2. Business and Labor in the Industrial
Age
• America had originally started out as a fledgling manufacturing nation
before the Civil War and was the leading national power by 1900 with
manufacturing output exceeding the combined total of Great Britain,
Germany and France.
• America’s surge to industrial might was aided by natural resources (which
America had great amounts of), investment capital from Europe that
underwrote more than a third of American manufacturing, cheap labor of
immigrants, and a huge domestic market swelled by city dwellers’
demands for consumer goods.
• Many business writers and historians talked about how dominating the
United States was to a very significant notice and had industries
throughout the world, in different parts of the world.
• Example of US industrial power – JP Morgan’s US Steel capitalized at 1.4
billion dollars – three times bigger than the nation’s annual budget.
• Industrialism really expanded during this time in the United States of
America
3. Business and Labor in the Industrial
Age
• 17% of America’s population went to a world’s fair held in
Philadelphia in 1876 to celebrate a hundred years of progress in the
United States at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition to view the
inventions .
• As the nineteenth century progressed – industrial companies
started to become corporations more and more as permitted by
general incorporation laws in most states (versus proprietorships
and partnerships).
• Capital-intensive businesses, and form of organizations were
considered attractive to future would-be industrialists.
• 1850s – most enterprises were cotton textile mills. The steel
corporation wouldn’t come along until 1901 which would be the
biggest at the time, and the first billion-dollar company with over
one-hundred thousand workers which increased to 440,000 by
1929.
