1870-1900

Gilded Age

Gilded Age West—Frontier, Populism, and Native American Removal

Gilded Age East—Worker abuse, Robber Barons, and Financial turmoil.

Two Manifestations?

Replacing muscle with steam and electricitSteel processed at 3-5 tons per day (increase of

15x from 1860) Today 5 tons takes 15 minutes!Steel: 1880-1,000,000 tonsSteel: 1900-25,000,000 tons

1900 there was 193,000 miles of rail…up from 30,000 in 1860.

Farming—it took 61 hours to cultivate an acre of wheat…in 1900 it took 3 hours!

Mining—in 1860 14,000,000 tons were mind. By 1884 that number was now 100,000,000 tons with ½ the workforce.

Dealing with Labor

New York1860: 800,0001900: 4,000,000

Chicago: 1860: 110,0001900: 2,000,000

Gilded Age Cities

Thomas Edison—what didn’t he invent? Electrical devices, communication devices, and light.

Gustavus Swift: ice cooled railway car to transport food

James Duke: Cigarette rolling machine…1,000 cigarettes versus 100,000. Duke University

Key Inventions

Edison promised every legislator $1,000 gift for favorable legislation.

Jay Gould spent $1,000,000 in 1 year bribing the Congress.

Central Pacific (Gould) spent $200,000 bribing Congress for rights to 9,000,000 acres of free land.

Gould charged Congress $79,000,000 to build a railroad that cost $24,000,000.

Graft!

Crooked politics

JP Morgan…an auspices beginning. Rifle story.

Loans to fuel industry were vital.Stock sales becoming vital.1895: US ran out of gold to back currency. JP

Morgan lent them the gold in exchange for bonds that they immediately resold for a 50% profit!

Finance

Businesses sought to crush one another.Rockefeller and Carnegie—Monopoly PoliticsRockefeller eventually created a

$2,000,000,000 empire valued at nearly 100 times that figure in today’s currency.

Morgan bought US Steel for $492,000,000 from Carnegie and created a global monopoly on steel.

Competition