Use questions generated about multiple historical sources to pursue further inquiry and investigate additional sources. Distinguish between long-term causes and triggering events in developing a historical argument. Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past. The above video from the Bill of Rights Institute provides historical context to understand why and how the early industrialists thrived.
Use your class text or other classroom resources, or refer to either or both of the following interactive timelines available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website Learner. Introduce your students to some individuals for whom the label "robber baron" is universally regarded as appropriate. Jim Fisk and Jay Gould clearly earned the title because they did not contribute to building something such as a railroad system.
Instead, they destroyed such systems through clearly illegal actions and disregard for anyone else. Their actions hurt the economy of the United States. Ask students to explain why Jay Cooke deserves the title "robber baron. Such behavior as Fisk's, Gould's, and Cooke's clearly fits the criteria for a robber baron. Tell the class that the label cannot always be applied with such assurance.
What if an action is illegal but leads to a positive end? The first billion-dollar corporation was United States Steel, formed by financier J. Morgan in , who purchased and consolidated steel firms built by Andrew Carnegie and others. Diagram of the Bessemer converter : Air blown through holes in the converter bottom creates a violent reaction in the molten pig iron that oxidizes the excess carbon, converting the pig iron to pure iron or steel, depending on the residual carbon.
Increased mechanization of industry and improvements to worker efficiency increased the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor. Mechanical innovations such as batch and continuous processing began to become much more prominent in factories. This mechanization made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers. In some cases, the advancement of such mechanization substituted for low-skilled workers altogether.
Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew. Engineering colleges were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was quickly growing, especially in northern cities.
The period from to saw the greatest increase in economic growth in such a short period as ever in previous history. Living standards improved significantly as the prices of goods fell dramatically due to the increases in productivity.
This caused unemployment and great upheavals in commerce and industry, with many laborers being displaced by machines and many factories, ships, and other forms of fixed capital becoming obsolete in a very short time span.
Crop failures no longer resulted in starvation in areas connected to large markets through transport infrastructure. By , the work done by steam engines exceeded that done by animal and human power. Horses and mules remained important in agriculture until the development of the internal combustion tractor near the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. Improvements in steam efficiency, such as triple-expansion steam engines, allowed ships to carry much more freight than coal, resulting in greatly increased volumes of international trade.
The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the twentieth century with early factory electrification and the production line, and ended at the start of the World War I. Completed in , the Transcontinental Railroad served as a vital link for trade, commerce, and travel between the East and West of the United States.
The First Transcontinental Railroad was built between and to join the eastern and western halves of the United States. Begun right before the American Civil War, its construction was considered to be one of the greatest American technological feats of the nineteenth century.
Shipping and commerce could thrive away from navigable watercourses for the first time since the beginning of the nation. Much of this line is still used by the California Zephyr, although some parts were rerouted or abandoned.
The construction of the railroad resulted in the end of most of the far slower and more hazardous stagecoach lines and wagon trains. The railroad also led to a great decline of traffic on the Oregon and California Trail, which had helped populate much of the West.
The Transcontinental Railroad provided much faster, safer, and cheaper transportation for people and goods across the western two-thirds of the continent. Many army veterans and Irish emigrants were the main workers on the Union Pacific, while most of the engineers were ex-army men who had learned their trade keeping the trains running during the American Civil War. The Central Pacific Railroad, facing a labor shortage in the more sparsely settled West, relied on Chinese laborers who did prodigious work building the line over and through the Sierra Nevada mountains and then across Nevada to northern Utah.
The construction work involved an immense amount of manual labor. Initially, Central Pacific had a hard time hiring and keeping unskilled workers on its line, as many would leave for the prospect of far more lucrative gold or silver mining options elsewhere.
Most Chinese workers spoke only rudimentary or no English, and the supervisors typically only learned rudimentary Chinese. The track laying was divided up into various parts.
In advance of the track layers, surveyors consulting with engineers determined where the track would go. Workers then built and prepared the roadbed; dug or blasted through hills; filled in washes; built trestles, bridges, or culverts across streams or valleys; made tunnels if needed; and laid the ties. The actual track-laying gang would then lay rails on the previously laid ties positioned on the roadbed, drive the spikes, and bolt the fishplate bars to each rail. At the same time, another gang would distribute telegraph poles and wire along the grade, while the cooks prepared dinner and the clerks busied themselves with accounts and records, using the telegraph line to relay requests for more materials and supplies or to communicate with supervisors.
Usually the workers lived in camps built near their work site. Tunnels were blasted through hard rock by drilling holes in the rock face by hand and filling them with black powder. Sometimes cracks were found which could be filled with powder and blasted open. The loosened rock would be collected and hauled out of the tunnel for use in a fill area or as roadbed, or else dumped over the side as waste.
Some tunnels took almost a year to finish; the Summit Tunnel, the longest, took almost two years. In the final days of working in the Sierras, the recently invented nitroglycerin explosive was introduced and used on the last tunnels including Summit Tunnel.
The mechanization of the manufacturing process allowed workers to be more productive in less time and factories to operate more efficiently. Frederick Winslow Taylor : Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer by training, is often credited with inventing scientific management and improving industrial efficiency. The Gilded Age was marked by increased mechanization in manufacturing. Businesses searched for cheaper and more efficient ways to create products.
Corporate officials used various techniques, such as timing their workers with stopwatches and using stop-motion photography, to study the production process and improve efficiency. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that the use of more advanced machinery could improve efficiency in steel production by requiring workers to make fewer motions in less time. His redesign increased the speed of factory machines and the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor.
Factories became an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers.
Machine shops, comprised of highly skilled workers and engineers, grew rapidly. A robber baron is a term that is also sometimes attributed to any successful businessperson whose practices are considered unethical or unscrupulous.
This behavior can include employee or environmental abuse, stock market manipulation , or deliberately restricting output to charge higher prices. The term appeared in American newspapers in Robber barons were widely despised and considered rapacious monopolists during their lifetimes. A chief complaint against the 19th-century capitalists was that they were monopolists. Fear over the robber barons and their monopoly practices increased public support for the Sherman Antitrust Act of Economic theory says a monopolist earns premium profits by restricting output and raising prices.
This only occurs after the monopolist prices out or legally restricts any competitor firms in the industry. However, there is no historical evidence that natural monopolies formed before the Sherman Antitrust Act. Many so-called robber barons—James J. Rockefeller —became wealthy entrepreneurs through product innovation and business efficiency. This is the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Among common criticisms of the early robber barons included poor working conditions for employees, selfishness, and greed.
Some robber barons—including Robert Fulton, Edward K. Collins, and Leland Stanford—earned their wealth through political entrepreneurship.
Many wealthy railroad tycoons during the s received privileged access and financing from the government via extensive use of lobbyists. He owned and ran several companies, including the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company that went to Japan and China. The first student admitted to the school was Herbert Hoover. He dominated the steamship business in Long Island Sound and invested in railroads when the first ones were being built connecting Boston to Long Island in the s. Over the next couple of decades, Vanderbilt built an empire by assuming control of numerous railroads around New York City.
From to he directed the construction of the Grand Central Depot on 42nd street in Manhattan. In Yerkes moved to Chicago and by he controlled a majority of the city's street railway systems on the north and west sides. He built The Loop in Chicago's business district before selling the majority of his Chicago Transport stocks and moving to New York in He moved to London the next year and worked extensively on the construction of its railways.
The crater Yerkes on the Moon is named in his honor. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. John Jacob Astor. Jay Cooke.
Andrew Carnegie. Charles Crocker. James Fisk. Daniel Drew.
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