modern money and its discontents big business and labor, 1865-1914
TRANSCRIPT
Modern Money and Its Discontents
Big Business and Labor, 1865-1914
Rise of an Industrial Economy
• Second Industrial Revolution—integrated transportation and communication; electric power; scientifically-based research and development
• Laborers were increasingly a proletariat—only their labor to sell in the marketplace.
Railroads
• First Transcontinental Railroad completed in 1869
• Financed by private capital and government land grants (129 million acres of public lands between 1850 and 1870 alone)
• Much corruption—Credit Mobilier Scandal; “Robber Barons”
Transcontinental Railroad
Robber Barons: Gould and Vanderbilt
Inventions Change Lifeways
• Alexander Graham Bell—Telephone—1876• Thomas Alva Edison—Light bulb in 1879;
the phonograph in 1877• George Westinghouse—airbrake for trains
and Alternating Current (beginning of power grid) in 1886.
• J. W. McGaffey—vacuum cleaner 1869• These inventions relied on electricity
Electric Generator
Edison and Westinghouse
New Corporate Models
• John David Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust• Corporation: “hasn’t a body to be damned or a
soul to be kicked”• Vertical Integration: from raw material to market
—Andrew Carnegie and Carnegie Steel• Horizontal Integration—control the bottlenecks:
John David Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust (refining monopoly)
Carnegie and Rockefeller
Oil wells in Titusville, Pa.
The Business of Money
• J. P. Morgan and Investment Banking
• Interlocking boards of directors
• Assumed control over 1/6 of all U. S. railroading
• United States Steel (1901) controlled about 90% of U. S. steel production
James Pierpont Morgan
Richard Sears & Alvah Roebuck
• Wide range of low priced consumer goods
• You could even buy a mail order church—just not the pretty girl on page 614
• Rural Free Delivery plus the railroad made this mail order business possible
• 6 million catalogs per year by 1900
New Economy Produced Harm for Many
• Concentration of wealth
• Alienation of labor
• Child labor
• Low wages
• Industrial accidents
Workers Try to Organize
• Contrary to “individualism”
• Strife between skilled and unskilled labor
• Race/Ethnicity—Dennis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party
• Pinkerton’s as Strikebreakers
• Government Prosecution (Sherman Anti-Trust Act)
Knights of Labor
• Growth under Terrence V. Powderly
• Success in early railroad strikes led membership to swell to 700,000 by 1886
• Lost favor as a result of Haymarket Affair in 1886
American Federation of Labor
• Samuel Gompers and Unionism pure and simple
• 500,000 members by 1890 and 2 million by 1914
1890s Strikes Illustrate Challenges faced by Unions
• Homestead Strike—1892
• Pullman Strike--1894
Eugene Victor Debs, 1855-1926—“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and
while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Mary Harris “Mother Jones” (1837-1930)
Socialism and Labor
• Socialist Party—polled 900,672 votes in 1912
• IWW
• Western Federation of Miners and Big Bill Haywood
William D. Haywood—Leader of WFM