texas during the depression of the 1870s that spread across the plains states and the South; advocated cooperative stores and exchanges that would circumvent middlemen, and it called for greater government aid to farmers and stricter regulation of railroads.
Farmer’s Alliance
