Industrial America in “The Gilded Age”

I. Captains of Industry• Robber Barons

• Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Steel

• Rockefeller & Standard Oil’s Monopoly

• Social Darwinism, Origin of Species (1859)

Andrew Carnegie

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil

II. America’s New Labor Supply

• New Wave of Immigration, 1880

• Segmented Working Class

• Dangerous Working and Living Conditions

New Wave of Immigration, 1880 - 1915

• 1870 – 1880 = 2.8 million

• 1880 – 1890 = 5.2 million

Oyster Canning Factory, Alabama, 1911

Glass Worker, Virginia, 1911

Globe Cotton Mill, 1909 Pennsylvania Coal Mine, 1911

Women’s Factory Work

III. Labor Strikes Back in the Gilded Age

• Trade Unionism• Knights of Labor,

Terence Powderly• Haymarket Square

Riot, Chicago, 1886• American Federation

of Labor, Samuel Gompers

Knights of Labor

Terence Powderly

Haymarket Square Riot, 1886

American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers

• Recruited U.S.-born Skilled workers

• “Pure and Simple” Moderate Unionism

What was it like to live in a city during the Gilded Age?

Newberry Street, New York City, 1905

Hester Street, New York City, 1904

New York City, 1899

IV. Party Politics in the City: Bosses & Machines

• Partisan Voters

• City “Machines” and “Bosses”

• New York’s Tammany Hall & Boss Tweed

Boss Tweed

Puck Magazine, 1894

V. Poverty in the City• Ellis Island

• Tenement Housing

• Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)

• Forms of Leisure

Times Square, New York, 1904

Ellis Island

Ellis Island Medical Exam, 1913

Angel Island Immigration Station

Tenement Housing, New York City

Tenement Apartment, New York, 1890s New York, 1910

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

Forms of Leisure: Coney Island, Brooklyn

VI. Middle Class Society & Culture

• Victorian Morality

• Cult of Domesticity

• Department Stores, “Palaces of Consumption”

Tea room inside The Emporium, 1904

Catherine Beecher’s The American Woman’s Home (1869)

Behaviors to avoid:

Reaching over another person’s plate; standing up to reach distant articles instead of asking to have those passed; using the table-cloth instead of napkins; eating fast and in a noisy manner; putting large pieces in the mouth; and picking the teeth at the table.

Macy’s, New York,1900

Dome of Marshall Fields, Chicago

Window Shopping outside Macy’s