The Second Industrial Revolution, 1865-1898

Women's Trade Union League

A U.S. organization of both working class and more well-off women formed in 1903 to support the efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions.

Homestead Strike

Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Homestead Steel Plant near Pittsburgh, precipitated this strike in 1892 by cutting wages by nearly 20 percent.

Progress and Poverty

Henry George's best selling book that advocated social reform through the imposition of a "single tax" on land

Standard Oil

John D. Rockefeller organized Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870. Through ruthless competition and superb organization, the Standard Oil Trust controlled 90 percent of oil refining in the United States by 1879.

"Bread and Butter" demands

of an individual indicates the various quantities of a good (or service) the consumer is willing and able to buy at different possible prices during a particular time period

Henry Ford

1863-1947. American businessman, founder of Ford Motor Company, father of modern assembly lines, and inventor credited with 161 patents., The pioneer in the manufacturing of affordable automobiles with his Model T, which was built using assembly line methods. The car was sturdy, reliable, inexpensive, and available only in black. In 1914, he announced that he would pay workers $5 a day. Workers were happy, and Ford had many customers. By 1924, his car sold for less than $300.

Alexander Graham Bell

1876 Bell invented telephone and in 1877 he started the Bell Telephone company

"Molly Maguires"

A Irish miner's union that was established in Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 1870s; tens of thousands of Irish were forced to flee their homeland during the potato famine, but were not welcomed in America, who regarded them as a social menace and competition for jobs; forced to fend for themselves, they banded together to improve their social, financial, and political situation.

U.S. Steel

A Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist who founded the Carnegie Steel Company in 1892. By 1901, his company dominated the American steel industry. Eventually bought out by JP Morgan, and the industry was renamed "U.S. Steel."

Scientific Management

A management theory using efficiency experts to examine each work operations and find ways to minimize the time needed to complete it

Horatio Alger

A popular novelist who wrote about young men of modest means who become rich and successful through honesty, hard work, and a little luck.

George Westinghouse

A remarkable inventor who was responsible for holding more than 400 patents and aslo for the development of the air brake for railroads in 1869 and a transformer for producing high voltage alternating current in 1885.

Trust

A trust, sometimes inaccurately made synonymous with a monopoly, was a business-management device designed to centralize and make more efficient the management of diverse and far-flung business operations. John D. Rockefeller organized the first trust, the Standard Oil Trust.

Transatlantic Cable

After the war Cyrus W. Fields invention of the an improved transatlantic cable in 1866 suddenly made it possible to send messages across the seas in an instant's time. By 1900, cables linked all continents of the world in an electronic network of instantaneous, global communication.

Thomas Edison

American inventor and physicist who took out more than 1,000 patents in his lifetime. His inventions include the telegraph (1869), microphone (1877), and light bulb (1879). He also designed the first power plant (1881-82), making possible the widespread distribution of electricity. During World War I, he worked on a number of military devices, including flamethrowers, periscopes, and torpedoes.

Samuel Gompers

An English-born American labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. He founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and served as that organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924.

Sherman Aniti-Trust Act

An act passed in 1890 which prohibited any "contract, combination, in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce."

U.S. vs. E.C. Knight

An act passed in 1890 which prohibited any "contract, combination, in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce."

Organized Labor

An association of workers united as a single, representative entity for the purpose of improving the workers' economic status and working conditions through collective bargaining with employers. Also known as "unions".

Laissez Faire

An economic theory that government should not regulate or interfere with commerce.

Henry George

Californian journalist who published Progress and Poverty a forthright attack on the uneven distribution of wealth in the U.S. He said labor was the only true source of capitol. He proposed the "single tax" which was a tax that would bring in so much money that no other taxes would be necessary and the government would have plenty of funds to establish new schools... it was never adopted. He ran for mayor against Abram S. Hewitt and lost.

Gospel of Wealth

Carnegie's belief that the wealthy must serve as trustees for their wealth and the public good

Women and Children factory workers

Employers often preferred to hire women workers because they thought women could adapt more easily to machines and were easier to manage. Women and children carted heavy loads of coal, sometimes on all fours in low passages. They also climbed ladders carrying heavy baskets of coal several times a day. These children often started working at age seven or eight, a few as young as five.

Interstate Commerce Commission

Federal regulatory agency often used by rail companies to stabilize the industry and prevent ruinous competition

American Federation of Labor

Federation of craft labor unions lead by Samuel Gompers that arose out of dissatisfaction with the Knights of Labor

John Peter Altgeld

Governor of Illinois during the Haymarket riots, he pardoned three convicted bombers in 1893, believing them victims of the "malicious ferocity" of the courts.

Henry Clay Frick

He was Carnegie's supplier of coke to fuel his steel mills as well as his right hand man. He was very anti-union. He was in charge of the mills when the Homestead Strike occurred. His decision to use strike breakers ignited the riot, and helped stain the image of unions.

Edward Bellamy

In 1888, he wrote Looking Backward, 2000-1887, a description of a utopian society in the year 2000.

Haymarket Square Bombing

In Chicago, home to about 80,000 Knights and a few hundred anarchists that advocated a violent overthrow of the American government, tensions had been building, and on May 4, 1886, Chicago police were advancing on a meeting that had been called to protest brutalities by authorities when a dynamite bomb was thrown, killing or injuring several dozen people. This was called the Haymarket Square Bombing.

"Iron Law of Wages"

Increase the working population and the availability of more workers would turn cause wages to fall, thus creating a cycle of misery and starvation.

"Wobblies"

Industrial Workers of the World nickname

Anti-Trust Movement

Middleclass citizens feared the trusts' unchecked power, and urban elites resented the increasing influence of the new rich. After failing to curb trusts on the state level, reformers finally moved Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Pioneered scientific management by doing time-motion studies on worker's operations. Determined the simplest, cheapest way of performing each job.

John D. Rockefeller

Rockefeller was a man who started from meager beginnings and eventually created an oil empire. In Ohio in 1870 he organized the Standard Oil Company. By 1877 he controlled 95% of all of the refineries in the United States. It achieved important economies both home and abroad by it's large scale methods of production and distribution. He also organized the trust and started the Horizontal Merger.

"Wish Book"

Sears, Roebuck; Montgomery Ward used the improved railroad system to ship to rural customers everything from hats to houses ordered from their thick catalogs, which were known to Americans as the "wish book".

"Self Made Man"

Self-made men were men of the middle class who rose to wealth or to a higher social status from humble origins through self-discipline, hard work, and temperate habits. The self made man became a central theme of American popular culture.

Jacob Coxey's Army

Supporters of Ohio populist Jacob Coxey who in 1894 marched on Washington, demanded that the government create jobs for the unemployed; although this group had no effect whatsoever on policy, it did demonstrate the social and economic impact of the Panic of 1893.

William Graham-Sumner

The Yale professor of the late 1800s who concluded that millionaires are a product of natural selection; they get high wages and live in luxury.

Vertical Integration

When you buy your suppliers out, in order to control your own raw materialss and businesses.

Social Darwinism

The idea that Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest should be applied to the marketplace.

National Labor Union

The labor union formed in 1866 that attracted 600,000 members including the skilled, unskilled, and farmers. It pushed social reform, an eight-hour day, and arbitration of labor disputes

Concentration of Wealth

The nation and the economy depended on the spending and investment of the wealthy. But the wealthy only made up about 5% of the population.

Cornelius Vanderbuilt

The railroad owner who built a railway connecting Chicago and New York. He popularized the use of steel rails in his railroad, which made railroads safer and more economical. This man was one of the few railroad owners to be just and not considered a "Robber Barron"

Interlocking Directorates

The same directories ran competing companies

Wilbur and Orville Wright

These brothers were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio who built and flew the first plane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. flew the first airplane for 12 seconds over a distance of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Andrew Carnegie

United States industrialist and philanthropist who endowed education and public libraries and research trusts (1835-1919). He produced one-fourth of the nation's Bessemer steel in 1990.

Panic of 1893

This financial panic in 1893 forced a quarter of all railroads into bankruptcy. J. Pierpont Morgan and other bankers quickly moved into take control of the bankrupt railroads and consolidate them. With competition eliminated, they could stabilize rates and reduce debts. By 1900, seven giant systems controlled nearly two-thirds of the nation's railroads. A positive result was that it was a more efficient rail system. On the negative side, however, the system was controlled by a few powerful men like morgan, who dominates the boards of competing railroad corporations through interlocking directories. In effect they created regional railroad companies

Knights of Labor

This group, which peaked membership in 1886, grew rapidly because of a combination of their open-membership policy, the continuing industrialization of the American economy, and the growth of urban population; welcomed unskilled and semiskilled workers, including women, immigratns, and African Americans; were idealists who believed they could eliminate conflict between labor and managements. Their goal was to create a cooperative society in which laborers owned the industries in which they worked.

Industrial Workers of the World

This radical union aimed to unite the American working class into one union to promote labor's interests. It worked to organize unskilled and foreign-born laborers, advocated social revolution and led several major strikes. Stressed solidarity.

Pullman Strike

This was a nonviolent strike which brought about a shut down of western railroads, which took place against the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago in 1894, because of the poor wages of the Pullman workers. It was ended by the president due to the interference with the mail system, and brought a bad image upon unions. (Eugene V Debs)

Menlo Park Labs

Thomas Edison established a research laboratory in 1876 in Menlo Park, NJ, for the purpose of inventing new technologies.

Bessemer Process

allowed for the price of steel to drop dramatically and for its production to be done with relative ease. The process involved blowing cold air on red-hot iron in order to ignite the carbon and eliminate impurities.

Court Injunctions

federal court order; directed the union to halt the strike

J.P. Morgan

financed the reorganization of railroads, insurance companies, and banks.

David Ricardo

iron law of wages: low wages were justified by David Ricardo whose famous law of wages arbitrarily would only increase the working population and the availability of more workers would turn cause wages to fall, thus creating a cycle of misery and starvation.

Horizontal Integration

joining with competitors to monopolize a given market

Eugene V. Debs

labor leader arrested during the Pullman Strike (1894); a convert to socialism, Debs ran for president five times between 1900 and 1920. In 1920, he campaigned from prison where he was being held for opposition to American involvement in World War I.

Collective Bargaining

negotiation between union representatives and management representatives to arrive at a contract defining conditions of employment for the term of the contract and to administer that contract

Lockout, Blacklists

the lockout were closing factories to break a labor movement before it could get organized, blacklists: names of pro-union workers circulates around employers

Yellow Dog Contracts

workers being told, as a condition for employment, that they must sign an agreement not to join a union, and injunctions were against strikes.