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Examine the Gilded Age: Who coined the term and why called Gilded, what is the time period? Discuss some of the leading personalities of the time period and their importance.
Examine the Gilded Age: Who coined the term and why called Gilded, what is the time period? Discuss some of the leading personalities of the time period and their importance.
What were the
characteristics of the Gilded Age?
Discuss the philosophies of the era: Nativism, Gospel of Wealth, Social
and Racial Darwinism. What
were the “ills” of society during this time period and what caused the “ills”?
Expand upon the desire for
more land during this period… imperialism. Lots to talk about here… Spanish American War, Philippines,
Cuba, Latin America, China, Japan…
What is vertical, interlocking, and
horizontal integration? Discuss
the tycoons who used these methods to grow their businesses. What were some of the major monopolies of the period?
Discuss the rise of trade
unions and the leadership of the various unions.
This time period saw the
final defeat of the Native Americans… discuss (be sure and include the role of the railroad in this defeat).
Explain the Gilded Age, who coined it, and the time period: The Gilded Age was name for the time period of the late 1800s, coined by Mark Twain, to describe the increase in wealth caused by the industrial age and provided for fancy lifestyles of the wealthy. The great industrial success of the U.S. and the fancy lifestyles of the wealthy hid the many social problems of the time which were commonly centered around Corruption in business and government.
ReplyDeleteThe undercurrent of serious social problems can be exemplified by the fact that during the 1890s, over 90% of citizens of the United States lived on less than 100 dollars per month, and despite the philanthropic efforts of those at the top, it was difficult to escape poverty. The average Gilded Age worker earned 380 dollars per year, significantly below the poverty line of 500 dollars.
DeleteVertical integration is when a company owns and controls the entire process. This includes the raw materials to the manufacture to the sale of the finished product.
ReplyDeleteHorizontal integration is the combination of many firms that work in the same type of business.
Carnagie Steel used vertical integration to make a near monopoly on the steel indusrty by having lessened prices on his products.
DeleteRockefeller used horizontal and consumed all smaller oil businesses to achieve a complete monopoly.
Rockefeller used horizontal integration with the oil industry.
DeleteRockefeller also used several other tactics to insure his success in the business world. He created the Standard Oil Company through the use of trusts, horizontal integration, being ruthless, and strangling or acquiring smaller businesses. Rockefeller also started the Horizontal Merger.
DeleteJ.P Morgan used vertical intergrantion and was criticized for creating monopolies by making it difficult for any business to compete against his. Morgan dominated two industries in particular he helped consolidate railroad industry in the East and formed the United States Steel Corporation.
DeleteDiscuss the rise of trade unions and the leadership of the various unions.
ReplyDeleteThe National Labour Union was the first labour federation in the United States, founded in 1866 and dissolved in 1873, and it paved the way for other organizations to be formed such as the Knights of labour or the ALF. It was the first organization that successfully brought together the many small organizations pushing for labour reform and workers’ rights, such as the ‘eight-hour leagues’ that were advocating a standardised eight hour work day.
The union that followed the National Labour Federation was known as the Knights of Labour. Begun in 1869, its formal name was the “Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labour’, and its fragments lasted until 1949, when the last, 50 member local chapter finally dissolved and marked the passing of the organization. In 1870, Daniel Spahr and his mother, who was then a lead member of the Philadelphia tailors' union, established a secret organization under the name the ‘Noble Order of the Knights of Labour’. The collapse of the National Labour Union in 1873 left a flood of workers looking for a new organization. The Knights became better organized and acquired a national vision when Stephens was eventually replaced with Terence V. Powderly. The Knights of Labour were more inclusive than the NLU, accepting women and blacks (after 1878) and their employers as members, and advocating the admission of blacks into local assemblies, but none the less tolerating the segregation of assemblies in the South.
Finally, the only successful union, the American Federation of Labour, was begun in 1886. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in May 1886 by an association of different unions originally from the Knights of Labour. Samuel Gompers, of the Cigar Makers' International Union, was elected president of the Federation at its founding convention and was re-elected every year except one until his death in 1924. The AFL sought to only gain better pay, better working conditions, and fewer hours for workers rather than taking on a wide range of problems, and by doing so could affect change more effectively and not be dissolved because of changing times.
The success of the AFL lies in the fact that it was one of the first major trade unions that included only skilled laborers. By doing this, the members of the AFL were much harder to replace than the members of the other unions, consequently making the use of strikebreakers effectively useless and the demands of the strikers much more likely to be met. This being said, the very factor that made them so successful - the inclusion of only skilled laborers - was also a hindrance, for it excluded the majority of the workforce and thus both limited the range of protests that could be made and made the AFL look somewhat hypocritical in its endeavors.
DeleteExamine the Gilded Age: Who coined the term and why called Gilded, what is the time period? Discuss some of the leading personalities of the time period and their importance.
ReplyDeleteThe Gilded Age is a period approximately spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth century; from the 1870s to 1900. The term was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), satirizing what they believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding. Important people were people such as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie who all shaped industry through monopolies during the Gilded Age.
The Gospel of Wealth was published by steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie, that argued that America should honor and respect the great capitalists, despite the reality that the growth of monopoly capitalism was curbing small business opportunities, promoting the exploitation of working people, and providing lack of competition in pricing of products for consumers. Instead, the great capitalists should be applauded and respected for their “great” contributions to America
ReplyDeleteCarnegie believed that the rich recognize their moral obligation to give away their money. In his essay on Gospel of Wealth, he wrote that " He who dies rich, dies disgraced." He also said that leaving money to the kids builds selfishness whereas hard work and poverty can build character that is necessary to be successfully wealthy.
DeleteThe policy of extending the rule or authority of an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependence is called imperialism. Imperialism was thought that was spread vastly through American minds due to the new technology that had advanced. These new technologies advanced our want to adventure to other lands and claim their territories such as Cuba to grow in population and spread democracy and show the american willingness to the world.
ReplyDeleteWhat were the major monopolies of the time period?
ReplyDeletesome of the major monopolies of the gilded age were owned by 3 major men Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Andrew Carnegie was a Scotish-American businessman who was the founder of the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh. John D. Rockefeller was the founder of the Standard Oil Company and used horizontal integration to effectively buy out his competition. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a steamboat and railroad businessman, he laid thousands of miles of railroad track and established standard gauge for railroads. All these men were were known as "the captains of industry".
One way horizontal integration was used by Rockefeller was when Rockefeller used his firm's superior size to negotiate preferential rates from the railroads that transported both his and his competitors' oil, making it nearly impossible for his competitors to stay in business.
DeleteThere was also J.P. Morgan who had a monopoly on banking and eventually bought Carnegie Steel Company to create U.S. Steel.
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DeleteJohn D. Rockefeller also firmly believed in Social Darwinism. Like it was said before me, Rockefeller would knock the other businesses out of competition leaving him on top. He bought out all of the land that could be used for pumping oil in the United States and used it all to his advantage to draw in more money at the expense of his buyers. He had complete control over the oil industry in the United States.
DeleteDiscuss the philosophy of Social Darwinism.
ReplyDeleteSocial Darwinism is the theory that persons, races, and groups are all subject to the same natural selections laws as those described by Charles Darwin in nature. Social Darwinists "survival of the fittest" mentality. This concept was used during the Gilded Age to promote laissez-faire capitalism, based upon the "natural" inequality of man, with the white, Anglo-Saxon protestant with money on the "top of the food chain" The phrase "survival of the fittest" was accredited to Herbert Spencer who was a leading supporter of the theory.
Some Social Darwinists applied this theory to explain why certain nations were better than others and had the right to dominate "lesser peoples", forming into Racial Darwinism
DeleteThis time period saw the final defeat of the Native Americans… discuss (be sure and include the role of the railroad in this defeat).
ReplyDeleteAs the railroad passed through the native americans lands, the white folks riding the trains would shoot out at the wild game such as buffalo and in doing so nearly caused the near extinction of the buffalo. The Native Americans would do a ritual dance called the "ghost dance" to bring back the dead. The white Americans were afraid of the ghost dance and told the Native Americans not to do it. The native Americans refused and danced the ghost dance anyways. The Americans got so nervous that they fired off a shot and the mass murder of the Native Americans began. This was the Battle of Wounded Knee.
The Ghost Dance led to the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. This act tried to reform Indian tribes and turn them into "white" citizens.
DeleteWhat is Interlocking Integration? Who used this method?
ReplyDeleteInterlocking Integration is a practice in which a member on a company's board of directors also serves on another board of a different company. Interlocking directorates are considered legal as long as the companies involved are not in competition. This practice was most commonly used by J. P. Morgan were he used this power to combine the Carnegie Steel Company with other steel companies that eventually became the U.S. Steel Company.
The Gilded Age was filled with extreme economic prosperity for a select few people, such as business tycoons Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller. Carnegie believed in the "Gospel of Wealth", which stipulated that the wealth he (received in the Steel Industry) or other wealthy people should give back their money through philanthropy. This would normally manifest itself in the building of libraries or other forms of public service that would allow people to "pull themselves up from their bootstraps" and have success like Carnegie. The Gospel of Wealth was created in 1889.
ReplyDeleteNativism, the belief of America for "native" Americans, gained teeth in the 1880s with the influx of immigrants from the New Immigrants of southern and eastern Europe. Nativists despised these immigrants due to how they clung to the cultures of their homelands, how they were willing to work for "starvation" prices, and how they could potentially grow in population and outnumber the Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent. Organizations like the American Protective Association, formed in 1887, garnered around a million members and were reminiscent of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s.
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ReplyDeleteJoseph, I am removing your post because your response has nothing to do with the Gilded Age. Your comments on the 1960s are out of the time period.
DeleteDiscuss the philosophy of Gospel of Wealth.
ReplyDeleteCarnegie published articles in many popular magazines of the day in which he laid out his philosophy which has come to be known as the Gospel of Wealth: first published in the North American Review, in 1906. He argued that consumer demand creates wealth; therefore wealth rightly belongs to everybody. However, not everyone qualified to handle wealth because it took a certain moral character to make the right decision to become wealthy.
In the Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie states that poverty can be solved by the wealthy investing their money in charities and not just letting their money be passed from heir to heir. Carnegie was against this because in history it proves that the heirs spend their inheritance foolishly.
DeleteThis time period saw the final defeat of the Native Americans… discuss (be sure and include the role of the railroad in this defeat).
ReplyDeleteIn the post-Civil War era, relations between Native and "native" Americans changed slightly from what had typically happened in the past. Where before Indians were utterly opposed to white advances (thus leading to many conflicts and much bloodshed) Natives now were more willing to cooperate (this most likely had something to do with their numbers being so low at this point in history) with surrendering their lands if and only if the federal government promised that the Native would be left alone and provided with supplies on the remaining land. The US government, however, continued its tradition of breaking promises and treaties made with the Indians, which, in part, was due to the discovery of gold in the Black Hills and ultimately led to increased violence by the Natives in an effort to avenge massacres performed by the whites, punish the whites for breaking treaties, defend their remaining land from intruders, and preserve the nomadic way of life against forced settlement. This forced settlement, in addition to Natives being relocated to reservations, came in the form of schools specifically designed to "civilize" Native American children and the Dawes Act of 1887 that dissolved tribes as legal entities, tried to take away the communal culture of the Natives, and wiped out tribal ownership with only the promise of US citizenship in twenty-five years as compensation. Eventually, despite valiant efforts by the Natives, they were defeated by the whites. This defeat was the result of a combination of factors that include: the desire of whites to spread their railroad system west and thus through Indian territory; disease, which had been wiping out Native populations since the "colonization" of the New World; the ear extermination of the buffalo (in 1865 there were around fifteen million wild buffalo, but by 1885 there were fewer than one thousand remaining); and warfare with the US Army, which resulted in the deaths of scores of young braves. Ultimately, the last "battle" between whites and the Natives occurred at Wounded Knee in 1890, at which the Natives - mostly elders, women, and children by this point - were performing a nonviolent and spiritual dance, the Ghost Dance, to bring back the buffalo and thus give the Natives the strength to defeat the whites, at which point the whites - full of fear and thoughts of a possible rebellion - massacred a vast portion of the gathered Natives.
Expansion into the Philippines.
ReplyDeleteThe time span for the Philippine-American war was from 1899 to 1902. The conflict originated from the Spanish-American War when the U.S.A. liberated Cuba and invaded the Philippines as well as use for a door to trading in the Pacific. The Philippines had been fighting for their independence since 1986 and the America came in and oppressed them even more. So the citizens rose up and fought back against the armed American forces. The Americans were much stronger than the Filipinos, thus resulting in their defeat. After the Filipinos were defeated, the Americans soon began their process of "Americanization".
What were some of the major monopolies of the period?
ReplyDeleteOne of the most powerful bankers of his era, J.P. Morgan (1837-1913) financed railroads and helped organize U.S. Steel, General Electric and other major corporations. The Connecticut native followed his wealthy father into the banking business in the late 1850s, and in 1871 formed a partnership with Philadelphia banker Anthony Drexel. In 1895, their firm was reorganized as J.P. Morgan & Company. He faced criticism that he had too much power and was accused of manipulating the nation’s financial system for his own gain.
Imperialism in the Spanish American War
ReplyDeleteIn 1898 the American Navy assisted the Filipinos to gain their independence from the Spanish. Along with the Philippines the U.S. also gained/annexed Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, all in the attempt to open foreign markets to American industries. With it's great location and better access to world trade, Cuba was next on America's list. America was watching as Cubans were rebelling against Spain and with the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in the harbor of Havana. Blaming the "incident" on Spain, the U.S. had a reason to get involved with Cuban affairs.As the war progressed and came to a close, Cuba declared it's independence but the U.S. force Cubans to write the Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution which allowed the U.S. to keep a military base in Cuba in case of an attack from another country. The Cubans felt that this was directly contradiction the Teller Amendment which stated that the U.S. would completely withdraw from Cuba when it gained it's independence.