Eddie Evans's List: American Age of Industry and Progressive Era

• The term "Gilded Age" was factitiously coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley in their 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. The "Gilded Age" generally refers to the decades between the end of reconstruction and the turn of the century (about 1870 to 1900). It was a time of unprecedented industrial and economic growth, tumultuous politics, and a wave of immigration. The dazzling flurry of technological innovation that occurred is sometimes referred to as the "Second Industrial Revolution." The industrial, transportation, and communications industries quickly boomed, but were subject to the tumult of an unstable economy. The word "monopoly" could easily characterize this era, in which a few trusts and individuals thrived and amassed fortunes while many Americans lived in poverty and lost their personal autonomy to the corporate machine. The Gilded Age was a formative period in American history, in which the standards for modern business and economics were just beginning to take shape.
• The Haymarket affair renewed fears of radicalism and led some employers to develop blacklists of unionists and strengthen their resolve against strikers' demands. The incidents also precipitated the decline of the Knights of Labor, whose disillusioned members defected as anti-labor sentiment swelled.
• Unlike the Knights of Labor, the AFL did not seek to overturn the industrial wage and hour system in favor of a new social order, nor was it centrally controlled.
• When Pullman slashed wages in order to protect profits after the onset of the Depression of 1893 without lowering prices and rent his town or yielding to negotiation, the American Railway Union (ARU) led by Eugene V. Debs initiated a massive strike and a boycott of train using Pullman cars. Eventually, The US Attorney General obtained a court injunction against the workers for interfering with the delivery of the mail and President Cleveland sent federal troops to enforce the injunction and crush the strike. The strikers were forced to return to work on Pullman's terms, Debs served a prison sentence for disobeying the injunction, and the ARU was disbanded. However, some historians believe that President Cleveland's actions cost him the nomination of his party two years later, the same year that the hated George Pullman died in fear that his tomb would be defiled.

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•  3. Monopolies led to more efficient production, which lowered prices.

   

  Pro: Consumer prices consistently fell because of monopolies.  

   

  Con: This was true to a certain extent, prices of some goods fell from 25% to 50%. Still, this happened across the board regardless of whether the industry monopolized or not.     

   

            A direct connection between rise of monopolies & lowering of prices is hard to prove.         

   

   

   Profit  margins did improve between the costs of raw materials & finished goods as  well.

• The late 19th century was an era  of popular protest songs that many people sang at work and around the piano at  night in the parlor   

   

   There  were very high  levels of strike activity: 1896  - 1900 were 390 workers stoppages due to labor discontent

•  Enforcement of Sherman was difficult as long as politicians were tied to business leaders  

   

      

   

   

  of  8 cases against corporations brought from 1890-1893, government prosecutors  lost 7    

   

   

  The Supreme Court dealt the death blow to this act in U.S. V. Knight, 1895

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• Originally a secret society open to all producers, the KOL excluded only "parasites" like stockbrokers, gamblers, lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers.
• KOL members also played a vital role in local politics, in the 1880s, waging successful electoral campaigns.
• The Printers, Cigarmakers, Bricklayers, Iron Molders, Granite Cutters, Carpenters, and other unions all complained that the KOL did not respect union strikes and boycotts and accepted as members workers who had been expelled or suspended from their trade unions.

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• There can be no doubt that the late 19th century business titans were business innovators, who, through their technical, administrative, and financial skills, achieved economies of scale, eliminated waste, and brought order and stability to large sectors of the American economy.
• But big business' critics accused the captains of industry of financial trickery, such as cornering and watering stock, and of political corruption and the bribing of legislatures. They attacked them for the inhumane treatment of labor--including the imposition of heavy hours, wage cuts, lockouts and the suppression of trade unions.

• The contrast between the palace of the  millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to­day  measures the change which has come with civilization.
• It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the  race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that is  highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements  of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better  this great irregularity than universal squalor.

• Because of fears during the late 1800s that monopolies dominated America's free market economy, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 to combat anticompetitive practices, reduce market domination by individual corporations, and preserve unfettered competition as the rule of trade.
• Congress derived its power to pass the Sherman Act through its constitutional authority to regulate commerce.
• Because the courts found certain activities to fall outside the scope of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to further widen its scope. For example, the Clayton Act added the following practices to the list of impermissible activities: price discrimination between different purchasers, if such discrimination tends to create a monopoly; exclusive dealing agreements; tying arrangements; and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition.

• Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization, attempts to monopolize, and conspiring to monopolize. Any such act constitutes a felony. A monopoly conviction requires proof of the individual having intent to monopolize with the power to monopolize, regardless of whether the individual actually exercised the power.

  Price-fixing occurs when a company or companies within a given market artificially set or maintain the price of goods or services at a certain level, contrary to the workings of the free market. Section 1 provides that price-fixing is an illegal restraint on trade, regardless of whether a vertical or horizontal scheme. A vertical scheme is a scheme among parties in the same chain of distribution. A horizontal scheme occurs among competitors on the same level.

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• The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial jobs for wages climbed from 1.5 million in 1890 to 2 million in 1910.
• In 1904 a group of progressive reformers founded the National Child Labor Committee, an organization whose goal was the abolition of child labor. The organization received a charter from Congress in 1907. It hired teams of investigators to gather evidence of children working in harsh conditions and then organized exhibitions with photographs and statistics to dramatize the plight of these children. These efforts resulted in the establishment in 1912 of the Children's Bureau as a federal information clearinghouse. In 1913 the Children's Bureau was transferred to the Department of Labor.
• By 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owens Act that established the following child labor standards: a minimum age of 14 for workers in manufacturing and 16 for workers in mining; a maximum workday of 8 hours; prohibition of night work for workers under age 16; and a documentary proof of age. Unfortunately, this law was later ruled unconstitutional on the ground that congressional power to regulate interstate commerce did not extend to the conditions of labor.

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• The following evening, anarchist and socialist labor leaders organized a meeting of workingmen near Chicago's Haymarket Square. Speakers at the meeting denounced the police attack of the previous afternoon and urged workers to intensify their struggle for an eight-hour workday and other improvements in labor conditions.
• ...Then someone hurled a bomb at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police drew guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded.

• After the Gold Rush of 1849, the Chinese were drawn to the West Coast as a center of economic opportunity where, for example, they helped build the first transcontinental railroad by working on the Central Pacific from 1864 to 1869.
• The law was repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943 during World War II, when China was an ally in the war against imperial Japan.

• They accepted $32.50 a month to work on the Union Pacific in Wyoming in 1870 for the same job that paid white workers $52 a month. This led to deep resentment by the whites, who felt the Chinese were competing unfairly for jobs.
• Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, a Wyoming race riot in which 28 Chinese were killed by British and Swedish miners.
• Despite discrimination and prejudice, this first wave of immigrants established thriving communities. Photographs taken in San Francisco's Chinatown show prosperous businesses, such as the "Chinese Butcher and Grocery Shop."

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• The Pendleton Act is a federal law established in 1883 that use British civic system as a reference and provision that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. This is the first time federal government established the three principles of personnel management, included competitive exams, permanent position and politically neutral position.

• The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
• The thirty-six-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska aspired to be the Democratic nominee for president, and he had been skillfully, but quietly, building support for himself among the delegates. His dramatic speaking style and rhetoric roused the crowd to a frenzy. The response, wrote one reporter, “came like one great burst of artillery.” Men and women screamed and waved their hats and canes.

• In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix)