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Unit 6
10–17% of examAfter the Civil War the United States became an industrial giant, with railroads, steel and giant corporations, and millions of immigrants filled its growing cities. This unit covers who gained and who lost: business leaders and a new middle class, struggling workers and farmers, American Indians pushed onto reservations, and Black Southerners facing Jim Crow, plus the fierce debates over what government should do about it.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
This opening topic sets the scene for the Gilded Age, a name taken from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The era glittered on the surface, with fast industrial growth and huge fortunes, but underneath were crowded cities, dangerous jobs and hard times for many workers and farmers.
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Government land grants helped build the first transcontinental railroad, finished in 1869, and railroads, mining booms, cattle ranching and the Homestead Act pulled people west. New machines helped farmers grow more, but falling crop prices, debt and high railroad rates led them to organize the Grange and the Farmers' Alliances.
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As settlers poured onto the Plains and the buffalo herds were nearly wiped out, the U.S. government broke treaties and used the army against American Indians who resisted, from the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876) to the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890). The Dawes Act (1887) and boarding schools tried to force assimilation by breaking up tribal land and cultures, though many Native people kept their traditions alive.
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Leaders like Henry Grady called for a 'New South' of factories, railroads and steel mills, but most Southerners still farmed, many as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Southern states passed Jim Crow segregation laws, which the Supreme Court upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and used poll taxes, literacy tests and violence to take the vote from Black men, while reformers like Ida B. Wells fought back.
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New technology and abundant natural resources let businesses produce goods on a huge scale. The Bessemer process made cheap steel, and railroads, the telephone (1876), electric lighting and refrigerated railcars changed how Americans worked, traveled and ate.
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Business leaders built giant corporations using new ways to organize and pay for them. Andrew Carnegie controlled the steps of steelmaking from mines to mills (vertical integration), John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil bought up rivals and combined them in a trust (horizontal integration), and bankers like J.P. Morgan financed huge mergers. Businesses also looked overseas for new markets and raw materials.
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Falling prices raised many workers' real wages, but factory work meant long hours, danger and child labor. Workers formed unions like the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, and big strikes such as the Great Railroad Strike (1877), Homestead (1892) and Pullman (1894) were often broken by company guards, courts or federal troops.
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Millions of 'new immigrants' arrived, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, and many of them were Catholic or Jewish, while others came from China and elsewhere. Along with Americans leaving farms, they filled factory jobs and crowded city neighborhoods built around ethnicity, race and class.
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Americans argued over whether and how immigrants should assimilate. Nativists pushed for limits like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), some writers used Social Darwinism to justify inequality, and reformers such as Jane Addams opened settlement houses like Hull House to help immigrants adjust to American life.
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Big companies needed managers, clerks and typists, and more Americans went to high school and college, so a distinct white-collar middle class grew, with more free time and money for department stores, amusements and sports. Some of the very rich, like Andrew Carnegie in his 'Gospel of Wealth', argued that they had a duty to give back, and gave money for libraries, schools and universities.
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Critics offered other visions for American society: Henry George proposed a single tax on land, Edward Bellamy imagined a cooperative future, socialists and agrarian reformers called for big changes, and Social Gospel ministers urged churches to fight poverty. Women's clubs and groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union gave many women a public voice, and more women went to college and worked for causes from temperance to suffrage.
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Many business leaders and politicians backed laissez-faire, the idea that government should stay out of the economy, even during depressions, while others wanted rules for railroads and trusts, like the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). Abroad, leaders looked for markets and resources in the Pacific, Asia and Latin America, buying Alaska in 1867 and annexing Hawaii in 1898.
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Republicans and Democrats were evenly matched, played on old Civil War loyalties and fought over tariffs and money, while reformers attacked corruption and political machines like New York's Tammany Hall. The Pendleton Act (1883) began a civil service based on merit. Struggling farmers formed the People's (Populist) Party, which wanted government to regulate railroads and the money supply; in 1896 the Populists backed Democrat William Jennings Bryan and his call for free silver, but he lost to Republican William McKinley.
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This skill topic asks you to explain what changed and what stayed the same across the Gilded Age. For example, how far did industrialization really change work and the South, and how much did the government's role in the economy shift? Strong answers name a turning point and explain both the change and the continuity around it.
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