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Gilded Age

Gilded Age . 1870-1900. Two Manifestations?. Gilded Age West—Frontier, Populism, and Native American Removal Gilded Age East—Worker abuse, Robber Barons, and Financial turmoil. Dealing with Labor. Replacing muscle with steam and electricit

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Gilded Age

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  1. Gilded Age 1870-1900

  2. Two Manifestations? • Gilded Age West—Frontier, Populism, and Native American Removal • Gilded Age East—Worker abuse, Robber Barons, and Financial turmoil.

  3. Dealing with Labor • Replacing muscle with steam and electricit • Steel processed at 3-5 tons per day (increase of 15x from 1860) Today 5 tons takes 15 minutes! • Steel: 1880-1,000,000 tons • Steel: 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.

  4. Gilded Age Cities • New York • 1860: 800,000 • 1900: 4,000,000 • Chicago: • 1860: 110,000 • 1900: 2,000,000

  5. Key Inventions • 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

  6. Crooked politics • 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!

  7. Finance • 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!

  8. Competition • Businesses sought to crush one another. • Rockefeller and Carnegie—Monopoly Politics • Rockefeller 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.

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