The document discusses life in America during the Gilded Age from 1870-1890. Key points: 1) Rapid industrialization, fueled by new technologies like railroads, created great wealth for some but also poor living/working conditions for many immigrants in cities. 2) Business consolidation led to trusts and monopolies controlled by "robber barons." While some philanthropists aimed to improve society, inequality grew sharply. 3) As the West developed, Native Americans faced increasing conflict as the US took their lands to access resources, culminating in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.

1. Ch. 16:
The Gilded Age,
1870-1890

2. gild1
verb
past tense: gilded; past participle: gilded
1.cover thinly with gold.
2.give a specious or false brilliance to.
"they gild the facts until the truth all but
vanishes"

3. Part 1:The West

4. Questions to Answer in this Unit
• How did the railroad affect the American
West?
• What was the impact of this technological
change on Native Americans?
• How did Native Americans resist/fight
back?

5. Bottom Line:
The West in the Gilded Age
• Railroads made Western lands more desirable
by connecting them to markets.
• After completion of transcontinental rail in
1869, land rush to the West.
• U.S. govt. and military fight wars against Native
Americans; law used to dispossess Mexican
Americans
• Farming and mining boom favors corporations,
easterners and European immigrants

6. Second Industrial
Revolution• Rapid economic growth
• Promoted by federal
government
• High tariffs to protect
industry
• Land grants to railroads
• Army "removes"
Indians from western
land
Image: arizonaexperience.org

7. Industrial
Economy
• Factories, mining, railroads expand everywhere but
South
• 1880: majority of Americans in non-farming jobs
http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/exhibits/1857/after/rail1.htm

8. • Transcontinental Railroad completed 1869
The Railroad

9. • Environmental degradation: buffalo, lumber, etc.
• Social changes: urbanization, privatization, time
"Trail of the hide hunters." Buffalo lying dead in snow, 1872. 79-M-1B-4
The Railroad

11. • Rail labor and immigrants
• New industries in the SW

12. The Railroad Network, 1880
Source: Houghton Mifflin Company

13. • 1865-1890: 1,000
battles/attacks on
Indian settlements by
US Cavalry
• 1871: US government
renounces policy of
making treaties with
Native American
groups
• Legal battles in CA and
the SW - European
Americans force out
Mexican landowners
Westward
Expansion
Co. B~ 10th Infantry~, crossing Gila River in
buckboard wagons near San Carlos, Ariz. Terr., ca.
1885. 111-SC-89105. Source: archives.gov

14. 6 See, vast, trackless
spaces,
As in a dream, they change,
they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch
upon them,
They are now covered with
the foremost people, arts,
institutions known.
7 See projected, through
time,
For me, an audience
interminable.
With firm and regular step they
wend—they never
stop,
Successions of men,
Americanos, a hundred
millions,
One generation playing its part
and passing on,
And another generation
playing its part and passing
on in its turn,
With faces turned sideways or
backward toward me
to listen,
With eyes retrospective toward
me. Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (1855).
Source: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
published/LG/1860/poems/1

15. • The ideal:
opportunity to
better life; esp.
economically
• The real:
• beginning 1700s,
forced Indian
labor on CA
missions
• large companies
and landholders
used semi-free
and unfree labor
Mining crew drifting for gold below discovery point, Deadwood, Dak.
Terr. Bystanders pose for photographer S. J. Morrow, ca. 1876. 165-
FF-2F-10
Transformation
of the West

16. Farming in the Trans-
Mississippi West• Advertising to
attract farmers
• Hundreds of
thousands get land
from Homestead
Act; more buy
• MN, ND, SD, NE,
KS: population
explosion - 300,000
(1860) to 5 million
(1900)
• ND most diverse
state in the union
"In Line At The land Office, Perry, Sept. 23, 1893. 9 o'clock A.M.
waiting to file." 49-AR-32

17. Farming• Even family farms
produced cash
crops
• CA as future: large
farms, poor and
often immigrant
migrant laborers
• Mechanization and
chemical fertilizers
drive this
transformation
over time
"The Covered Wagon of the Great Western Migration.
1886 in Loup Valley, Nebr." A family poses with the wagon
in which they live and travel daily during their pursuit of a
homestead. 69-N-13606C

18. Source: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections

19. The Cowboy and
the Corporate West
• The ideal:The rugged
individual
• The real:
• Cowboy = low-paid
workers
• West becomes the
home of big
corporations: e.g.
mining in MI, CA, NV,
CO The Broncho Buster, 1895; revised 1909; this cast, by November 1910
Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909)
Bronze
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

20. The Subjugation
of the Plains
Indians
• Pre-Civil War migrants traded
with Indians
• Conflict bloodier at mid-
century, and wholesale attack
on Indian way of life after
Civil War
• Battle of Little Big Horn, 1876
= victory of Sioux and
Cheyenne
• But by 1890, Plains Indians
concentrated on reservations

23. Indian Reservations, ca. 1890
http://www.lib.ku.edu/MapsColl/mapstuff/Conference/indianres1890.jpg

24. The Dawes Act
• Dawes Act 1887:
• Indian land divided
into family plots
• Indian farmers = full
US citizens
• Rest of land
auctioned off to
whites
• Indians lost 86 of 138
million acres in 50
years

26. Wounded Knee• Ghost Dance 1890:
• religious
observances, singing
and dancing
• government troops
sent to reservations
• December 29, 1890:
Massacre at
Wounded Knee -
150-200 Indians,
mostly women and
children killed
"Big Foot, leader of the Sioux, captured at the
battle of Wounded Knee, S.D." Here he lies frozen
on the snow-covered battlefield where he died,
1890. 111-SC-82412.

27. Bottom Line:The Gilded Age in
the West
• The railroad changed the U.S. by connecting
the coasts, connecting raw materials to
urban markets:
• This made land and natural resources in the
West valuable…
• Which led the U.S. to make war on Native
American communities in order to take
over those resources.

28. Part 2:The City

29. Questions to answer in Part 2:
The City
• How did businesses change with
technological advances after the Civil War?
• What does robber baron mean? Why
would someone use this term?
• What is one way that people responded to
the problems of the new industrial cities?

30. Technology in the Gilded Age
-
Does technology make life
better?

31. e:http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/telephone-light-patents/

32. Bottom Line:
Cities in the Gilded Age
• Technological changes helped create
massive fortunes for a few
• Jobs created in cities - new growth in
Midwestern cities, esp. Chicago
• Largely immigrant workforce with relatively
little power, though they worked to change
this

33. Technical
Change and the
New Business
• National enterprise and the “trust”
• “pools” - divide markets, fix prices
• “trusts” - rival companies managed by
single director
• Giant companies: U.S. Steel = 1st billion-
dollar enterprise

34. New Industries
and the City
• Immigrants: In 1880, % of
foreign-born residents:
San Francisco, 45%;
Chicago, 42%; NewYork,
40% (vs. LA county today:
35.6% foreign-born)
• Young women from the
countryside
• Technology made large
population concentrations
possible From Leslie’s Weekly, Aug.
29,1895. Accessed via http://
docsteach.org/documents/

35. The New Rich
• Andrew Carnegie:“vertical
integration” in steel
• most technologically
advanced factories in the
world
• dictatorial control of
factories
• rich have social obligations

36. The New Rich
• “Robber barons” or “Knights of Industry”?
Carnegie: Between 1899 and
1917, provided nearly a million
dollars to help create 65 public
libraries in MN alone.
Rockefeller: founded the
University of Chicago

37. This poster highlights the famous homes that lined Euclid Avenue between East 12th and East 45th Streets from 1850-1910 Source: http://
www.clevelandhistorylessons.com/millionaires-row-poster.html.

38. The problem of our age is the administration of wealth, so
that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich
and poor in harmonious relationship. . . . The contrast
between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the
laborer with us today measures the change which has come
with civilization.
This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as
highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress of
the race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that
is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the
refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be
so.... A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous to both-
not the least so to him who serves-and would sweep away
civilization with it....
Andrew Carnegie,“Wealth,” North American Review (1889).
Accessed via http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.asp

39. What would Ira
Steward (p. 491) have
to say to Carnegie?

40. Responses to
Industrialization
• Reformism and the Social
Gospel
• Middle-class reformers -
books about social inequality
• Protestant clergy - reform
churches:
• expand appeal among poor
in cities
• respond better to social
problems
Walter Rauschenbusch
Image: spider.georgetown.edu

41. Jacob Riis

42. Jacob A. Riis,“Dens of Death,” 1872.
Museum of the City of NewYork, accessed via ARTstor.

43. Jacob A. Riis,“In sleeping quarters -
Rivington Street Dump,” ca. 1890.
Museum of the City of NewYork, accesed via ARTstor

44. Jacob A. Riis,“Home of an Italian Ragpicker,”
1888-1889.
Museum of the City of NewYork, accesed via ARTstor

45. Responses to
Industrialization
• Unionism:The Knights of
Labor
• unskilled AND skilled
workers
• blacks AND whites (but
not Asians)
• women AND men
• 1886: 800,000 members (its
highest)

46. • Chicago, May 1, 1886: 40,000
strikers in Chicago strike for
the day in support of 8-hr
day
• Two McCormick Reaper
strikers murdered on May 3
• Protest/rally at Haymarket
Square on May 4 in
response
• Bomb thrown into crowd;
police open fire
• 8 labor leaders arrested, all
convicted, 4 hanged
The Haymarket
Affair

47. Government
and Labor
• Strikes are met with violence
during this period: Pinkerton
men and government troops
• Homestead Steel, 1892:
300 private security
turned back; 8,000 state
militiamen sent to break
strike

48. Bottom Line:
The Gilded Age in the City
• The new economy led to a large gap between rich and poor:
• Some people became fabulously wealthy.
• Others - mostly immigrants - worked hard for very low wages.
They:
• lived in slums
• organized unions and went on strike
• got some sympathy from middle-class people, but not
enough to make much difference in their lives.