UNIT 6 (1865-1898)
Welcome to Unit 6 of APUSH! This unit covers the time period from 1865-1898! During this unit, we will be covering everything from the Civil War’s end to the Treaty of Paris that acquired Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam for the United States. We will go over the continuation of western expansion, the New South, the innovations during this time period, capitalism, and the Gilded Age that happened after Reconstruction. Within the Gilded Age, we will go over reform movements, capitalism, politics, political machines, culture, immigration, the economy, corporations, labor unions, and a lot more. We will also be going over the several presidents during this time and the fight against corporations.
Key People, Terms, and Events
People
Terms
Events
Mechanization of Agriculture: A movement in which machines were starting to be used in farming instead of manual labor
New South: A term used after the Civil War to call for industrial growth, economic diversity, laissez-faire capitalism, and the end of discrimination and slavery in the South.
Capitalism: Based on laissez-faire economies, with laissez-faire meaning “let alone”, defined by the belief of limited government involvement in the economy and the ownership of private property, supported the idea of private owners owning trade and industry for profit, led to the rise of large corporations
Social Darwinism: The application of biological Darwinism to society. In nature, the strong eat the weak and the fittest survive. Social Darwinism takes that idea and applies it to society, in which strong nations should eat weak nations and strong companies should eat weak companies. They argued that all of these competition and exploitation and practices were natural, because it meant that the “strong/fittest” were demonstrating their superiority and success over the rest of the people.
Gilded Age: The period after Reconstruction, defined by rapid economic growth and change. But at the same time, the Gilded Age was also defined by political corruption, the plight and terrible working conditions of laborers, and class division.
Labor Unions: Organized associations of workers formed to provide workers with a collective voice and advocate for their rights and interests. While it would be easy for a factory owner to fire one worker, it was much harder for them to ignore a union of them. Through labor unions, workers were able to employ political action and strikes in order to fight for what they wanted.
Middle Class: People who didn’t do manual labor nor did they own factories. These people were managers, accountants, secretaries, lawyers, and other positions that mainly had to deal with handling information and giving orders rather than working and making things with their hands. These people were called white-collar workers because they often dressed up in their fancy suits and white collars before going to work. They often worked fewer hours and fewer days than factory workers. With all of this extra time and money, they started to buy things they didn’t necessarily need, and thus came the rise of a leisure culture. Many people went to opera houses, parks, watched sports games, and attended social events. They enjoyed Vaudeville shows, went shopping for fun, traveled, and often went on vacation for enjoyment.
Gospel of Wealth: The belief that the duty of the rich is to reinvest their money into society to help out those who are less fortunate in order to give them a chance at a more comfortable life. The rich should help the poor to provide everyone with a better society and a better future
Industrial Capitalism: An economy in which goods are mass-produced in factories to be sold nationally and also internationally. These factories and businesses flourished due to the lack of government regulation and intervention in how the economy was running. This led to a lot of the wealth from the businesses gathering in the hands of their owners, creating a ridiculously rich upper class.
Muckrakers: Journalists who about the plight of the poor and the corruption inside businesses, helped bring these problems into the public eye, letting more people be informed of what was going on inside many businesses. This led to a wave of political debates over citizenship, corruption, and civil rights alongside a wave of demand for the federal government to step in and start regulating the nation’s problems.
Socialism: An economic ideology in which the means of production, meaning the factories and industries, should be owned by the people as a whole and that the wealth generated from it should be shared among everyone equally
Laissez-faire Economics: The dominant economic ideology during the Gilded Age. Under this ideology, people believed that the best way to treat the economy was to leave it alone and let everybody act on their own. This started off during the Enlightenment with Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations and up until the late 19th century, this ideology had remained unchallenged. And this invisible hand, as Smith said, should thrive under competition. But while many Gilded Age politicians and business owners and tycoons supported laissez-faire economics, they had completely destroyed the competition part of it by buying out all of their competitors.
Populist Party: A party that wanted to actually help out the people and fix the economy by removing power from elite banks and trusts. In the Ocala Platform, populists published their beliefs and argued for the direct election of senators, an eight-hour work day, lower tariff rates, the unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax (the higher your income, the more you were taxed), a new banking system regulated by the federal government, federal storage for farmers’ crops, and federal loans in order to decrease farmers’ dependency on creditors. After Populism ended in 1896, the Democrats began taking up many of the Populist viewpoints and demands, such as the unlimited coinage of silver.
Political Machines: Political organizations led by a small group of people that recruited members through incentives and had a lot of control over what their members did. In urban centers, many cities fell under the control of political machines that enticed members with promises of jobs if they were faithful.
Frederick Jackson Turner: A person who wrote The Significant of the Frontier in American History. In this essay, Turner argued that the American people should be very concerned over the closing of the frontier, because for all throughout the nation’s history, people had been able to move out west and explore whenever they wanted. Whenever people didn’t like their way of life or their living situation, they could just choose to move out west. Starting from the first colonization of the continent up until 1890, that had been true. But now, Turner argued that there was no longer a way for Americans to release discontent and that now, there was no stretch of land left that was safe from American society. He argued that without the frontier, society would take its hold and cause America to fall into class conflicts just like Europe, because now they had no “free” land left to escape to.
Ida B. Wells: The editor of a black newspaper in the South and used it to argue against lynching and Jim Crow Laws
Booker T. Washington: An African American educator, argued that black people needed to become economically self-sufficient and educated in order to see change happen. To this end, he created many speeches and cultivated the spread of many schools across the South for African Americans.
Henry Bessemer: An English engineer that patented the Bessemer Process in the 1850s, a new way of making higher-quality and stronger steel. The main idea of the Bessemer Process was to blast hot air through molten iron to get rid of impurities, creating stronger steel. This led to more steel being created and lower steel prices, allowing for the construction of more factories, railroads, and infrastructure.
Alexander Graham Bell: Invented the telephone in 1876, which allowed people to actually hear the sounds of other people’s voices from far away, and within a year, Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company, facilitating the spread of thousands of telephones across America
John D. Rockefeller: Owner of Standard Oil, had a monopoly over the oil and petroleum industries, practiced horizontal integration and controlled almost 90% of the oil industry
Andrew Carnegie: Had a monopoly over the steel industry after the Bessemer Process was discovered, practiced vertical integration and bought up all of the companies related to steel production, sold his company to J. P. Morgan for half a billion dollars in 1901 and started devoting his life to philanthropy, believed in the Gospel of Wealth and believed that people should be given the resources needed to be successful and then have to work for it afterwards. He personally invested roughly $350 million to build libraries, concert halls, universities, and many other public institutions.
Eugene V. Debs: A union leader; during the Pullman Strike, he directed his members to not work on any of the trains that had Pullman cars. But because the owners of railroads and train cars worked closely together, they started hooking the Pullman cars to trains carrying federal mail, making it so that if they interfered with the cars, they were also interfering with federal mail. And so Debs and other union leaders were arrested for this, ending the strike. Started the Socialist Party of America in 1901, which died out after Debs ran for president and failed.
Jane Addams: Established settlement houses to take care of immigrants arriving in Chicago, including the famous Hull House in 1889. In these settlement houses, aid was given to immigrants in order to assimilate into American society. They were given education, taught English, healthcare, and employment resources. So while immigrants had a really difficult time during the Gilded Age, there were still some that were willing to provide aid.
Jacob Riis: Wrote How The Other Half Lives, a book that was a compilation of photographs that exposed the unsanitary living conditions of the poor and working class and all of the diseases they had to suffer with
Adam Smith: Enlightenment thinker from the 18th century, wrote The Wealth of Nations. In his publication, Smith argued that economies are best governed by the laws of supply and demand and that meant that people should leave the economy alone and let these two forces just do their thing. This meant that if you just let people make decisions in their own best personal interest, the economy’s “invisible hand” will always flourish, leading to society flourishing as well. And this invisible hand, as Smith said, should thrive under competition.
Boss Tweed: Ran the political machine of Tammany Hall in New York City.
1871: The Indian Appropriation Act is passed, ending the sovereignty of Indian nations
1874: Henry Grady coins the term “New South”
1877: Jim Crow Laws begin to be created and the Gilded Age begins
1879: The Exoduster Movement occurs, a mass migration of African Americans from the South to the West
1880s: In the late-1880s, Standard Oil controls almost 90% of the oil industry through horizontal integration
1881: The Pendleton Act is passed to replace patronage with a competitive examination for federal jobs
1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, banning all immigration from China
1886: In the Haymarket Square Riot, the Knights of Labor gather in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest for an eight-hour workday but then a bomb explodes, leading many Americans to view the Knights as radical anarchists, causing the union to fall apart
1890: The U.S. Census Bureau declares that the frontier is now officially closed; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA); The Ocala Platform occurs
1893: The Significance of the Frontier in American History, an essay by Fredrick Jackson Turner, is published
1893: Queen Liliʻuokalani and the Hawaiian monarchy are overthrown by American businessmen
1896: Plessy v. Ferguson is ruled, ruling that “separate but equal” is constitutional
Fast Summary
The Gilded Age was a period in American history that lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the 20th century. It was a time of rapid economic growth, marked by the rise of big business and the growth of industries such as steel, railroads, and oil. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to describe the glittering surface of wealth and prosperity, while the reality was often different and more complex.
During this time, the country experienced a great deal of social, political, and economic change, including the growth of cities, the arrival of new immigrants, and the rise of labor unions. The population of the US grew rapidly, and many new innovations, including the telephone and electricity, changed the way people lived and worked.
However, this period was also marked by significant inequality and corruption. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few powerful tycoons was a source of concern, and many people felt that the country's political and economic systems were rigged against them. The gap between the rich and the poor grew wider, and the labor movement fought for better working conditions and wages for workers.
Despite these challenges, the Gilded Age saw the growth of American capitalism and the rise of the US as a global economic power. The country's transportation and communication systems improved, and the country became more connected, both domestically and internationally. It was a time of great creativity, with advances in the arts, literature, and science, and the beginning of the progressive movement, which sought to address some of the social and economic problems of the era.