THE SHAPING OF AMERICA: The Gilded Age (1890-1920)
Jobs and Conditions: The working conditions in the Gilded Age were poor. The wages were low. Typically ranging from 400-500$ when the salary needed for a decent living was 600$. The working conditions were dangerous as well. The death rate for working on the railroad was 1 in 399 while the injury rate stood at 1 in 26. There were pollutants as well.
Railroad Strike of 1877:
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country's first major rail strike and witnessed the first general strike in the nation's history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country's commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike would be broken within a few weeks, but it helped set the stage for later violence in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages. The cutbacks prompted strikes and violence with lasting consequences. In May the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation's largest railroad company, cut wages by 10 percent and then, in June, by another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit. On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by 10 percent. It also slashed the workweek to just two or three days.
LINK: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3189
Steel Mill Factory Workers:
One of the largest employers, the steel mills, often demanded a seven-day workweek. Seamstresses, like factory workers in most industries, worked 12 or more hours a day, six days a week. Employees were not entitled to vacation, sick leave, unemployment compensation, or reimbursement for injuries suffered on the job. Yet injuries were common. In dirty, poorly ventilated factories, workers had to perform repetitive, mind-dulling tasks, sometimes with dangerous or faulty equipment.
In 1882, an average of 675 laborers were killed in work-related accidents each week. In addition, wages were so low that most families could not survive unless everyone held a job. Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the number of women working for wages doubled, from 4 million to more than 8 million. Twenty percent of the boys and 10 percent of the girls under age 15—some as young as five years old—also held full-time jobs. With little time or energy left for school, child laborers forfeited their futures to help their families make ends meet.
LINK: https://sites.google.com/site/perkinsapushlaborunions/home/a-working-conditions-during-the-gilded-age
The Knights of Labor:
The Knights of Labor was a union founded in 1869. The Knights pressed for the eight-hour work day for laborers, and embraced a vision of a society in which workers, not capitalists, would own the industries in which they labored. The Knights also sought to end child labor and convict labor.
The Knights of Labor was an exceptionally progressive organization for its day. Most earlier unions restricted membership to skilled laborers (those with specialized training in a craft) and to white men. Led by Terence V. Powderly, the Knights welcomed unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers into their ranks. Immigrants, African Americans and women were also welcome as members. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Knights of Labor found support among coalminers in Pennsylvania, and among railroad workers following a successful 1885 strike against the Wabash Railroad.
Link: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-6/apush-gilded-age/a/the-knights-of-labor
Homestead Strike:
The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. His plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, stepped up production demands, and when the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick began locking the workers out of the plant. On July 2 all were discharged. The union, limited to skilled tradesmen, represented less than one-fifth of the thirty-eight hundred workers at the plant, but the rest voted overwhelmingly to join the strike. An advisory committee was formed, which directed the strike and soon took over the company town as well. Frick sent for three hundred Pinkerton guards, but when they arrived by barge on July 6 they were met by ten thousand strikers, many of them armed. After an all-day battle, the Pinkertons surrendered and were forced to run a gauntlet through the crowd. In all, nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed; many strikers and most of the remaining Pinkertons were injured, some seriously. The sheriff, unable to recruit local residents against the strikers, appealed to Governor William Stone for support; eight thousand militia arrived on July 12. Gradually, under militia protection, strikebreakers got the plant running again. Frick’s intransigence had won sympathy for the strikers, but an attempt on his life by anarchist Alexander Berkman on July 23 caused most of it to evaporate. Meanwhile, the corporation had more than a hundred strikers arrested, some of them for murder; though most were finally released, each case consumed much of the union’s time, money, and energy. The strike lost momentum and ended on November 20, 1892. With the Amalgamated Association virtually destroyed, Carnegie Steel moved quickly to institute longer hours and lower wages. The Homestead strike inspired many workers, but it also underscored how difficult it was for any union to prevail against the combined power of the corporation and the government
LINK: http://www.history.com/topics/homestead-strike
Invention:
Late 19th century inventions shape American technology. Many things greatly used today were invented in the Gilded Age. Electricity growing increasingly popular by 1900.
Alexander Graham Bell's Invention of the Telephone:
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), the Scottish-born American scientist best known as the inventor of the telephone, worked at a school for the deaf while attempting to invent a machine that would transmit sound by electricity. Bell was granted the first official patent for his telephone in March 1876, though he would later face years of legal challenges to his claim that he was its sole inventor, resulting in one of history’s longest patent battles.
LINK: http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/alexander-graham-bell
Invention of the first Phonograph:
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. While other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edison's phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound. His phonograph originally recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet wrapped around a rotating cylinder. A stylus responding to sound vibrations produced an up and down or hill-and-dale groove in the foil. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders, and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a "zig zag" groove around the record.
LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph
Invention of Coca-Cola:
In the first year of its invention, Coca-Cola only sold 25 gallons of syrup, enough for just a few hundred glasses. In 1886, the advertisements for Coca-Cola featured a pretty, well-dressed girl drinking Coca-Cola with the caption or idea, "Drink Coca-Cola". At its inception, Coca-Cola had to convince you that it was what you wanted to drink. Part of the way to do this, especially in a world dominated by men, was to convince them using a woman's beauty. But by 1907, Asa Griggs Candler had made Coca-Cola a country-wide phenomenon. The 1907 advertisement is a well-dressed man drinking the last few drops of Coca-Cola from a glass with the caption "Sold Everywhere." Now that everyone knew what Coca-Cola was, the emphasis in advertising shifts from enticing people to try the new product, especially using the seduction of a woman, to reassuring people. Reassuring them that Coca-Cola is indeed what they want to drink because it is the best, as proven by the successful look of the man drinking it. Pemberton, a well-known pharmacist in Atlanta, had many concoctions brewed for various ailments. This one just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was eventually bought by another very successful pharmacist Asa Griggs Candler. Candler was the true business-man with the idea that Coca-Cola, as it came to be known, would be great. From 25 gallons the first year, to "Sold Everywhere" was a remarkable change and that was just the beginning. Coca-Cola would become the world's most recognized symbol and word.
LINK: https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/4999
Invention of the first lightbulb:
The first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. He experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. This is called an electric arc. Much later, in 1860, the English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) was determined to devise a practical, long-lasting electric light. He found that a carbon paper filament worked well, but burned up quickly. In 1878, he demonstrated his new electric lamps in Newcastle, England.
In 1877, the American Charles Francis Brush manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. These arcs were used on a few streets, in a few large office buildings, and even some stores. Electric lights were only used by a few people. The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.
LINK: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/edison/lightbulb.shtml
Transportation:
Transportation was changing throughout the Gilded Age. The appearance of new transportation such as railroads, trolleys, and the automobile shaped the future of America.
Benz Invention of the first Automobile:
The first stationary gasoline engine developed by Carl Benz was a one-cylinder two-stroke unit which ran for the first time on New Year’s Eve 1879. Benz had so much commercial success with this engine that he was able to devote more time to his dream of creating a lightweight car powered by a gasoline engine, in which the chassis and engine formed a single unit.
LINK: https://www.daimler.com/company/tradition/company-history/1885-1886.html
Trolley:
The cable car, the invention of Andrew Hallidie, was introduced in San Francisco on Sacramento and Clay streets in 1873. The cars were drawn by an endless cable running in a slot between the rails and passing over a steam-driven shaft in the powerhouse. The system was well-adapted for operation on steep hills and reached its most extensive use in San Francisco and Seattle. The cars operated more smoothly than did early electric cars, but they could run only at a constant speed; breaking or jamming of the cable tied up all the cars on the line. Beginning about 1900, most cable trackage was replaced by electric cars; but the Seattle lines lasted until the 1930s, and a portion of the San Francisco system continued in operation in the late 20th century.
LINK: https://www.britannica.com/technology/streetcar
Subway:
In the United States the first practical subway line was constructed in Boston between 1895 and 1897. It was 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and at first used trolley streetcars, or tramcars. Later, Boston acquired conventional subway trains. New York City opened the first section of what was to become the largest system in the world on Oct. 27, 1904. In Philadelphia, a subway system was opened in 1907, and Chicago’s system opened in 1943. Moscow constructed its original system in the 1930s.
LINK: https://www.britannica.com/technology/subway
Airplane:
Wilbur and Orville set to work trying to figure out how to design wings for flight. They observed that birds angled their wings for balance and control, and tried to emulate this, developing a concept called “wing warping.” When they added a moveable rudder, the Wright brothers found they had the magic formula-on December 17, 1903, they succeeded in flying the first free, controlled flight of a power-driven, heavier than air plane. Wilbur flew their plane for 59 seconds, at 852 feet, an extraordinary achievement.
LINK: http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/wright-brothers
Industrialization:
Industrialization was a big part of the Gilded Age. It affected almost everything. It brought large pools of labor and offered ideal conditions for rapid industrial growth.
Standard Oil Company:
John D Rockefeller, the owner of the Standard Oil Company, made a large impact on the booming of the oil industry. To create the Standard Oil company, Rockefeller first partnered with his older brother in Cleveland, Ohio and later moved the business into Pennsylvania. He was one of the first people to have a national company, making him a very wealthy man. In 1911 Standard oil was broken into 34 separate company's, and those company's accounted for more than 70 percent of the worlds petroleum resources.
LINK: https://infogr.am/oil-in-the-gilded-age
U.S Steel Corporation:
When founded in 1901, United States Steel Corporation was the largest business enterprise ever launched, with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion. Throughout the years, U. S. Steel responded to changing economic conditions and new market opportunities through diversification and periodic restructuring. Today, over a century after its founding, U. S. Steel remains the largest integrated steel producer headquartered in the United States. U. S. Steel had its origins in the dealings of some of America's most legendary businessmen, including Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Charles Schwab. However, its principal architect was Elbert H. Gary, who also became U. S. Steel's first chairman. At the turn of the century, a group headed by Gary and Morgan bought Carnegie's steel company and combined it with their holdings in the Federal Steel Company. These two companies became the nucleus of U. S. Steel, which also included American Steel & Wire Co., National Tube Company, American Tin Plate Co., American Steel Hoop Co., and American Sheet Steel Co. In its first full year of operation, U. S. Steel made 67 percent of all the steel produced in the United States.
LINK: https://www.ussteel.com/uss/portal/home/aboutus/history
Sewing Machine:
The sewing machine allowed clothing to become a mass produced item which increased the social acceptance of the sewing machine. Besides the commercial sewing machine, the household machine became very popular when it became electric. If you had electric in your home you could have a sewing machine and it was even easier and faster than the hand powered models. The sewing machine also helped other industries grow, for example the need for large quantities of thread for factory machines. Others benefited from sewing machines such as metal companies for needles and parts, varied machinists to repair the machines when needed, shipping companies got a lot more business because more products were being made.
LINK: http://sewingmachine.umwblogs.org/the-sewing-machine-its-impact-on-america/
HELPFUL LINKS :)
1.) http://www.ushistory.org/us/36.asp
2.) http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=9&smtid=1