First Half of Chapter 24 Quiz

How were railroads improved?

1.) Rail travel was safer and easier as a result of a standardized signal system and uniform track gauge. 2.) Westinghouse's invention of the air brake made trains much safer. 3.) The telegraph allowed moving trains to communicate.

How did the electric light change the way humans lived?

1.) Slept less 2.) Worked more/longer hours, produced more - 2nd or 3rd shifts at factories 3.) Interacted more - out in public later, more entertainment 4.) Safer environment - fewer fires

Despite acclaim, the Interstate Commerce Act emphatically did not represent a popular victory over corporate wealth. Why?

It did not revolutionize the railroad industry, but did stabilize it. It provided an orderly forum where competing business interests could resolve their conflicts in peaceable ways. The country could now avoid ruinous rate wars among the railroads and outraged, "confiscatory" attacks on the lines by pitchfork-prodded state legislatures. This was a modest accomplishment but by no means an unimportant one.

The railroads especially stimulated mining and agriculture in the West. How was this so?

It took farmers out to their land, carried the fruits of their toil to market, and brought them their manufactured necessities. Clusters of farm settlements paralleled the railroads, just as earlier they had followed the rivers.

What was the Transcontinental Railroad?

It was built by the Central Pacific Railroad (heading east) and the Union Pacific Railroad (heading west) with the help of huge government loans and land grants. It took seven years and was built mostly by immigrants.

The sheer size of the American market encouraged innovators to...?

invent mass-production methods. With cheap transportation crisscrossing the nation and an ever-larger population able and eager to consume, anyone who could make an appealing new product available for a good price in large quantities—and figure out how to market it—thrived.

In order to increase their fortunes, people...?

invested in, bought, sold, and disassembled railroads as they saw fit.

Completion of the transcontinental line—a magnificent engineering feat for that day—was one of America's...?

most impressive peacetime undertakings. It welded the West Coast more firmly to the Union and facilitated a flourishing trade with Asia. It penetrated the arid barrier of the deserts, paving the way for the phenomenal growth of the Great West.

Rail laying at the California end was undertaken by the Central Pacific Railroad. This line...?

pushed boldly eastward from Sacramento, over and through the towering, snow-clogged Sierra Nevada. Four far-seeing men—the so-called Big Four—were the chief financial backers of the enterprise. The quartet included the heavyset, enterprising ex-governor Leland Stanford of California, who had useful political connections, and the burly, energetic Collis P. Huntington, an adept lobbyist. The Big Four cleverly operated through two construction companies, and although they walked away with tens of millions in profits, they kept their hands relatively clean by not becoming involved in the bribing of congressmen.

What led the way to the many changes in technology?

railroads.

Other rail barons granted secret...?

rebates or kickbacks to powerful shippers in return for steady and assured traffic. Often they slashed their rates on competing lines, but they more than made up the difference on noncompeting ones, where they might actually charge more for a short haul than for a long one. As a result, small farmers usually paid the highest rates, while large customers got the best deals.

Perhaps the most productive inventor of the era, Thomas Edison, was...?

responsible for perfecting the electric light bulb and several other devices as well: mimeograph, dictaphone, moving picture, stock ticker.

These inventions caused a...?

substantial increase in private investment. Examples: Telegraph - Western Union Telephone - American Telephone & T Light bulb - General Electric, Westinghouse

What did this lead to?

This led to corruption playing a part in real deals.

How was the Transcontinental Railroad made possible?

This was only possible by merging newer, western lines with older, well-established eastern ones.

For railroad operators worried about keeping schedules and avoiding wrecks, this patchwork of local times was a nightmare. What happened as a result of this?

Thus on November 18, 1883, the major rail lines decreed that the continent would hence-forth be divided into four "time zones."

Finally, the railroad, more than any other single factor, was the maker of millionaires. This meant that...?

A new aristocracy emerged with the rise of railroads. They replaced the old southern "lords of the lash".

The scattered state efforts screeched to a halt in 1886. Why was this so?

At first, state legislatures tried to regulate railroad rates. The Wabash Case halted these efforts when the Supreme Court ruled that only the federal government could regulate interstate commerce.

Many of the large railroads in the post-Civil War decades passed through seemingly endless bankruptcies, mergers, or reorganizations. Why was this so?

Avidly seeking land bounties and pushing into areas that lacked enough potential population to support a railroad, pioneer builders sometimes laid down rails that led "from nowhere to nothing." When prosperity failed to smile upon their coming, they went into bankruptcy, carrying down with them the savings of trusting investors.

Just as industry served as a hothouse of invention, brilliant ideas gave rise to whole new lines of business. How was this so?

Between 1860 and 1890, some 440,000 patents were issued. Business operations were facilitated by machines such as the cash register, the stock ticker, and the type-writer, while the refrigerator car, the electric dynamo, and the electric railway speeded urbanization. One of the most ingenious inventions was the telephone, introduced by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. America was suddenly turned into a nation of "telephoniacs," as a gigantic communications net-work was built on his invention. The social impact of the telephone further expanded when it lured "number please" women away from the stove to the switchboard.

How else did corruption take place?

Bribery, excessive lobbying (influencing government officials), and threats allowed rail barons to operate under lenient laws. The public were the ultimate losers as barons eventually joined forces.

How did the government benefit from this?

But the government did receive beneficial returns, including long-term preferential rates for postal service and military traffic. Granting land was also a "cheap" way to subsidize a much-desired transportation system because it avoided new taxes for direct cash grants.

What were the positive effects of the Transcontinental Railroad?

By the end of the century, no less than five major rail lines crossed the U.S. Railroads increased existing markets, created new ones, sped up immigration, provided jobs, and decreased travel time. Frontier villages touched by the magic wand of the iron rail became flourishing cities; those that were bypassed often withered away and became "ghost towns."

The success of the western lines was facilitated by welding together and expanding the older eastern networks, notably the New York Central. The genius in this enterprise was...?

Cornelius Vanderbilt. He used his money to help build new and improved railroads and eventually a monopoly. Offering superior railway service at lower rates, he amassed a fortune of $100 million.

When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the Republic ranked only fourth among the manufacturing nations of the world. By 1894 it had bounded into first place. Why the sudden upsurge?

Liquid capital, previously scarce, was now becoming abundant. The word millionaire had not been coined until the 1840s, and in 1861 only a handful of individuals were eligible for this class. But the Civil War, partly through profiteering, created immense fortunes, and these accumulations could now be combined with borrowings from foreign capitalists. Investors from abroad loaned more money to the United States in the postwar period than any country had previously received. Unlike in other countries, in America they mostly put the money into private hands

Two significant new improvements were helpful to the railroads? What were they?

One was the steel rail, which Vanderbilt helped popularize when he replaced the old iron tracks of the New York Central with the tougher metal. Steel was safer and more economical because it could bear a heavier load. A standard gauge of track width likewise came into wide use during the postwar years, thus eliminating the expense and inconvenience of numerous changes from one line to another.

What was one weighty argument for the start of the railroad?

One weighty argument for action was the urgency of bolstering the Union, already disrupted, by binding the Pacific Coast—especially gold-rich California—more securely to the rest of the Republic.

Railroad companies also stimulated the mighty stream of immigration. How was this so?

Seeking settlers to whom their land grants might be sold at a profit, they advertised seductively in Europe and sometimes offered to trans-port the newcomers free to their farms.

What was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887?

Stiff-necked President Cleveland did not look kindly on effective regulation. But Congress ignored his wants and passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. It: 1.) prohibited rebates and pools 2.) mandated open rates and fee schedules 3.) no favoritism - forbade unfair discrimination against shippers and outlawed charging more for a short haul than for a long one over the same line. 4.) set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to administer and enforce the new legislation.

After this argument proved effective,...?

The Union Pacific Railroad was thus commissioned by Congress to thrust westward from Omaha, Nebraska. For each mile of track constructed, the company was granted 20 square miles of land, alternating in 640-acre sections on either side of the track. For each mile, the builders were also to receive a generous federal loan, ranging from $16,000 on the flat prairie land to $48,000 for mountainous country. The laying of rails began in earnest after the Civil War ended in 1865, and with loans and land grants available, the promoters made all possible haste.

What was the "pool"?

The earliest form of combination was the "pool"—an agreement to divide the business in a given area and share the profits.

What was "stock watering"?

The term originally referred to the practice of making cattle thirsty by feeding them salt and then having them bloat themselves with water before they were weighed in for sale. Using a variation of this technique, railroad stock promoters grossly inflated their claims about a given line's assets and profitability and sold stocks and bonds far in excess of the railroad's actual value.

What is a patent?

a license that gives an inventor the exclusive right to make, use, or sell an invention for a set period of time.

A flood of inventions during this period led to...?

a massive increase in patents issued by the U.S. government.

Congress, impressed by arguments pleading military and postal needs,...?

began to advance liberal loans to two favored cross-continent companies in 1862 and added enormous donations of acreage paralleling the tracks. All told, Washington rewarded the railroads with 155,504,994 acres, and the western states contributed 49 million more—a total area larger than Texas

The railroads emerged as the nation's...?

biggest business, employing more people than any other industry and gobbling up nearly 20 percent of investment dollars from foreign and domestic investors alike. More than any other single factor, the railroad network spurred the amazing economic growth of the post-Civil War years.

Land grants to railroads were made in...?

broad belts along the proposed route. Within these belts, the railroads were allowed to choose alternate mile-square sections in checkerboard fashion. But until they determined the precise location of their tracks and decided which sections were the best selections, the railroads withheld all the land from other users. President Grover Cleveland put an end to this foot-dragging practice in 1887 and threw open to settlement the still-unclaimed public portions of the land-grant areas.

Dedicated to free enterprise and to the principle that competition is the soul of trade, the American people...?

cherished a traditionally keen pride in progress. They remembered that Jefferson's ideals were hostile to government interference with business. Above all, there shimmered the "American dream": the hope that in an economic system as such, anyone might become a millionaire.

Railroad kings were, for a time, virtual...?

industrial monarchs. As manipulators of a huge natural monopoly, they exercised more direct control over the lives of more people than did the president of the United States. They increasingly shunned competition and began to cooperate with one another to rule the railroad dominion. Sorely pressed to show at least some returns on their bloated investments, they entered into defensive alliances to protect precious profits.

Transcontinental railroad building was so costly and risky as to require...?

government subsidies, as it had in many other industrializing nations. Everywhere, the construction of railway systems promised greater national unity and economic growth.

The Central Pacific, which was granted the same princely subsidies as the Union Pacific, had the same...?

incentive to haste. Some ten thousand Chinese laborers, sweating from dawn to dusk, proved to be cheap, efficient, and expendable (hundreds lost their lives in premature explosions and other mishaps). The towering Sierra Nevada presented a formidable barrier, and the nerves of the Big Four were strained when their workers could chip only a few inches a day tunneling through solid rock, while the Union Pacific was sledgehammering westward across the open plains.

Railroad managers were forced to charge high rates and wage ruthless competitive battles in order to...?

pay off the exaggerated financial obligations with which they were burdened.

Farmers, frustrated with being "railroaded", began to...?

seek change. They used the Grange as a lobbying tool. Under pressure from organized agrarian groups like the Grange (Patrons of Husbandry), many midwestern legislatures tried to regulate the railroad monopoly.

Deadlock in the 1850s over the proposed transcontinental railroad was broken when...?

the South seceded, leaving the field to the North. In 1862, the year after the guns first spoke at Fort Sumter, Congress made provision for starting the long-awaited line.

What did the Interstate Commerce Act foreshadow?

the arrival of a series of independent regulatory com-missions in the next century, which would irrevocably commit the government to the daunting task of monitoring and guiding the private economy. That there was a public interest in private enterprise that the government was bound to protect.

What allowed businesses to expand and brought people closer?

the improvements to railroads, the telegraph, steel production, and the invention of the telephone.

The captains of industry had a major motivation to invent machines. Why?

they made it possible to replace expensive skilled labor with unskilled workers, now cheap and plentiful as a result of massive immigration. Steel, the keystone industry, was built largely on the sweat of low-priced immigrant labor from eastern and southern Europe, working in two 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.

In the years between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the 20th century, businesses in the U.S....?

underwent changes that would affect how future corporations were formed, expanded, and managed.

Immediately after the Civil War, everyday life in America...?

was still one of few conveniences. There was no electricity and mail took weeks to travel from coast to coast. The last three decades of the 19th century would change that. A technological revolution led to inventions that greatly improved everyday life in America.

The extension of rails into thinly populated regions...?

was unprofitable until the areas could be built up, and private promoters were unwilling to suffer heavy initial losses.