HIST 2020 Chapter 18

Why were most people looking for government jobs in the 1880s worried about having to pass an examination to qualify?

Few potential employees had enough education to pass a written examination.

How did J. P. Morgan achieve his stunning reorganization and consolidation of businesses in the late nineteenth century?

He sometimes formed a community of interest, comprised of a few directors he chose.

What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?

Progress is the result of competition, and social reforms and other modes of human interference impede progress.

Which of the following big businesses came to dominate American life in the second half of the nineteenth century?

Railroading

Which relatively new building material both improved railroading in the late nineteenth century and depended on it?

Steel produced through the Bessemer process

Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?

The company had employed both horizontal and vertical integration to control more than 90 percent of the oil business.

What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?

The desire among some Southerners to shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one

Which of the following developments was a key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age?

The growth of industrialism in the United States

To what did the term solid South refer in the decades after Reconstruction?

The states of the old Confederacy, which voted Democratic in every election for the next seventy years

Which of the following factors explains the high voter turnout in national elections during the last three decades of the nineteenth century?

Voting was an important way to get a government job

What was accomplished by J. P. Morgan's railroad companies' practice of issuing watered stock?

Watered stock kept investors happy but caused overcapitalization and debt for the railroads.

How did American women respond to the denial of their right to vote in the late nineteenth century?

Women participated in the political process though the antilynching, suffrage, and temperance movements.

The most enthusiastic supporters of the tariff in the nineteenth century were

industrialists and westerners who traded in wool, hides, and lumber.

The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the 1880s because

it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services.

Democrats dubbed the Republican-dominated Fifty-first Congress the "Billion Dollar Congress" because it spent the nation's surplus on

lawmakers' own constituents

The Supreme Court's decision in Wabash v. Illinois (1886), which reversed its ruling in Munn v. Illinois (1877),

led to passage of the first federal law regulating the railroad industry.

Rockefeller ultimately reorganized Standard Oil as a holding company in the late nineteenth century to

legally combine competing companies under a central administration.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 established the Civil Service Commission an

made it impossible to remove people in civil service jobs for political reasons

The presidents who served in the last part of the nineteenth century—Rutherford B. Hayes through William McKinley—

were overshadowed by business development and party politics at state and local levels.

What was an important consequence of the civil service reform of the 1880s?

Business became even more influential in politics than before.

What was the main purpose of crude oil in the United States before the advent of the automobile?

Lubrication and lighting in the form of kerosene

What is an oligopoly?

A competitive business system in which several large companies control production in an industry

Which of the following describes the Gilded Age?

An era marked by personal greed and a corrupt partnership between business and politics

What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?

An increasing number of lynchings across the South

How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?

Bell used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed both local and cross-country communication

Why were Irish Catholic voters offended by James G. Blaine's campaign?

Blaine neglected to respond to a slur on Catholic voters.

Who dominated national politics in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century?

Dynamic party bosses

How was it possible that Jay Gould was described as both the world's richest man and the most hated man in America when he died in 1892?

He was a symbol of all the most troubling aspects of big business in America.

What was the purpose of vertical integration, which was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century?

It placed all aspects of the business, from mining raw materials to marketing and transporting finished products, under the control of the chief operating officer.

How effective was the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first federal regulatory agency?

It was so weak in its early years that it served as little more than a historical precedent.

What message did Andrew Carnegie promote in his gospel of wealth

Millionaires should be trustees and agents for the poor.

Which of the following factors boosted nineteenth-century railroad construction in America significantly?

Monetary aid and land grants from federal and state governments

Where had electricity been put to use in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century?

Mostly in urban areas

Which of the following occurred soon after Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania in 1859?

Thousands launched their own small refineries.

What did the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act have in common?

a) They testified to the nation's growing willingness to use federal measures to intervene in big business on behalf of the public interest.

Carnegie Steel achieved the tremendous productivity that Andrew Carnegie insisted on

by forcing employees to work long hours under extremely dangerous conditions for low pay.

Prominent business leaders of the late nineteenth century, such as J. P. Morgan, believed

consolidation and central control were preferable to competition.

John D. Rockefeller first organized Standard Oil as a trust to

control the key elements of production and corner the market for oil.

According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in

economics and the shifting social structure of the South

The Supreme Court's late-nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment helped big business by

elevating property rights over all other rights

Having stated that "the paramount issue this year is moral rather than political," supporters of Grover Cleveland in 1884 were chagrined to learn that Cleveland had

fathered a child out of wedlock.

The turn of the twentieth century saw individual entrepreneurship in the United States yield to

finance capitalism.

J. P. Morgan acquired the core of what would be the largest corporation in the world when he purchased

steel interests formerly controlled by Andrew Carnegie.

The economic theory of laissez-faire gained political clout in the late nineteenth century because

the Supreme Court increasingly was reinterpreting the Constitution to protect business

The industries that grew up around the revolutionary inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated that

the age of the inventor was becoming the age of the corporation

The Greenback Labor Party believed that the government should issue paper currency based on

the country's total wealth.

When advocates of bimetallism referred to the crime of '73, they were talking about

the decision by Congress in 1873 to stop buying and minting silver.

In her History of the Standard Oil Company published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as

the man whose business methods made him a symbol of heartless monopoly capitalism.

President Grover Cleveland hoped to increase the nation's flagging gold reserves during the economic depression in the winter of 1894-95

through making a deal with a private group of bankers, headed by J. P. Morgan, to purchase gold abroad and supply it to the government.

President James A. Garfield unwittingly helped the cause of civil service reform when he

was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker