The Gilded Ageand
Industrialization
Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction: Harper’s Weekly, March 17, 1877
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: “Colonel Agramonte’s Cavalry Charging on the Mob, at the Halstead street Viaduct, in Chicago, July 16,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 11, 1877
Major railroads in 1880 with time zones
Population growth: “Great Railway Station at Chicago--Departure of a Train,” Appleton’s Journal, 1870 supplement
Government support: Land grants to the railroads
Invention: Thomas Edison with the light bulb, invented in 1879
National markets: The first national brand, Uneeda Biscuit (1898, ad from 1900)
Sears and Roebuck Catalog, 1900
Gilded Age: Who coined the term?
Mark Twain
Capital: The race is on: "Admiral" Jim Fisk of the ERIE vs. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt New York Central Lines.
Labor: The Celebration of the Meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869.
A. J. Russell, “Chinese at Laying Last Rail UPRR,” stereoview
John D. Rockefeller, Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1917
Corporations had the same rights as persons
The 14th amendment:
“Section. 1. …No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
US Supreme Court, 1886, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific RR co.
“The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Next! Cartoon in Puck, September 7, 1904
Henry Adams Criticized Corporations in His Autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, 1918
Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species (1859)
Herbert Spencer, author of social Darwinist doctrines of “survival of the fittest and “laissez faire”
Skull Types
Andrew Carnegie, Scottish immigrant who built a “vertically integrated” steel company that dominated the steel industry in the laste 19th century
Horatio Alger books promoted rags to riches stories
Conspicuous Display of Wealth, Millionaire’s Row, New York
Carnegie Mansion Vanderbilt Chateau
Jacob Riis, Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street, c. 1889
“Driving the Rioters from Turner Hall,” Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1877
“The Haymarket Riot,” Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886
“The Haymarket Martyrs,” Anarchy and Anarchists, 1889
“The First Dynamite Bomb Thrown in America,” Chicago Inter-Ocean Supplement, 1886
Pin Protesting the Executions, Inscribed “Nov. 11, 1887”
“Justice Hurling a Bomb,” Graphic News, June 5, 1886
The Pullman Strike, 1893-1894
John D. Rockefeller Founds a Day Nursery for Children of Working Italian Women, 1895
U.S. Presidents, 1877-Present
Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877-1881James Garfield, 1881Chester Arthur, 1881-1885Grover Cleveland, 1885-1889Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1993Grover Cleveland, 1993-1997William McKinley, 1897-1901Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909William H. Taft, 1909-1913Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921Warren Harding, 1921-1923Calvin Coolidge, 1923-1929Herbert Hoover, 1929-1933
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945Harry Truman, 1945-1953Dwight Eisenhower, 1953-1961John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963Lyndon Johnson, 1963-1969Richard Nixon, 1969-1974Gerald Ford, 1974-77Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989George H.W. Bush, 1989-1993William J. Clinton, 1993-2001George W. Bush, 2001-present
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