1. Business After 1865

2. Industrialization changed how businesses were run.
Business leaders combined funds and resources.
Investors formed corporations that protected them from losing more than their original investment.
Aided by railroads and the telegraph, corporations could operate in different regions.

3. Corporations worked to maximize profits by
paying workers low wages.
paying lower prices for raw materials.
supporting research labs. 3

4. Competitors forced out of business
Corporations used strategies to eliminate competition and decrease costs.
monopolies
cartels
Competitors forced out of business
Better control of production, reduced costs
horizontal integration
vertical integration 4

5. Tycoons of the Late 1800s John D. Rockefeller Oil Andrew Carnegie
Business leader
Industry
John D. Rockefeller
Oil
Andrew Carnegie
Steel
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Railroads

6. Were the tycoons “robber barons” who swindled the poor and drove small businesses under . . .
or “captains of industry” who served the nation and lowered the prices of goods?

7. Biltmore Estate-Owned by the Vanderbilt Family
The Largest House in America-178,000 Square Feet!

8. The Breakers
A “Small Cottage” Owned by the Vanderbilts

9. Andrew Carnegie’s Home

14. A Tenement House

16. People began to wonder—Is big business bad for small businesses?16

17. Or is big business good for the nation?
provides jobs
allows for product innovations
financially supports universities, libraries, and museums

18. Theory of Survival of the Fittest is Used to Defend Big Business
Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution of species
applied to American capitalism
becomes Social Darwinism
This is the belief that wealth was a measure of a person’s value and those who had wealth were the most “fit.”

19. Social Darwinists believed government should stay out of private business and thought it was wrong to use public funds to assist the poor.
Americans who worried about the methods of industrialists called for federal regulation of business practices. 19

20. The ICC and the Sherman Antitrust Act began a trend toward government limits on corporate power.
Interstate Commerce Commission
oversaw railroad operations
Sherman Antitrust Act
Passed by the Senate in 1890
Outlawed trusts that operated “in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states”