Ch. 16: The Gilded Age,

1870-1890

gild1

verbpast tense: gilded; past participle: gilded1.cover thinly with gold.2.give a specious or false brilliance to. "they gild the facts until the truth all but vanishes"

Part 1: The West

Questions to Answer in this Unit

• How did the railroad affect the American West?

• What was the impact of this technological change on Native Americans?

• How did Native Americans resist/fight back?

Bottom Line: The West in the Gilded Age

• Railroads made Western lands more desirable by connecting them to markets.

• After completion of transcontinental rail in 1869, land rush to the West.

• U.S. govt. and military fight wars against Native Americans; law used to dispossess Mexican Americans

• Farming and mining boom favors corporations, easterners and European immigrants

Second Industrial Revolution• Rapid economic growth

• Promoted by federal government

• High tariffs to protect industry

• Land grants to railroads

• Army "removes" Indians from western land

Image: arizonaexperience.org

Industrial Economy

• Factories, mining, railroads expand everywhere but South

• 1880: majority of Americans in non-farming jobs

http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/exhibits/1857/after/rail1.htm

• Transcontinental Railroad completed 1869

The Railroad

• Environmental degradation: buffalo, lumber, etc.

• Social changes: urbanization, privatization, time

"Trail of the hide hunters." Buffalo lying dead in snow, 1872. 79-M-1B-4

The Railroad

• Rail labor and immigrants

• New industries in the SW

The Railroad Network, 1880

Source: Houghton Mifflin Company

• 1865-1890: 1,000 battles/attacks on Indian settlements by US Cavalry

• 1871: US government renounces policy of making treaties with Native American groups

• Legal battles in CA and the SW - European Americans force out Mexican landowners

Westward Expansion

Co. B~ 10th Infantry~, crossing Gila River in buckboard wagons near San Carlos, Ariz. Terr., ca. 1885. 111-SC-89105. Source: archives.gov

6 See, vast, trackless spaces, As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill, Countless masses debouch upon them, They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, institutions known.

7 See projected, through time, For me, an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, One generation playing its part and passing on, And another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn, With faces turned sideways or backward toward me to listen, With eyes retrospective toward me. Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (1855).

Source: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/poems/1

• The ideal: opportunity to better life; esp. economically

• The real:

• beginning 1700s, forced Indian labor on CA missions

• large companies and landholders used semi-free and unfree labor

Mining crew drifting for gold below discovery point, Deadwood, Dak. Terr. Bystanders pose for photographer S. J. Morrow, ca. 1876. 165-FF-2F-10

Transformation of the West

Farming in the Trans-Mississippi West• Advertising to

attract farmers

• Hundreds of thousands get land from Homestead Act; more buy

• MN, ND, SD, NE, KS: population explosion - 300,000 (1860) to 5 million (1900)

• ND most diverse state in the union

"In Line At The land Office, Perry, Sept. 23, 1893. 9 o'clock A.M. waiting to file." 49-AR-32

Farming• Even family farms produced cash crops

• CA as future: large farms, poor and often immigrant migrant laborers

• Mechanization and chemical fertilizers drive this transformation over time

"The Covered Wagon of the Great Western Migration. 1886 in Loup Valley, Nebr." A family poses with the wagon in which they live and travel daily during their pursuit of a homestead. 69-N-13606C

Source: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections

The Cowboy and the Corporate West• The ideal: The rugged

individual

• The real:

• Cowboy = low-paid workers

• West becomes the home of big corporations: e.g. mining in MI, CA, NV, CO The Broncho Buster, 1895; revised 1909; this cast, by November 1910

Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909) Bronze Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Subjugation of the Plains

Indians• Pre-Civil War migrants traded

with Indians

• Conflict bloodier at mid-century, and wholesale attack on Indian way of life after Civil War

• Battle of Little Big Horn, 1876 = victory of Sioux and Cheyenne

• But by 1890, Plains Indians concentrated on reservations

Indian Reservations, ca. 1890

http://www.lib.ku.edu/MapsColl/mapstuff/Conference/indianres1890.jpg

The Dawes Act

• Dawes Act 1887:

• Indian land divided into family plots

• Indian farmers = full US citizens

• Rest of land auctioned off to whites

• Indians lost 86 of 138 million acres in 50 years

Wounded Knee• Ghost Dance 1890:

• religious observances, singing and dancing

• government troops sent to reservations

• December 29, 1890: Massacre at Wounded Knee - 150-200 Indians, mostly women and children killed

"Big Foot, leader of the Sioux, captured at the battle of Wounded Knee, S.D." Here he lies frozen on the snow-covered battlefield where he died, 1890. 111-SC-82412.

Bottom Line: The Gilded Age in the West

• The railroad changed the U.S. by connecting the coasts, connecting raw materials to urban markets:

• This made land and natural resources in the West valuable…

• Which led the U.S. to make war on Native American communities in order to take over those resources.

Part 2: The City

Questions to answer in Part 2: The City

• How did businesses change with technological advances after the Civil War?

• What does robber baron mean? Why would someone use this term?

• What is one way that people responded to the problems of the new industrial cities?

Technology in the Gilded Age -

Does technology make life better?

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Bottom Line: Cities in the Gilded Age• Technological changes helped create

massive fortunes for a few

• Jobs created in cities - new growth in Midwestern cities, esp. Chicago

• Largely immigrant workforce with relatively little power, though they worked to change this

Technical Change and the New Business

• National enterprise and the “trust”

• “pools” - divide markets, fix prices

• “trusts” - rival companies managed by single director

• Giant companies: U.S. Steel = 1st billion-dollar enterprise

New Industries and the City• Immigrants: In 1880, % of

foreign-born residents: San Francisco, 45%; Chicago, 42%; New York, 40% (vs. LA county today: 35.6% foreign-born)

• Young women from the countryside

• Technology made large population concentrations possible From Leslie’s Weekly, Aug.

29,1895. Accessed via http://docsteach.org/documents/

The New Rich

• Andrew Carnegie: “vertical integration” in steel

• most technologically advanced factories in the world

• dictatorial control of factories

• rich have social obligations

The New Rich

• “Robber barons” or “Knights of Industry”?

Carnegie: Between 1899 and 1917, provided nearly a million dollars to help create 65 public

libraries in MN alone.

Rockefeller: founded the University of Chicago

This poster highlights the famous homes that lined Euclid Avenue between East 12th and East 45th Streets from 1850-1910 Source: http://www.clevelandhistorylessons.com/millionaires-row-poster.html.

The problem of our age is the administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. . . . 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. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. 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.... A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous to both-not the least so to him who serves-and would sweep away civilization with it....

Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review (1889). Accessed via http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.asp

What would Ira Steward (p. 491) have to say to Carnegie?

Responses to Industrialization

• Reformism and the Social Gospel

• Middle-class reformers - books about social inequality

• Protestant clergy - reform churches:

• expand appeal among poor in cities

• respond better to social problems

Walter RauschenbuschImage: spider.georgetown.edu

Jacob Riis

Jacob A. Riis, “Dens of Death,” 1872. Museum of the City of New York, accessed via ARTstor.

Jacob A. Riis, “In sleeping quarters - Rivington Street Dump,” ca. 1890.

Museum of the City of New York, accesed via ARTstor

Jacob A. Riis, “Home of an Italian Ragpicker,” 1888-1889. Museum of the City of New York, accesed via ARTstor

Responses to Industrialization• Unionism: The Knights of

Labor

• unskilled AND skilled workers

• blacks AND whites (but not Asians)

• women AND men

• 1886: 800,000 members (its highest)

• Chicago, May 1, 1886: 40,000 strikers in Chicago strike for the day in support of 8-hr day

• Two McCormick Reaper strikers murdered on May 3

• Protest/rally at Haymarket Square on May 4 in response

• Bomb thrown into crowd; police open fire

• 8 labor leaders arrested, all convicted, 4 hanged

The Haymarket Affair

Government and Labor

• Strikes are met with violence during this period: Pinkerton men and government troops

• Homestead Steel, 1892: 300 private security turned back; 8,000 state militiamen sent to break strike

Bottom Line: The Gilded Age in the City

• The new economy led to a large gap between rich and poor:

• Some people became fabulously wealthy.

• Others - mostly immigrants - worked hard for very low wages. They:

• lived in slums

• organized unions and went on strike

• got some sympathy from middle-class people, but not enough to make much difference in their lives.