Big Business and the Gilded Age

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World Class Educationwww.kean.edu
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Big Business and the Gilded Age
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Topic 7

• The New Industrial Order
• in
• The Post-Civil War Period

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What encouraged the growth of industry and the
rise of big corporations in America?
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• Natural resources iron and oil
• Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
• Favorable state and federal Government policies
• Immigration influx of cheap labor
• New sources of power oil / electricity
• American inventions and innovations
• Improved transportation regional and
  transcontinental railroads
• Giant corporations drive industrialization after
  the Civil War

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Impact on American Economy
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• New industrial products factory-made goods
• Improved standard of living begins
• Urban development
• Increased overseas trade / imperialism
• Problems of unregulated capitalism monopolies
  and ruthless competition
• Great fortunes accumulated

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The New Industrial System
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• Big corporations begin to replace single-owner
  business / partnerships with limited capital
• Unfettered Competition
• Major investments in railroads, steel, oil,
  telegraph and telephone communications
• Corporations chartered to act as an artificial
  legal person
• Emergence of powerful corporate tycoons

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Cornelius Vanderbilt
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• Railroad empire begins1869
• New York to Chicago
• What do I care for the law? Havent I got the
  Power?

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John D. Rockefeller
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• Oil empire
• Standard Oil Company of Ohio, 1870
• 90 of nations oil refineries
• Supreme Court limits Rockefeller monopoly

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Andrew Carnegie
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• Steel empire
• Carnegie Steel Company 1900
• Iron ore deposits
• Railroads
• Steamships
• Steel mills
• The Gospel of Wealth - the uses of wealth

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J. Pierpont Morgan
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• Finance industrial consolidation
• US Steel Corporation
• American Telephone and Telegraph
• General Electric
• Northern Pacific RR

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Others Industrialists
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• Gustavus Swift meatpacking
• Philip D. Armour meatpacking
• Charles A. Pillsbury flour milling
• James B. Duke cigarette manufacturing
• Andrew Mellon aluminum

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Captains of Industry or Robber Barons
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• Created new industries
• Efficiency
• Order out of economic chaos
• Better services
• Improved quality of products
• America becomes an industrial giant
• Philanthropies endowment of museums,
  universities, libraries

• Exploitation of workers
• Corruption of government
• Greed
• Destruction of small producers
• Restraint of competition - monopolies
• Abuse of consumers
• Laissez faire economics

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Workers respond to the New Industrial OrderLabor
Strife and Unions
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• Haymarket Affair, 1886
• Homestead Steel Strike, 1892
• Pullman Strike, 1894
• Anthracite Coal Strike, 1902
• Knights of Labor
• American Federation of Labor
• The Industrial Workers of the World

• Low pay
• Long hours
• Unsafe working conditions
• No minimum wage
• Employer lockouts

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The Legacy of the Gilded Age
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• Mark Twain called the late 19th century the
  "Gilded Age." In the popular view, the late 19th
  century was a period of greed and guile, when
  rapacious robber barons, unscrupulous
  speculators, and corporate buccaneers engaged in
  shady business practices and vulgar displays of
  wealth. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age
  as an era of corruption, scandal-plagued
  politics, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered
  capitalism. But it is more useful to think of
  this period as modern America's formative era,
  when the rules of modern politics and business
  practice were just beginning to be written.
• from www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

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Selected Readings
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• Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons How Andrew
  Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.
  P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
• Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons The Great
  American Capitalists, 18611901
• Leon Litwack, The American Labor Movement