PowerPoint presentation on the Gilded Age for a US History class

1. The Gilded Age:Industry, Urbanization, and the West

3. Shift: consumer to capital goods

4. RRs crucial: 320,000 miles by 1900

6. Huge domestic demand for goods

7. Abundant Capital – U.S. & European

8. Labor saving technologies

9. Talented managers and entrepreneurs

10. Major Inventions: communications, electricity

12. Shift from idealism to cynicism

13. Era of “forgettable presidents”

16. Hands Off vs. Helping Hands

17. Pro-business government

18. Capitalist Work Ethic

20. The Steel Industry: Carnegie Steel; U.S. Steel (J. P. Morgan)

21. J. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil

24. Industrial warfare: strikes, lockouts, blacklists, yellow-dog contracts, private guards & state militias

27. Haymarket bombing (1886)

28. Homestead Strike (1892)

29. Pullman Strike (1894)

31. displacement, overcrowding, persecution

32. freedom, econ. opportunities, cheap transport

33. 1840s to 1880s: NW Europe: Protestants, literate & skilled, meshed well with natives (“Old Immigrants”)

34. 1890s to 1914: SE Europe: mostly Catholic, Orthodox & Jewish, illiterate , poor, from autocratic countries (“New Immigrants”) – dangerous work in factories

35. Strong Anti-Immigrant movement

36. First legal restrictions, more rigorous standards

38. Skyscrapers: spread upward, technology transformed skylines (steel skeletons, elevators, central heating)

39. Streetcar cities: spread outward from commercial center

40. Wealthy left central business districts & poor moved in

41. Landlords divided up older housing

42. New tenements overcrowded, dirty, disease-y

43. Distinct ethnic neighborhoods

45. Post-Reconstruction South Economic Development: new industries (lumber, tobacco, cotton mills) & cheap, non-union labor Most profits went North to investors High Poverty Rates: most southerners were sharecropping farmers, barely got by Agricultural Development: increased productivity re: cotton, diversification of crops Farmers’ Southern Alliance (1 million); Colored Farmers’ National Alliance (250,000) -- lack of unity undercut effectiveness

46. Segregation and Loss of Civil Rights “Redeemers” enacted segregation Used poor whites’ racial fears to deflect common economic concerns Supreme Court: Congress can’t prohibit racial discrimination by private citizens, including railroads, hotels… Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) “separate but equal” ushers in the Jim Crow era Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, property requirements, poll taxes used to disfranchise blacks or liberal whites Blacks couldn’t serve on juries, harsher punishments, shut out of good jobs Waves of lynching & other forms of terror

47. Black Responses Migrate: western U.S.; Africa (Bishop Henry Turner, International Migration Society 1894) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, newspaper writer and editor fought against lynching & Jim Crow, death threats forced her to flee to North Booker T. Washington: economic uplift, industrial, technical ed., no agitation (Tuskegee Inst. 1881) W.E.B. Du Bois: end segregation, equal civil rights, higher ed., political activism