Big Business and Labor

• Homework: 241-249

Art- Interior Design-Smoking Room From John D. Rockefeller House,

New York

Andrew Carnegie

• Carnegie from Railroad to steel

• Better and Cheaper• Precise Cost• Vertical integration- Buy

out suppliers• Horizontal integration-

buy out competitors• Carnegie then becomes a

philanthropist and gives away the majority of wealth

Social Darwinism

• Justification of laissez faire

• Economic Darwinism• JP Morgan buys out

Carnage Steel• John D. Rockefeller sets

up trust to gain control from 3% to 90% of oil revenue

• Bribery and Spying lowering cost to drive out competition

Josiah Strong (protestant minister)

“It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future.

Heretofore there has always been in the history of the world a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus population.

There are no more new worlds. The unoccupied arable lands of the earth are limited, and will soon be taken. The time is coming when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence will be felt here as it is now felt in Europe and Asia. Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States, will assert itself. Then this race of unequaled energy….will spread itself over the earth. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the fittest?”

Antitrust

• Sherman Antitrust Act- Corporate interference

• Very difficult to enforce

• Business Bypass of South

• Holding Companies- exist to buy stocks of other companies

Labor

• Long Hours, Dangerous work• National labor Union• Colored National Labor Union• Knights of Labor (1869)• American Federation of Labor

(AFL) skilled labor- collective Bargaining (Samuel Gompers)

• Women’s Alliance• American Railway Union-

started by Eugene Debs• “Wobbles” Industrial Workers

of the world- welcomed African Americans equally- made up of Socialist and Communist

Strike• Great Strike of 1877-

Federal Troops end strike- Mary Harris Jones and United Mine Workers

• Haymarket Affair- - Day 1 of strike= police

brutality, shot strikers- Day 2 Thousands

protest. Someone through a bomb in the middle of riot. 8 police and 60 others are killed

• Scabs (strike breaker)

• Pinkerton Agency• Pullman- federal

troops and blacklist• Triangle Shirtwaist

Tragedy- fire, doors locked

• Yellow Dog contracts

Discrimination in Unions

• In California Japanese- Mexican Labor Association is formed for farmers

• AFL did not support women organizers so groups like National Women’s Trade Union League were forced to be created

Labor Song

“In the black of winter of nineteen nine

When we froze and bled on the picket line

We showed the world that women could fight

And we rose and won with women’s might”

Summary Questions

1) Who formed the Railway Union?2) What is vertical integration?3) What Millionaire made his riches in steel?4) This Union used collective bargaining and strikes5) What was the purpose of the Sherman Antitrust Act?6) What is a corporation that does nothing but buy stocks of

another company?7) She was a supporter of the Great strike of 1877 and

organized United Mine Workers?8) It was an organization that was made up of Socialist and

Communist Workers?9) Theory that supported the great wealth of some individuals?10) Corporation made up of many companies?11) Market in which one company has complete control?