Chapter 6

A New Industrial Age

The Expansion of Industry

Natural Resources Fuel Industrialization

• BLACK GOLD

• 1840s – Americans use kerosene to light lamps

• 1859 – steam engines used to drill for oil

• Petroleum-refining industries in Cleveland and Pittsburgh

• BESSEMER STEEL PROCESS

• Iron – soft and tends to break and rust

• Steel – lighter, more flexible, and rust-resistant

• 1850 – Henry Bessemer and William Kelly

• NEW USES FOR STEEL

• Railroads

• The Brooklyn Bridge• Completed in 1883• Spans across the East

River in New York

• William Le Baron Jenney designs the first skyscraper with a steel frame

Inventions Promote Change

• THE POWER OF ELECTRICITY

• Thomas Alva Edison • George Westinghouse

• 1890 – electric power ran machines

• Electric streetcars• Industry not bound to

rivers

• INVENTIONS CHANGE LIFESTYLES

• Thomas Alva Edison invents the light bulb

• Christopher Sholes invented the typewriter in 1867

• Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson invent the telephone in 1876

The Age of the Railroads

Railroads Span Time and Space

• A NATIONAL NETWORK

• 1869 – the transcontinental railroad

• 1861 – 30,000 miles of tracks

• 1890 – 180,000 miles of tracks

• ROMANCE AND REALITY

• The Central Pacific Railroad employed thousands of Chinese immigrants

• The Union Pacific hired Irish immigrants and out-of-work Civil War veterans

The Grange and the Railroads

• GRANGER LAWS

• 1871 – Illinois authorized a commission “to establish maximum freight and passenger rates and prohibit discrimination”

• 1877 – Munn v. Illinois• Supreme Court upholds the Granger laws

• INTERSTATE COMMERCE ACT 1887

• 1886 – the Supreme Court ruled that a state could not set rates on interstate commerce

• Interstate Commerce Act• Reestablished the right

of the federal government to supervise railroad activities

• Established a five-member Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)

Big Business and Labor

Carnegie’s Innovations

• Andrew Carnegie

• 1873 – Carnegie enters the steel business• 1899 – Carnegie Steel Company manufactured more

steel than all factories in Great Britain

• NEW BUSINESS STRATEGIES

• Carnegie’s success based on new management practices• Make better products more

cheaply• Use of new machinery and

techniques

• Improvement of his own manufacturing operation• Vertical integration

• Horizontal integration

Social Darwinism and Business

• PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL DARWINISM

• Herbert Spencer• Used Darwin’s theories

to explain the evolution of human society

• Economists justify laissez faire• The marketplace

should not be regulated

Fewer Control More

• Mergers result in monopolies• Holding companies buy

out stocks of other companies

• J. P. Morgan and United States Steel

• Trust

• ROCKEFELLER AND THE “ROBBER BARONS”

• 1870 – Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company processed two or three percent of the country’s crude oil

• 1880 – Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the refining business

• Industrialists become philanthropists

• Rockefeller gave away over $500 million

• Carnegie donated about 90 percent of the wealth he accumulated

• SHERMAN ANTITRUST ACT

• 1890 – the Sherman Antitrust Act made it illegal to form a trust that interfered with free trade between states or with other countries

• Standard Oil reorganized into single corporations

• BUSINESS BOOM BYPASSES THE SOUTH

• The South still tried to recover from the Civil War, • Lack of capital• Northern businesses owned 90 percent of the

stock in the most profitable Southern enterprise

• The South remained agricultural• Only growth in forestry, mining, and in the tobacco,

and textile industries

Labor Unions Emerge

• LONG HOURS AND DANGER• Steel mills – a seven-day workweek

• Seamstresses – worked 12 or more hours a day, six days a week

• Sweatshops

• EARLY LABOR ORGANIZING

• The National Labor Union (NLU)• Formed in 1866

• The Colored National Labor Union (CNLU)

• The Knights of Labor• “An injury to one is the concern of all”• Membership was officially open to all workers

Union Movements Diverge

• CRAFT UNIONISM

• The American Federation of Labor (AFL), with Samuel Gompers as president

• Focus on collective bargaining

• INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM

• The American Railway Union (ARU)

• Included skilled and unskilled laborers

• Eugene V. Debs

Strikes Turn Violent

• THE GREAT STRIKE OF 1877

• 1877 – workers for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) protest their second wage cut in two months

• Stopped freight and passenger traffic on 50,000 miles,

• Federal troops end the strike

• THE HAYMARKET AFFAIR

• May 4, 1886 – 3,000 people gathered at Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police brutality

• The crowd was dispersing when police arrived• Someone tossed a bomb into the police line

• THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE

• Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead plant

• Steelworkers called a strike on June 29, 1892

• Pinkerton Detective Agency

• Strikebreakers

• THE PULLMAN COMPANY STRIKE 1894

• Panic of 1893 and the economic depression

• Pullman company laid off 3,000 of its 5,800 employees

• Cut the wages of the rest by 25 to 50 percent

• WOMEN ORGANIZE

• Mary Harris Jones• Exposed child labor

conditions• 1909 – Pauline Newman

organizes the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in March 25, 1911