1. The Industrial Revolution
Expansion of Big Business & Industry

2. Causes of the Revolution
Railroad boom
Technological innovations
Cheap labor
Abundance of raw materials in the U.S.
Laissez-faire economic policy

3. The Railroads

4. Railroad Construction Boom 1870s – 1900s
1865 – 35,000 miles of track → 1900 – 193,000 miles

5. Railroad Wealth
Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt – owner, NY Central RR (1867), 4,500 miles of track connecting NYC to the Midwest

6. Steel

7. Bessemer Process
Impurities taken out of iron – produces STEEL

8. Andrew Carnegie Carnegie Steel One of world’s top producers of steel
Sold to JP Morgan in 1901, became US Steel

9. Big Business Strategies
Horizontal integration
Buying out the competing businesses
Vertical integration
Buying the various levels of production from resource to finished product

10. Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth”
Wealthy should act as “trustees” for their “poorer brethren.”
Andrew Carnegie

11. The Oil Industry

12. Edwin Drake – steam powered oil drill Titusville, Pennsylvania (1859)
Oil Drilling
Edwin Drake – steam powered oil drill
Titusville, Pennsylvania (1859)

13. John D. Rockefeller Standard Oil Company 1870 – 3% of US oil

14. Standard Oil Trust
Rockefeller build his empire under the name of the “trust”
Trust = Monopoly

15. Robber Barons
Nickname given to the industrial elite of the late 1800s because of their questionable business practices.
Gained wealth at the expense of workers and other businesses
Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Jay Gould, Carnegie

16. Inequality in Society Social Darwinism - “might makes right”
Society’s response to wealth and success
Survival of the fittest

17. Government Intervention
Interstate Commerce Act (1887)
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)
Regulation of freight rates (railroads)
Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)
A trust = a monopoly, therefore it’s illegal
Government attempt to fight big business