Covers key events preceding the Progressive Era, including the passage of the Dawes Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, as well as the emergence of the Ghost Dance movement, the massacre at Wounded Knee, the rise of the Pinkerton Agency, and the Homestead Strike.

1. A SURVEY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY
Unit 3: Reconstruction and Urbanization
Part 8: Taking On the Trusts

2. GROVER
CLEVELAND
• In 1884, Grover Cleveland
became the first Democratic
President in twenty-five years.
He was one of the so-called
‘Bourbon Democrats,’ fiscally
conservative, pro-business, and
opposed to organized labor.
• He won with the support of the
‘Mugwumps,’ a faction of the
Republican Party that shared his
economic principles.
• The result was a reduction in the
tariff, a customs duty designed
to protect American jobs by
making imported products more
expensive than domestic ones.

3. NATIVISM REMAINS
IN FORCE
Irish immigration to the United
States remained a problem for
many Americans. In 1887, the
American Protective Association
was founded as a secret society of
anti-Catholic Protestants. Multiple
branches of the society opened
across the country, connecting
people who all advocated placing a
limit on immigration from Europe.

4. NATIVE AMERICANS
ARE INDIVIDUALIZED
Also in 1887, the passage of the
Dawes Act revolutionized relations
between the American government
and Native Americans. Previously,
the government dealt only with
entire tribes, not individual Indians.
The Dawes Act, however, divided
up Indian land for sale to individual
Indians, fracturing tribal loyalties to
advance personal landownership.

5. BENJAMIN
HARRISON
• In 1888, Grover Cleveland lost
his bid for re-election to the
Presidency. He was succeeded
by Benjamin Harrison, a
Republican who undid much of
his work on the tariff issue.
• Harrison signed into law the
McKinley Tariff, named after the
House Representative, William
McKinley, who drafted it. The
tariff raised customs duties on
all imports to almost fifty per
cent of their sale price,
specifically in order to protect
American products and
therefore American jobs.

6. THE RAILROAD
OCTOPUS
• By the 1870s, four Californian
railroad barons — Leland
Stanford, Collis Huntington,
Charles Crocker, and Mark
Hopkins — controlled a
monopoly on the railroad lines
connecting San Francisco to
the rest of California.
• This gave them a stranglehold
on the movement of Californian
freight, and therefore the prices
paid by manufacturers to get
their products out of railroad
warehouses. Their monopoly
came to be known as ‘the
Railroad Octopus.’

7. THE SHERMAN
ANTI-TRUST ACT
• In 1890, rising concerns about
‘trusts’ like the one owned by
John D. Rockefeller, and
concerns about monopolies in
general, led to the passage of
the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
• Trusts were corporations that
owned stock in their market
competitors and therefore
possessed power over them.
• Monopolies are corporations
that economically intimidate
and/or overwhelm their market
competitors, thus dominating a
single market or industry.

8. THE SHERMAN
ANTI-TRUST ACT
• The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was
direct in putting an end to trusts
and monopolies.
• Section 1: “Every contract,
combination in the form of trust
or... conspiracy, in restraint of
trade or commerce among the...
States, or with foreign nations,
is declared to be illegal.”
• Section 2: “Every person who
shall monopolize, or attempt to
monopolize... any part of the
trade or commerce among the...
States, or with foreign nations,
[is] deemed guilty of a felony.”

9. THE SHERMAN
ANTI-TRUST ACT
• The intention of the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act was to break up
trusts and monopolies such as
the Railroad Octopus and
Standard Oil. This would allow
competitive behavior to enter
the freight and oil industries,
forcing prices to drop for the
benefit of consumers.
• The business barons were not
deterred, however. Just two
years later, Andrew Carnegie
founded Carnegie Steel and
J.P. Morgan founded the
General Electric Company...

10. THE GHOST DANCE
MOVEMENT
• In 1889, the Nevada Paiute
began practicing a new form of
ceremonial ‘circle dance’ called
Nanissáanah, or ‘Ghost Dance.’
• The dance was taught by the
Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka,
who prophesied a peaceful end
to white settlers’ expansion into
Native American lands.
• Its purpose was to reunite the
living with the dead. Wovoka
prophesied that the white man
would vanish from the earth
and the spirits of the Indians’
ancestors would return.

11. THE GHOST DANCE
MOVEMENT
• Over the next twelve months,
the Ghost Dance combined
with existing Native American
religious practices and was
adopted by various tribes
throughout the American West.
• By the time the Ghost Dance
was adopted by the Lakota
Sioux, it had become
associated with the promise of
radical societal transformation
and had begun to serve as a
signifier of peaceful resistance
to white authority.

12. THE MASSACRE AT
WOUNDED KNEE
• In 1890, near Wounded Knee
Creek in present-day South
Dakota, more than 150 Lakota
Sioux were massacred by the
remnants of Custer’s Seventh
Cavalry and 50 were injured.
• The U.S. Army was attempting to
relocate the Lakota Sioux under
the provisions of the Dawes Act,
and the Ghost Dance was their
mode of protest and resistance.
• The government authorities who
witnessed large numbers of
Lakota Sioux performing the
Ghost Dance worried that it was
a prelude to an attack.

13. THE MASSACRE AT
WOUNDED KNEE
• On December 15, 1890, agents
were sent to arrest Chief Sitting
Bull in order to avoid violence.
• Crowds of Lakota Sioux
gathered around Sitting Bull to
prevent his arrest. Shots were
fired, and government officials
as well as Sitting Bull himself
were killed in a gunfight.
• Two hundred members of the
crowd fled and joined another
Lakota Sioux chief, Spotted Elk,
on a nearby reservation.

14. THE MASSACRE AT
WOUNDED KNEE
• On December 28, Spotted Elk,
now with about 350 followers,
encountered 500 soldiers in the
Seventh Cavalry, five miles away
from Wounded Knee Creek.
• The Seventh Cavalry demanded
that Spotted Elk’s followers
surrender their weapons and
accompany them to Wounded
Knee. The Indians went with the
soldiers but kept their weapons.
• At dawn the next day, soldiers
forcibly took the Indians’ weapons.
When a deaf man, Black Coyote,
did not heed orders to give up his
gun, conflict broke out.

15. THE PINKERTON AGENCY
In 1850, a Chicago
detective named Allan
Pinkerton founded
America’s first private
detective agency. The
Pinkerton Agency
achieved national fame in
late 1860 when it claimed
to have broken up a
conspiracy to assassinate
Abraham Lincoln.
By 1890, the Pinkerton
Agency employed more
secret agents than there
were soldiers employed
by the United States
Army. As a private law
enforcement agency,
companies facing labor
troubles paid Pinkerton
men to resolve disputes
by force or intimidation.

16. THE HOMESTEAD
STRIKE
• On June 30, 1892, workers at the
Homestead Steel Works in
Homestead, Pennsylvania,
organized a strike.
• The steel mill was owned by
Andrew Carnegie, who wanted to
increase production and output
by breaking the union of which
most of the workers at the mill
were members.
• On June 28 and June 29, in
response to failures of collective
bargaining agreements between
the management and the
workers, the management locked
the workers out of the mill.

17. THE HOMESTEAD
STRIKE
• In response to the lockout, the
members of the Amalgamated
Association (AA) stopped work
and determined not to let the
mill re-open, even if Carnegie
employed new men who did
not belong to any unions.
• The management plan was to
re-open the mill on July 6 with
non-union workers. The mill
was surrounded by striking
workers who stopped anyone
from accessing it.

18. THE HOMESTEAD
STRIKE
• On the night of July 5, the mill
management contracted three
hundred heavily armed
Pinkerton men to assemble on
a barge downriver of the mill
and then proceed upriver.
• The Pinkertons attempted to
disembark at the mill and break
the strike by force, but the
strikers fended them off.
• By the afternoon of July 6, the
strikers had been joined by
enough supporters to number
5,000, easily overwhelming the
Pinkertons despite their arms.

19. A SURVEY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY
Unit 3: Reconstruction and Urbanization
Part 8: Taking On the Trusts