Industrial America

1877-1920

Railroad - 1st “big” business.

● Transporting
○ Oil
○ Tobacco
○ Food
○ Cotton
○ Cattle
○ Mail
○ Coal
○ People

Railroads were very powerful.

● Setting rates and terms of service

Munn v. Illinois - SC (Supreme Court) - States ciuld regulate private industry that
affect public interest and all railroads. (break up monopolies)

Interstate Commerce Act - to regulate business practices, when business is conducted

over state lines. (is it effective, why/why not? No, because the profits are much higher
than the price of the fine.)

Google Question: Standardized Time and Time Zones

● If railroad companies never existed we probably would still be using local

times in each city.

Andrew Carnegie
● Successfully used vertical integration in his steel industry.

John D. Rockefeller
● Successfully used horizontal integration in his oil industry, He established a
monopoly, this allowed him to control costs and increase profits.

Social Darwinism is used to justify the poor treatment of workers… Workers

aren’t buying it, so they form unions to fight the unfair conditions.
Crude oil is refined to make kerosene.
Main uses of kerosene are cooking, heating, and lighting.

Eventually oil will be refined for other products as well.

2nd Industrial Revolution increased the demand for oil and widened its
distribution.

Corporation run by the owners or stockholders.

Rockefeller restructures as a trust.

Trust run by individuals who are not owners or stockholders.

Allows Rockefeller to buy controlling shares in other oil companies. (create a

monopoly)

He controlled 90% of the oil refineries in the USA.

Which inventor launched the silent-film industry? (Thomas Edison)

Electric generators- produced large quantity, more reliable electricity.

This allowed towns to use electric lights where they were previously used
oil/kerosene lights. By 1884 people in New York began using electric lights.

Independence can give Women and other minorities (non-caucasians)

opportunities to get their inventions to society.

Working Conditions
● 10-12 hours per day
● 6 days a week
● $0.15 per hour
● No health insurance
● No vacation time
● Layoffs with no unemployment benefits
● Completed repetitive taks on the job

Increasing number of women and children joined the workforce. They worked in
terrible conditions for even lower wages than men.
Child Labor

1880 - 182,000 children 15 and under worked

Compulsary Education - Laws were passed in an effort to americanize the children of

immigrants and decease child labor.

Labor Unions

Knights of Labor
● Secret society (Stephens)
○ “Men and Women of every creed and color”
○ Skilled and unskilled
● 1879 not secret (Powderly)
● “Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, eight hour of what we will!”
(broad social reform)

American Federation of Labor

● Skilled only organized by Industry (Gompers)
○ Mineworkers, steelworkers
● Focused on specific workers needs
○ Wages, conditions and hours

Pullman Strike - Pullman, Illinois

George Pullman owns everything in town, it is a company town.

He increases the rent so he gets more money.
He pays his workers lower wages.
All the workers went on strike because the only way to get a job in that town is from him
but he doesn’t pay them enough to even be able to pay it.
The Pullman Strike ended with the militia getting involved.

Immigration

● 1st wave
○ 1840’s and 1850’s N/W Europe - England, Germany, Ireland, and
Scandinavia

● 2nd wave
 ○ 1880’s (Ethnically like 1st wave)

● 3rd wave

○ Lates 1890’s - early 1900’s

○ Shifts to more S/E Europe - Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Italy,
Pland, and Russia

Push and Pull Factors

● Push Factors
○ Religious persecution
○ Mandatory military service
○ Political “changes”
○ Employment “changes”
○ Agricultural problems

● Pull Factors
○ Opportunity for
■ Land ownership
■ Employment
■ Political freedom
■ Religious freedom
■ “Promise” of a better future

How did they travel to America? (Boat)

Steerage - lower levels of a ship where the steering mechanisms were located

Cheapest fares
Cramped
Poor ventilation
No privacy

Where do they arrive?

● West coast - Angel Island, San Francisco

 ○ 1 million immigrants processed

● East coast - Ellis Island, New York Harbor

○ 12 million immigrants processed

Most common reason an immigrant for rufused entry to the United States was
because they were sick with an infectious disease.

Americanization

● Learn English
● Dress like middle class Americans
● Eat foods common to America (not ethnic dished from home country.)
● Practice customs of your new land
● Don’t consume alcohol

Be like us! (assimilation)

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)

Opposition to immigration (legislation)

1882 - Chinese Restriction Act - Prohibited Chinese people from immigrating to

USA for 10 years (first time we as a government prohibited a group by nationality from
immigrating

1892 - The Geary Act extended restrictions into the early 1900’s

The restrictions were not repealed intil the 1940’s

Gentlemen’s Agreement 1907 (example of Nativism)

● Citizens were concerned that Japanese immigrants would control the best
farmland.
● San Francisco schools began segregating students.

President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in…

● Japan agreed to only issue travel documents to educated professionals and their
immediate family.
● Ih exchange SF schools would stop segregating students.
The agreement did not end discrimination against the Japanese in the US.

As cities grow in population they must grow in size. (Trains make it possible to feed
the growing urban population.)

Buildings have been limited to about 5 floors.

Why?
● Constructions materials not suited for taller buildings (brick, stone, wood)
● Would you want to walk up all those stairs?
● Water could not reliably be pumped above 5th floor.

Fixes…
● Lower cost, higher quality steel
● Elevator and elevator brake
● Improvements to plumbing and ventilation

Make skyscrapers possible!

Immigrant life (urban)

Immigrant neighborhoods - Little Italy, China Town

Immigrant based businesses - grocery stores, neighborhood banks

Tenemants - Poorly maintained overcrowded apartments, affordable

Benevolent Societies - self-help [help people of the same ethnicity (illness,

unemployment, education) little federal help available]

Diseases (tuberculosis, smallpox, typhoid, cholera) - spread easily because of

conditions.

Hull House (settlement house)

● Janes Addams - Ellen Gates Starr
○ Focused on the need of immigrant families
○ Established a Kindergarten and a playground
○ Taught immigrants English and civics (government)
○ Addams became garbage inspector to “force” garbage collectors to do
their job.
Also worked for reforms concerning
● Child labor
● 8 hour work day for women
● Other national movements (suffrage)

More people more “traffic”

Problems
● Streets wete not always paved
● Horse drawn carriages and wagons
● Lots of Pedestrians

Solutions
● Elevated trains
● Subways (first 1897 - Boston)
● Cable cars - pulled along by cable underground (covers smaller area)
● Trolleys/street car - get electricity from overhead cable (produces own
locomotion) - created central business districts
● Street cars are virtually non-existent in today’s cities
● Commuter train - made suburban life possible

Suburbs
● LIve outside the city, work and shop in the city
● Middle class
● Quiter
● Cleaner
● Could buy a home

The Gilden Age 1870-1900

American society looked golden from a distance but was merely gilded, or coated
w/cheap gold paint.

The meant that society, despite its positive appearance was ugly and corrupt on
the inside.

Progressivism - address social problems from the negative effect of industrialism

(Urban areas)
Remember Social Darwinism?

It encouragedthe belief that darker skinned people were of lower intelligence. It tried to
justify steps to return South to pre-Civil Warsocial strata.

This lead to…

● Laws limiting voting rights (15th Amendment?)
○ Poll taxes (keep African Americans from voting)
● Laws that allowed for segregation (14th Amendment?)
○ Plessy v. Ferguson was decided and segregation became the
accepted norm of society. (limit African American access to same
services as caucasians)
○ Even the federal government had segregated offices.

Both want equality

● Booker T. Washington
○ Move slowly
○ Be patient
○ Work hard
○ We will earn their respect

● W.E.B. Du Bois
○ Immediately
○ Demand respect
○ Our rights are guaranteed by the Constitution.