1. The Rise of Big Business
Innovators in Enterprise:
Gustavus Swift - assembly line – later will be adopted by Henry Ford for automobiles
Vertical integration - company controls all aspects of production from beginning to end
Predatory pricing - lowering prices to eliminate competitors
Standard Oil and the Rise of Trusts:
John Rockefeller used horizontal integration
Horizontal integration - merge competitor companies with his own to gain a market advantage – in effect, creating MONOPOLIES
Trust - small group of individuals hold stock from competing firms, thus having control over all of them
Financier JP Morgan bought Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel, created first $1 billion company

2. The Rise of Big Business Cont.
Assessing the Industrialists:
Robber Barons v. Industrial Statesmen
Were the entrepreneurs of the time just ruthless predators who took advantage of the weak, or were they helping to move the American economy and capitalism forward?
A National Consumer Culture:
Department stores like Macy’s were able to cut prices significantly
Home-order catalogs helped those living in rural areas to be able to shop for products not physically available where they lived
Sears and Montgomery Ward created the first nationwide catalogues
Advertisements began to appear, including on outdoor billboard

3. The Rise of Big Business Cont.
The Corporate Workplace
White-collar workers - professional positions; Blue-collar workers - manual labor
New middle managers emerged - in charge of goods and labor (director of sales, director of personnel, director of purchasing, human resources director etc….)
Jobs as salesmen increased to try to sell the new products we were creating
Women in the Corporate Office
Clerking and secretarial opportunities for women increased and paid better than other domestic jobs
4 million women worked by 1900

4. Deskilling of labor - assembly line and mass production workers required no education or advanced skills
The era of the craftsman were being replaced by an era of machine created products
Scientific Management System - Frederick Taylor (Taylorism)
Used to increase production efficiency – what is the fastest way to create a product. “A penny saved on the production process for each item can yield massive profits for a company that makes thousands of items each year.”
Health Hazards and Pollution
Dangerous conditions were in many industries - RR 1 in 20 deaths or disabilities, 2,000 coalminers died per year
Unskilled Labor and Discrimination – would later result in the need to create labor unions.
Men and unions discriminated against women - should stay at home
1 in 5 children under 16 worked outside the home
African Americans were often paid the least amount, women worked in mostly domestic service roles

5. Immigrants, East and West
Immigrants were the ideal labor supply - abundant, worked for little $, hard to unionize
Newcomers from Europe
Post-1892, many immigrants came through Ellis Island
“New Immigrants” were mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe (Italy, Greece, Russia, etc.) - 3 million were Jews
Many of these immigrants took low-paying jobs on the East Coast
Asian Americans and Exclusion
Chinese immigrants faced extreme prejudice and violence out West many of those immigrants came into American through Angel Island
Worked in restaurants and laundries, as they were the only jobs available
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) - barred Chinese from coming to US, repealed in 1943