1. Early factories
produced consumer goods—goods that replaced articles made at home or by
individual artisans.
2. Gradually, capital
goods—goods that added to the productive capacity of the economy—began to drive
3. In 1856, British
inventor Henry Bessemer designed the Bessemer converter, a furnace that refined
raw pig iron into steel, which is harder and more durable than wrought iron.
4. In 1872, Andrew
Carnegie erected a massive steel mill that used the Bessemer converter; the Edgar
Thompson Works of
5. The technological
breakthrough in steel spurred the intensive mining of some of the country’s
rich mineral resources: iron ore and coal.
6. The nation’s energy
revolution was completed with the coupling of the steam turbine with the
electric generator; after 1900, American factories began a conversion to
electric power.
1. Americans were
impatient for year-round, ontime transportation
service that canal barges and riverboats could not provide; the arrival of locomotives
from
2. The
3. The
most important boost that government gave the railroads was a legal form of
organization—the corporation with limited liability.
4. Railroad promoters
ran the railroad construction companies, which raised cash by buying and
selling railroads’ bonds.
5. The
most successful railroad promoters were those with access to capital; John
Murray Forbes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and James J. Hill were the most famous.
6. With the early
railroads, gauges of track varied widely, and at terminal points the railroads were
not connected.
7. In 1883 the
railroads divided the country into the four standard time zones to manage
scheduling, and by the end of the 1880s, the track gauge was standardized.
8. The inventor George
Westinghouse perfected the automatic coupler, the air brake, and the friction
gear; this resulted in a steady drop in freight rates for shippers.
9. For investors, the
price of railroad competition was high; when the economy turned bad, as in 1893,
a third of the industry went into receivership.
10. After 1893, the
investment banks of J. P.Morgan &
11. By the early twentieth
century, a half dozen great regional systems had
emerged out of the jumble of rival systems.
1. Until well into the
industrial age, most manufacturers operated on a small scale for nearby markets
and left distribution to wholesale merchants and commission agents.
2. As
3. The Union Stock Yard
of
4. Gustavus
F. Swift and his engineers developed an effective cooling system for shipping
beef. Swift invested in a fleet of refrigerator
cars and built a central beef-processing plant in
5. Swift & Co. was
a vertically integrated firm, absorbing the functions of many small,
specialized enterprises within a single centralized structure.
6. John D. Rockefeller’s
Standard Oil Company had a national distribution system for kerosene, and the
Singer Sewing Machine Company used retail stores as well as door-todoor salesmen.
7. In the late
nineteenth century, modern advertising appeared as big businesses set about
creating a national demand for their brand names.
1. After the Civil War,
the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural, and wages for farm labor in the
South were low.
2. Southern textile
mills recruited workers from the surrounding hill farms; mill wages exceeded farm
earnings, but not by much.
3. The new southern
mills had an advantage over those of the long-established
4. A “family system” of
mill labor developed, with a labor force that was half female and very young.
5. Blacks sometimes
worked as day laborers and janitors but seldom got jobs as operatives in the
cotton mills.
Chapter Annotated Outline 27
6. When cigarettes
became fashionable in the 1880s, southerner James B. Duke took advantage of
James A. Bonsack’s new machine that produced
cigarettes automatically.
7. The businesses that
developed in the South produced raw materials or engaged in the lowtech processing of coarse products; the South consistently
lagged behind the North economically.
8. Many southerners
blamed the North for economic disparity, as most of the capital came from the
North.
9. Low wages in the
South discouraged employers from replacing workers with machinery, attracted labor-intensive
industry, and inhibited investment in education.
10. Northerners and
immigrants avoided the South and its low wages, and prior to World War I, few
southerners left for the higher wages of the North.
1. Unlike Europe, the
2. The
3. Modest numbers of
blacks began to migrate out of the South between 1870 and 1910; most settled in
cities but were not given factory work because immigrants provided cheaper labor.
4. Ethnic origin
largely determined the kind of work immigrants took in
5. With the advance of
technology, fewer European craftsmen were needed, yet the demand for ordinary
labor skyrocketed.
6. By 1895, arrivals
from southern and Eastern Europe far outstripped immigrants from
7. Heavy, low-paid
labor became the domain of the immigrants; their relatives and neighbors often
followed them to
8. Immigrants were
often peasants displaced by the breakdown of the traditional rural economies of
southern and Eastern Europe; many returned home during
9. In 1900, women made
up a quarter of the nonagricultural labor force. Contemporary beliefs about
womanhood determined which jobs women took and how they were treated at work.
10. In 1890, fewer than 5
percent of white wives had worked outside the home, while more than 30 percent
of black wives worked for wages.
11. Women were not
permitted to do “men’s work” nor were they paid the same wages as men,
regardless of their skills. Employers maintained that because women had men to
support them, they did not require a “living wage.”
12. At the turn of the
century, women’s work fell into three categories: domestic service; female white-collar
jobs; and industry, such as the garment trade.
13. Black women were
excluded from all but the most menial jobs, as were black men.
14. The family household
could not function without the wife’s contribution; therefore, society disapproved
of wives taking paying jobs.
15. Working-class
families had a hard time getting by on one income; in 1900, one in five
children under the age of sixteen worked.
16. By the 1890s, all
northern industrial states had passed child labor laws and regulations on work
hours for teenagers.
17. Deprived of their
children’s earnings, yet still needing more than one income, more women in
working-class families entered the workplace.
1. Autonomous male
craftsmen flourished in many branches of nineteenth-century industry.
2. These workers abided
by the “stint,” an informal system of restricting output that infuriated efficiency-minded
engineers.
3. Many young female
workers found a new sense of independence and new social outlets from working.
4. Women workers rarely
wielded the kind of craft power that the skilled male worker commonly enjoyed.
5. For men, dispersal
of authority was characteristic of nineteenth-century industry; the most skilled
workers were autonomous—hiring, supervising, and paying their own helpers—but
the subordinates were sometimes exploited.
1. With mass
production, machine tools became more specialized, and the need for skilled
operatives disappeared.
2. Employers were
attracted to “dedicated” machinery because it increased output; the impact on
workers was not their greatest concern.
28 Chapter 17 Capital and Labor in the Age of
3. Frederick W. Taylor’s
method of scientific management eliminated the brainwork from manual labor and
deprived workers of the authority they had previously known.
4. Influenced by
5. Scientific
management did not solve the labor problem as
6.
7. For textile workers,
the loss of autonomy came early; for miners and ironworkers, it came more slowly;
and construction workers mostly retained their autonomy.
1. The Knights of Labor
was founded in 1869 as a secret society of garment workers in
2. To achieve labor “emancipation,”
the Knights had originally intended to set up factories run by the employees;
led by Terence V. Powderly, they instead devoted themselves to “education.”
3. The labor reformers
expressed the higher aspirations of American workers, but the trade unions
tended to the workers’ day-to-day needs.
4. The earliest unions
were organizations of workers in the same craft and sometimes the same ethnic
group.
5. By the 1870s the
national union was becoming the dominant organizational form for American trade
unionism.
6. Many workers carried
membership cards in both the Knights of Labor and a trade union.
7. As did most trade
unions, the Knights barred women until 1881, when women shoe workers won the
right to form their own local assembly.
8. The Knights of Labor
allowed black workers to join out of the need for solidarity and in deference to
the Order’s egalitarian principles.
1. In the early 1880s the
Knights began to act more like trade unions; as the Knights won more strikes,
its membership rapidly increased.
2. As the Knights stood
poised as a potential industrial-union movement, the national trade unions
insisted on a clear separation of roles, with the Knights confined to labor
reform.
3. Samuel Gompers led
the ideological assault on the Knights, and he hammered out the philosophical position
known as pure and simple unionism.
4. The Knights favored
an eight-hour workday because workers had duties to perform as American
citizens, and unionists favored it because it spread the work among more
people, providing more jobs and protecting them from overwork.
5. Seizing on the
antiunion hysteria set off by the Haymarket affair, employers broke strikes violently,
compiled blacklists, and forced some workers to sign “yellow-dog contracts”
that renounced union membership.
6. In December 1886,
the national trade unions formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL); the
underlying principle was that workers had to take the world as it was.
7. The Knights of Labor
never recovered from the Haymarket affair, and by the mid-1890s, the Knights
had faded away while the AFL took firm root.
1. American trade
unions wanted a larger share for working people; this made employers opposed to
collective bargaining.
2. Andrew Carnegie had
once stated that workers had the right to organize and that employers should
honor workers’ jobs during labor disputes.
3. Carnegie decided
that collective bargaining had become too expensive and wanted to replace the
workers at his steel mill in
4. Carnegie’s
second-in-command, Henry Clay Frick, announced that Carnegie’s mill would no
longer deal with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.
5. The
6. George M. Pullman
cut wages at his factory but not the rents for employee housing; he denied that
there was any connection between his roles as employer and landlord.
7. Pullman workers
belonged to the American Railway Union (ARU), and Eugene V. Debs directed all
ARU members not to handle
Chapter Annotated Outline 29
8. The Pullman boycott
was crushed by the federal government, which—pressured by the railroad
companies—used its power to protect the
1. Eugene Debs devoted
himself to the American Railway
2. With the formation
of the Socialist Labor Party in 1877,Marxist socialism
established itself as a permanent presence in American politics.
3. After being
incarcerated after the
4. Under Debs, the
Socialist Party of America began to attract not only immigrants but farmers and
women as well.
5. A different brand of
American Marxist radicalism was taking shape as the atmosphere of western
mining camps turned violent in the 1890s.
6. The Western
Federation of Miners joined with left-wing socialists in 1905 to create the
Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies).
7. The Wobblies supported the Marxist class struggle at the
workplace rather than in politics (syndicalism).
8. American radicalism
bore witness to what was exploitative and unjust in the new industrial order.