Big Business and Organized Labor

The Rise of Big Business: Why?

• Shortage of labor• Technological Innovations• Government policies

The Second Industrial Revolution vs. the First Industrial Revolution

• Steam• Iron• Textiles• Mass production of

simple products such as shirts and slips

• Skilled and artisanal labor still necessary

• Electricity• Steel• Railroads• Vertical and Horizontal

Integration• Research and

Development• Interchangeable parts

and mass production• Deskilling of labor

Textile Mill ca. 1890

The significance of the RR

• RR “firsts”: First big business, first magnet for finance, and first with large-scale management

• Government help: Pacific RR Act• Golden Spike• Work Force• Finance: Gould and Vanderbilt• Integrating a national market

Inventors and New Industries

• Bell and AT&T• Edison and Westinghouse• Battle of the Currents• General Electric

Entrepreneurs

• John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil• Horizontal v. Vertical Integration• Trusts and Holding Companies• Carnegie and Steel• Bessemer Process• Electrical Industry: Siemens, Edison• J.P. Morgan and Finance• U.S. Steel: The World’s First $Billion firm

John D. Rockefeller

Rockefeller Cartoon

J.P. Morgan Attacks!

Andrew Carnegie

Puddling

Bessemer Process

Carnegie Steel Mill

Electrical Industry

• Importance of Research and Development• Early movers: Siemens & Halske: Telegraphy• Inventors: Siemens: Electrical Magnets and

Machinery• Edison: Electric Lighting• Westinghouse v. Edison: Battle of the

Currents• Morgan’s Role

Werner von Siemens

Thomas Edison: The miracle of electrical lighting

Labor

• Productivity, deflation and real wages• Child Labor• Molly Maguires and other heroes• Railroad Strike of 1877 and Sand Lot

Incident• National Labor Union• Terrance Powderly and the Knights of

Labor

Types of Labor Unions

• Craft/Trade Unions: American Federation of Labor and Samuel Gompers

• Industrial Unions: Terrence Powderly and the KofL

Labor Violence

• Anarchism• Haymarket Affair, May 3, 1886• Homestead Strike, July 7, 1892• Pullman Strike, May-July 1894: George

Pullman, Eugene Debs, John Peter Altgeld, Grover Cleveland

• In Re Debs (1895)

Haymarket Riot 1886

Homestead Strike 1892

Strikers and Pinkertons

Homestead Strike: The Army Arrives

Frick and would be assassin

Pullman 1894

Pullman Strike and U.S. Army

Summarize Changes in Labor

• Deskilled work and mass production: leading to Fordism

• Antagonism between low skilled and immigrant labor and skilled and native born

• Industrial v. craft labor unions• Living in new cities• Government firmly aligned against labor

unions and workers’ rights

Coxey’s Army

• Jacob Coxey• Carl Browne• “The Stranger”

Radicals

• International Workers of the World (IWW)• Socialists

Why is there no socialism in America?