A New Spirit of Reform

The Gilded Age  The American worker hidden under the powerful few  Reform, or change needed – were the industries corrupt?

Railroad Credit Scandal  Union Pacific buys credit company  Gives contracts from government to Union Pacific  Overpaid 50 million – stocks look good?  Led to investigation

President Grant  Corruption  Railroad credit scandal  Cheated American Indians  Illegal payments from whiskey companies to avoid paying taxes.  People were making millions off the government

Political Corruption ….. Helped immigrates for votes  Boss Tweed – newspaper bribe

Election of 1884-Cleveland wins  Interstate Commerce Act Forced Railroad crossing state lines to charge customers the same fees for the same service.  C. Vanderbilt made a Fortune from building railroads. Great Northern Railroad System – James Hill- “The Empire builder

Reform was also needed with American workers  Labor Unions established:  Strikers – stop working to get better pay or conditions  Two groups formed  AFL  Nobel Order of Knights

Two Different Unions:  AFL : American Federation of Labor -Skilled workers -peaceful bargaining (talks)  Knights of Labor  Open to all workers  Improve pay and work conditions  Strikes and boycotts  Ends with a bomb

Texas Longhorns; 400 ranches -Ranching big business -Cattle trails and railroads developed. Meatpacking developed by Armour and Swift

Andrew Carnegie  poor, from Scotland came over at 12 worked on railroads  Started and invested in Carnegie Steel Co  Became a steel tycoon; railroads, bridges, buildings  Sold in 1901 to J P Morgan for 480 million; libraries, schools, medical research

Tech Boom– “Menlo Park wizard”  Thomas Edison – perfects light bulb, brings electricity to New York, invents many things….like the phonograph  Alexander Gram Bell – invents telephone

Other inventions:  George Eastman – The Kodak camera!  Elisha Otis – the elevator!  Edwin Drake – strikes oil in Titusville!  Ford – gas engine and creates the assembly line!

Vocabulary:  Selling stock – way for a corporation to make money  Entrepreneur – person who starts and organizes a business  Monopoly – a corporation that has little competition

Corporations  Stockholders – are those who buy shares in a company. The company is led by Board of Directors  Trusts – formed to gain dominance with several companies hence creating monopoly  To control the markets, business bought out their competition – horizontal combination

John D Rockefeller - started Standard Oil -vertical integration -owned 90% of pipelines refined 84% of the oil

Vertical Integration  Control all industries required for production from raw material to the final delivery.  Raw Material  Factory production  Railroad for delivery

Manufacturing replaces agriculture  Suspension bridges ----Brooklyn bridge  Refineries for crude oil---Rockefeller  Railroads---Cornelius Vanderbilt  Meat packing-----Amour and Gustavo Swift  Steel for sky scrappers  US has tremendous natural resources- coal, iron, petroleum  Downside—factories caused pollution. 