Unit 5 Gilded Age

James A. Garfield

(1831-1881) He was remembered as one of the four "lost presidents" after the civil war. He was elected to the Ohio Senate in 1859 as a Republican. During the secession crisis, he advocated coercing the seceding states back into the Union. As President, he strengthened Federal authority over the New York Customs House. Less than four months of taking office in 1881, he was assassinated. His assassination led to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform of 1883.

Rutherford B. Hayes

19th president of the united states, was famous for being part of the Hayes-Tilden election in which electoral votes were contested in 4 states, most corrupt election in US history

Haymarket Square

A May Day rally that turned violent when someone threw a bomb into the middle of the meeting, killing several dozen people. Eight anarchists were arrested for conspiracy contributing to the disorder, although evidence linking them to the bombing was thin. Four were executed, one committed suicide, and three were pardoned in 1893.

Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois

A Supreme Court decision that prohibted states from regulating the railroads because the Constitution grants Congress the power ro regulate interstate commerce. As a result, reformers turned their attention to the federal government, which now held sole power to regulate the railroad industry.

Battle of Wounded Knee

A battle between the U.S. Army and the Dakota Sioux, in which several hundred Native Americans and 29 U.S. soldiers died. Tensions erupted violently over two major issues: the Sioux practice of the "Ghost Dance," which the U.S. government had outlawed, and the dispute over whether Siouz reservation land would be broken up because of the Dawes Act.

Credit Mobilier scandal

A construction company was formed by owners of the Union Pacific Railroad for the purpose of receiving government contracts to build the railroad at highly inflated prices-and profits. In 1872 a scandal erupted when journalists discovered that the Credit Mobilier Company had bribed congressmen and even the Vice President in order to allow the ruse to continue.

pragmatism

A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems. The pragmatists thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge. Among the most well-known purveyors of pragmatism were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James.

Homestead Act

A federal law that gave settlers 160 acres of land for about $30 if they lived on it for five years and improved it by, for instance, building a house on it. The act helped make land accessible to hundreds of thousands of westward-moving settlers, but many people also found disappointment when their land was infertile or they saw speculators grabbing up the best land.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

A law that forbade trusts or combinations in business, this was landmark legislation because it was one of thfirst Congressional attempts to regulate big business for the public good. At first the law was mostly used to restrain trade unions as the courts tended to side with companies in legal cases. In 1914 the Act was revised so it could more effectively be used against monopolistic corporations.

trust

A mechanism by which one company grants control over its operations, through ownership of its stock, to another company. The Standard Oil Company became known for this practice in the 1870s as it eliminated its competition by taking control of smaller oil companies.

American Federation of Labor

A national federation of trade unions that included only skilled workers, founded in 1886. Led by Samuel Gompers for nearly four decades, the AFL sought to negotiate with employers for a better kind of capitalism that rewarded workers fairtly with better wages, hours, and conditions. The AFL's membership was almost entirely white and male until the middle twentieth century.

Tuskegee Institute

A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. It focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence. Washington justified segregated, vocational training as a necessary first step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too "accomodationist."

Battle of the Little Big Horn

A particularly violentg example of the warfare between whites and natice Americans in the late nineteenth century, also known as "Custer's Last Stand." In two days, June 25 and June 26, 1876, the combined forces of over 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapho Indians defeared and killed more than 250 U.S. soldiers, including Colonel George Custer. The battle came as the U.S. government tried to compel Native Americans to remain on the reservations and Native Americans tried to defend territory from white-gold seekers. This Indian advantage did not last long, however, as the union of these Indian fighters proved tenuous and the United States Army soon exacted retribution.

grandfather clause

A regulation established in many southern states in the 1890s that exempted from voting requirements (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) anyone who could prove that their ancestors ("grandfathers") had been able to vote in 1860. Since slaves could not vote before the Civil War, these clauses guaranteed the right to vote to many whites while denying it to blacks.

yellow journalism

A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age our of the circulation battles between Joseph Pullitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards.

Homestead Strike

A strike at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, P.A., that ended in an armed battle between the strikers, three hundred armed "Pinkerton" detectives hired by Carnegie, than sixty. The strike was part of a nationwide wave of labor unrest in the summer of 1892 that helped the Populists gain some support from industrial workers.

Tweed Ring

A symbol of gilded Age corruption, "Boss" Tweed and his deputies ran the New York Democratic party in the 1860s and swindled $200 million from the city through bribery , graft, and vote-buying. Boss Tweed was eventually jailed for his crimes and died behind bars.

patronage

A system, prevalent during the Gilded Age, in which political parties granted jobs and favors to party regulars who delivered votes on election day. Patronage was both an essential well-spring of support for both parties and a source of conflict within the Republican party.

Gilded Age

A term given to the period 1865-1896 by Mark Twain, indicating both the fabulous wealth and the wide-spread corruption of the era.

fourth party system

A term scholars have used to describe national politices from 1896-1932, when Republicans had a tight grip on the White House and issues like industrial regulationand labor concerns became paramount, replacing older concerns like civil service reform and monetary policy.

closed shop

A union-organizing term that refers to the practice of allowing only unionized employees to work for a particular company. The AFL became known for negotiating closed-shop agreements with employers, in which the employer would agree not to hire non-union members.

Jacob S. Coxey

A wealthy Ohio quarry owner turn populist who led a protest group to Washington D.C. to demand that the federal government provide the unemployed with meaningful work (during the depression of 1893). The group was arrested and disbanded peacefully in D.C. movements like this struck fear into American's hearts

panic of 1873

A world wide depression that began in the United States when one of the nation's largest banks abruptly declared bankruptcy, leading to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. The crisis intensified debtors calls for inflationary measures such as the printing of more paper money and the unlimited coining age of silver

mining industry

After gold and silver strikes in Colorado, Nevada, and other Western territoriesin the second half of the nineteenth century, fortune seekers by the thousands rushed to the West to dig. These metals were essential to U.S. industrial growth and were also sold into world markets. After surface metals were removed, people sought ways to extract ore from underground, leading to the development of heavy mining machinery. This in turn, led to the consolidation of the mining industry, because only big companies could afford to buy and build the necessary machines.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Aggressive eastern railroad builder and consolidator who scorned the law as an obstacle to his enterprise. Offering superior railway service at lower rates, he amassed a fortune of $100 million. His name is perhaps best remembered through his contribution of $1 million to the founding of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

John D. Rockefeller

Aggressive energy-industry monopolist who used tough means to build a trust based on horizontal integration. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of modern philanthropy. In 1870, Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company and ran it until he retired in the late 1890s. He kept his stock and as gasoline grew in importance, his wealth soared and he became the world's richest man and first U.S. dollar billionaire, and is often regarded as the richest person in history

Frederick Jackson Turner

American historian who said that humanity would continue to progress as long as there was new land to move into. The frontier provided a place for homeless and solved social problems.

Pullman strike

An 1894 strike by railroad workers upset by drastic wage cuts. The strike was led by socialist Eugene Debs but not supported by the American Federation of Labor. Eventually President Grover Cleveland intervened and federal troops forced an end to the strike. The strike highlighted both divisions within labor and the government's new willingness to use armed force to combat work stoppages.

Plessy v. Ferguson

An 1896 Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, sayinig that as long as blacks were provided with " seperate but equal" facilities, these laws did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision provided legal justification for the Jim Crow system until the 1950s.

Jay Gould

An American financier who became a leading American railroad developer and speculator. Teaming up with Jim Fisk, they conned President Grant into ceasing the sale of gold on market to stop inflation and help farmers, but resulted in "Black Friday"

Horace Greeley

An American newspaper editor and founder of the Republican party. His New York Tribune was America's most influential newspaper 1840-1870. Greeley used it to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as antislavery and a host of reforms.

Dawes Severalty Act

An act that broke up Indian reservations and distributed land to individual households. Leftover land was sold for money to fund U.S. government efforts to "civilize" Native Americans. Of 130 million acres held in Native American reservations before teh Act, 90 million were sold to non-Native buyers.

Gold Standard Act

An act that guaranteed that paper currency would be redeemed freely in gold, putting an end to the already dying "free silver" campaign.

sharecropping

An agricultural system that emerged after the Civil War in which black and white farmers rented land and residencies form a plantation owner in exchange for giving him a certain "share" of each year's crop. Sharecropping was teh dominant form of southern agriculture after the Civil War, and landowners manipulated this system to keep tenants in perpetual debt and unable to leave their plantations.

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women. NAWSA argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilites in the home and family made them indispensable in teh public decision-making process. During World War I, NAWSA supported the war effort and lauded women's role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment.

J. P. Morgan

Banker who bought out Carnegie Steel and renames it to U.S. Steel. He was a philanthropist in a way; he gave all the money needed for WWI and was payed back. Morgan was one of the "Robber barons"

Social Darwinists

Believers in the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that perople gained wealth by "survival of the fittest." Therefore, the wealthy had simply won a natural competition and owed nothing ot hte poor, and indeed service to the poor would interfere with this organic process. Some social Darwinists also applied this theory to whole nations and races, explaining that powerful peoples were naturally endowed with gifts that allowed them to gain superiority over the others. This theory provided one of the popular justifications for U.S. imperial ventures like the Spanish-American war.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Black leader who assailed Booker T. Washington. After dertermined struggle, he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, the first of his race to achieve that goal. He demanded complete equality for blacks, socail as well as economic, and helped found teh National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Grover Cleveland

Cleveland was the democratic presidential candidate for the 1884 election. His republican opponent, James G. Blaine, was involved in several questionable deals , but Cleveland had an illegitimate child. Consequently, the election turned into a mudslinging contest. Cleveland won, becoming the first democratic president since Buchanan. He took few initiatives, but he was effective in dealing with excessive military pensions. He placated both North and South by appointing some former Confederates to office, but sticking mostly with Northerners.

land-grant colleges

Colleges and universitties created from allocations of public land through the Morrell Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887. These grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of the today's public universities derive from these grants.

Interstate Commerce Act

Congressional legislation that established the Interstae Commerce Commission, compelled railroads to publish standard rates, and prohibited revates and pools. Railroads quickly became adept at using the Act to achieve their own ends, but the Act gave the government an important means to regualte business.

Pendleton Act

Congressional legislation that estbalished the Civil Service Commision, which granted federal government jog=bs on the basis of examinations instead of political patronage, thus reigning in the spoils system.

Joseph Pultizer

Created the first modern, mass circulation newspaper. in 1883 he bought the New York World and tried to make it more demoratic and lively. avertised for donating money to the Statue of Liberty and they will have thier name put in the paper.

Thomas Alva Edison

Edison was dubbed the "Wizard of Menlo Park," New jersey, where he lived and established the first major industrial research laboratory. Edison was not only an ingenious inventor; he also figured out how to apply the principles of mass production to his inventions. Phonographs, telephiones, telegraphs, incandescent electric lighting, fluoroscopes, kinetoscopes, and many more technological wonders spread throughout the world following their development in Edison's lab.

Tom Watson

Elected to the U.S congress, became known as a champion of Georgia's farmers. He was a Populist leader who supported interracial unity, but turned more radical.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Federal legislation that prohibited most further Chinese immigration to the United States. This was the first major legal restriction on immigration in U.S. history.

Alexander Graham Bell

Former teacher of the deaf. He was also an American inventor who was responsible for developing the telephone. This greatly improved communications in the country and created an entire new industry.

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Founded in 1874, this organization advocated for teh prohibition of alcohol, using women's supposedly greater purity and morality as a rallying point. Advocateds of prohibition in the United States found common cause with activists elsewhere, especially in Britain, and in the 1880s they founded the World Women's Christian Temperance Union, which sent missionaries around the world to spread the gospel of temperance.

Mark Twain

He was America's most popular author, but also renowned platform lecturer. He lived from 1835 to 1910. Used "romantic" type literature with comedy to entertain his audiences. In 1873 along with the help of Charles Dudley Warner he wrote The Gilded Age. This is why the time period is called the "Gilded Age". The greatest contribution he made to American literature was the way he captured the frontier realism and humor through the dialect his characters use.

Charles Darwin

He was a British scientist who was most famous for developing his Theory of Evolution. Besides making a great milestone in the world of science, his theory had an effect on society, which created Social Darwinism.

John Dewey

He was a philosopher who believed in "learning by doing" which formed the foundation of progressive education. He believed that the teachers' goal should be "education for life and that the workbench is just as important as the blackboard."

Horatio Alger

He was a writer of juvenile fiction. His stories held the theme of rags to riches. In his books, youth would win fame by having virtues of honesty, diligence, and perseverance. His more than 100 novels had a large affect on the youth of that time period because they emphasized merit rather than success as a way of determining social status.

Samuel Gompers

He was the creator of the American Federation of Labor. He was an organizer of a conservative craft-union group and advocate of more wages for skilled workers.

World's Columbian Expostition

Held in Chicago, Americans saw this World's fair as their opportunity to claim a place among the world's most "civilized" societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe. The Fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a min-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time. For many, this was the high point of the "City Beautiful" movement.

New Immigrants

Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them. These new immigrants congregated in ethnic urban neighborhooods, where they worried many native-born Ameicans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of whom introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate.

Marcus Alonzo Hanna

Iron tycoon from Ohio who helped to elect McKinley with his strong endorsement, "I love McKinley". Served as kingmaker and campaign manager, trying to make the focus of the election the tariff.

Standard Oil Company

John D. Rockefeller's company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age. By 1877 Standard Oil controlled 95% of the oul refineries in teh U.S. It was also one of the first multinational corporations, and at times distributed more than half of the company's kerosene production outside the U.S. By the turn of the century it had becoome a target for trust-busting reformers, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to break up into several dozen smaller companies.

settlement houses

Many run by middle-class native-born women, settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States. Many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed life-long passions for social activism in the settlement houses. Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald's henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent.

Liberal Protestants

Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible represented scientific or historical truth. Many Liberal Protestants became active in the "social gospel" and other reform movements of the era.

Populists

Officially known as the People's party, the Populists represented Westerners and Southerners who believed that U.S. economic policy inappropiately favored Eastern businessmen instead of the nation's farmers. Their proposals included nationalizing the railroads, creeping a graduated income tax, and most significantly the unlimited coinage of silver.

Booker T. Washington

Prominent black American, born into slavery, who believed that racism would end once blacks acquired useful labor skills and proved their economic value to society, was head of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881. His book "Up from Slavery."

"waiving the bloddy shirt"

Republicans whipped up enthusiam for grant during his election, by reviving gory memories of the Civil War. This became for the first time a prominent feature of a presidential campaign

Andrew Carnegie

Scottish immigrant who organized a vast new industry on the principle pf vertical intergration. Creator of Carnegie Steel that gets bought out by banker J.P. Morgan and renamed U.S. Steel.

Jane Adams

Social reformer who worked to improve the lives of the working class. In 1889 she founded Hull House in Chicago, the first private social welfare agency in the U.S., to assist the poor, combat juvenile delinquency and help immigrants learn to speak English.

Thomas B. Reed

Speaker of the House in 1890. Sometimes reffered to as "Czar" Reed, he served for six years, dramatically increasing the power of the office in line with his dictum that "the best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch." He dominated the "Billion-Dollar" Congress.

Carrie Champman Catt

Spoke powerfully in favor of suffrage after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had died and worked as a principle and a reporter and later became the head of the National Women's Suffrage Association.

Jim Crow

System of racial segregation in the American South from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century. Based on the concept of "seperate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites, the Jim Crow system sought to prevent racial mixing in public, including restaurants, movie theatres, and public transportation. An informal system, it was generally perpetuated by custom, violence, and intimidation.

Compromise of 1877

The agreement that finally resolved the 1876 election and officially ended Reconstruction. In exchange for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, winning the presidency, hayes agreed to withdraw the last of the federal troops from the former Confederate states. This deal effectiviely completed the southern return to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics.

mechanization of agriculture

The development of engine-driven machines, like the combine, which helped to dramatically increase the productivity of land in the 1870s and 1880s. This process contributed to the consolidation of agricultural business that drove many family farms out of existance.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

The last piece of federal civil rights legislation until the 1950s, the law promised blacks equal access to public accomodations and banned racism in jury selection, but the Act provided no means of enforcement and was therefore ineffective. In 1883, the supreme Court declared most of the Act unconstitutional.

interlocking directorates

The practice of having executives or directors from one company serve on teh Board of Directors of another company. J.P. Morgan introduced this practice to eliminate banking competition in the late 1890s.

vertical integration

The practice perfected by Andrew Carnegie of controlling every step of the industrial production process in order to increase efficiency and limit competition.

horizontal integration

The practice perfected by John D. Rockefeller of dominating a particular phase of the production processes in order ro monopolize a market, often by forming trusts and alliances with competitors.

Knights of Labor

The second national labor organization, organized in 1869 as a secret society and opened for public membership in 1881. The Knights were known for their efforts to organize all workers, regardless of skill level, gender, or race. After teh mid-1880s their membership declined for a variety of reasons, including the Knights' participation in violent strikes and discord between skilled and unskilled members.

reservation system

The system that allotted land with designated boundaries to Native American tribes in teh west, beginning in the 1850s and ending with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Within these reservations, most land was used communally, rather than owned individually. The U.S. government encouraged and sometimes violently coerced Native Americans to stay on the reservations at all times.

William McKinley

The twenty-fifth President of the United States, and the last veteran of the Civil War to be elected. By the 1880s, this Ohio native was a nationally known Republican leader; his signature issue was high tariffs on imports as a formula for prosperity, as typified by his McKinley Tariff of 1890. As the Republican candidate in the 1896 presidential election, he upheld the gold standard, and promoted pluralism among ethnic groups.

William Jennings Bryan

This Democratic candidate ran for president most famously in 1896 (and again in 1900). His goal of "free silver" (unlimited coinage of silver) won him the support of the Populist Party. Though a gifted orator, he lost the election to Republican William McKinley. He ran again for president and lost in 1900.

National Labor Union

This first national labor organization in U.S. history was founded in 1866 and gained 600,000 members from many parts fo the workforce, although it limited the participation of Chinese, women, and blacks. The organization devoted much of its energy to fighting for an eight-hour workday before it dissolved in 1872.

William Randolph Hearst

United States newspaper publisher whose introduction of large headlines and sensational reporting changed American journalism (1863-1951). A leading newspaperman of his times, he ran The New York Journal and helped create and propagate "yellow (sensationalist) journalism."

Chester Arthur

Vice President of Garfield from New York. After the death of Garfield, Arthur took over asmany underestimated, but he suprised many politics by prosecuting several fraud cases and giving his former Stalwart pals the cold shoulder. His display of integretiy offended many powerful Republicans. His ungrateful party turned him out to pasture and he died in 1886.