Cambridge AS History 9489 Gilded Age & Progressive Era

[0:05]Hello historians and welcome to another Purple Shirt History. Today, we'll be talking about the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, which runs from 1780 to about 1920. This is the period after the Civil War where America's industrial strength grows tremendously. This video is intended for Cambridge A.S. students, but if you're studying American history in any other exam board, it should also be quite useful. With that in mind, would you mind taking just a quick second to hit like and subscribe so other students studying all around the world can see this video as well. Much appreciated. Now, sit back, relax, grab a drink and your notebook and let's study about the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in the United States of America. Getting into the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 1870s to 1920. This is a topic that you can split into two and it's very causal. So the Gilded Age and the excesses of it will cause the progressive era. The Gilded Age was a term coined by Mark Twain. Gilded means it looks very nice on the outside, it could be golden, but on the inside it is not valuable. It's just a patina, it's just to make things look better than they are. The Progressive Era is going to be a reaction to the excesses of this capitalism of J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, these types of people. Ruthless capitalists who eventually will get the moniker Captain of Industry. If you didn't like them, you would call them a robber baron. The progressives would want a number of reforms passed, mostly to do with labor, working conditions. We see a lot of strikes during this era. We see women trying to get the right to vote. So suffragettes. We see temperance movements trying to get alcohol banned. There are a lot of things going on. And it all culminates with American entry into World War I and the effect that it had on society. Here's today's agenda. Why was the late 19th century an age of rapid industrialization? With the Civil War over, the U.S. could concentrate on developing itself economically and catching up to Britain, who was the first country to industrialize. France and Prussia and some other European countries were also trying to play catchup. How significant were the consequences of rapid economic growth in the late 19th century? This industrialization and this rapid growth is going to have profound social changes mainly with capital and labor. We'll see a number of strikes, we'll see a number of movements to improve working conditions. We'll see media actually play a positive role. So things like Matthew Brady and his pictures that were documenting child labor. We'll see Upton St. Clair, his book The Jungle and the awful conditions in the meat packing industry. There are a lot of social changes during this era that are well documented and definitely worth checking out when you have some free time. Also, with this industrial growth, it will pull immigration from all over the world. There will be Chinese laborers working on the railroads. There will be people from Eastern Europe. There'll be Jews from the Russian Empire. There'll be Irish, there'll be people from the south of Italy. Many different groups of people come to America during this time and it causes a lot of social tensions. So we'll see anti-immigrant feeling starts to become a major political theme and there's parties like the No Nothing Party who really want to stop immigration into the United States. What were the main aims and policies of the Progressive Movement and how popular were they? There are many, many different aims of the Progressive Movement. The first one, in my opinion, is just cleaning up the massive amount of corruption in America. Whenever huge sums of money are created, there's going to be corruption. And corruption in the late 19th century is just eye-watering. So we're going to see things like buying politicians. There's a lot of political corruption and the most famous example is Tammany Hall in New York City. Political machines, they were called. We'll get into that in a bit. But also just monopolies. So people like John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil would use anti-competitive practice to just destroy the competition. It was unrestricted capitalism and John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil became the biggest company in the world by using some pretty unsavory tactics. This included using the railroads to their advantage, charging people different prices for the same freight. This would be eliminated with the Hepburn Act, but things like that you would take for granted now. People had monopolies on railroads, monopolies on transportation and this would cause different prices for different businesses leading to unfair competitive advantages. Child labor and better working conditions is a main thing during the progressive era as well. I already mentioned Matthew Brady and Upton Sinclair, but there were a lot of other great journalists and social reformers that were really focused on that. And education as well. Education in America owes a great debt to people like Horace Greeley and having free compulsory education for young people in the country became a thing during this era. Political reforms like campaign finance reform, breaking up the political machines, having more direct democracy, expanding the voter base, these were all things the progressives wanted. Women were really active in the Progressive Era. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted temperance. We have to realize how big a role alcohol played during this time period. There was a lot of alcoholism in America. Alcohol was such a central part to people's lives in this era, especially hard liquor like whiskey was very commonplace. Which caused a lot of family problems, accidents at work. So public drunkenness was a huge issue the progressives wanted to tackle. There's two different ways to deal with it. One is temperance, which means passing laws to drink less. And the other one is prohibition, which is an outright ban of the sale of alcohol. Environmental conservation becomes a thing in this era. Massive pollution and destruction of natural habitats in North America up to this point. And Theodore Roosevelt is the first president to actually set aside lands for National Parks. Civil rights for many different racial groups, but especially African Americans, is also another key aspect during this Progressive Era. How successful was the Progressive Movement up to 1920? It's really a mixed bag. You can choose which way you want to go with this. I don't want to tip you, lean you one way or the other. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act breaks up the monopolies. We see the expansion of democracy. With eventually women getting the right to vote, we see a lot of progress in education and labor reform. We see the National Park system. There's a lot of positive things. On the other hand though, there is a lot of unfinished business. So reforms make things more palatable, but there's still a lot of things in American society that weren't addressed. For example, the civil rights situation will take a few more generations to get another civil rights act passed. There's still massive inequality between capital and labor. There are a few federal holidays made, there are some improvements and working conditions, but the capital definitely is in control over labor throughout this period and going forward into the future. So you can pick and choose, it's a good question to answer because you can really look at it from either side and have a lot of evidence. Why was the late 19th century an age of rapid industrialization? So here we see a picture of John D. Rockefeller. I put his nickname underneath his picture, John D. Wreck-a-Fella, because of his famous ruthlessness in his business practices. The first line is Growth of Trusts, corporations and robber barons. Trusts are anti-competitive organizations. So people basically engaging in price fixing. We'll see this being tackled through the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But for a while, there's an era of consolidation in oil, copper, railroads, all kinds of things. So the heavy industry of America is controlled by just a few dozen insanely wealthy individuals. And they have the name robber barons because of their extreme and excessive greed. A lot of them are centered in Pittsburgh and Ohio. So Standard Oil is from Ohio. Carnegie, if you're looking to go to Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, that was named after the famous robber baron/captain of industry Andrew Carnegie. Technological innovations, example given electrical power and the telephone. Electricity. Yeah, pretty great. Wouldn't be able to do these videos without it. Right. Electrical power. We start to see Westinghouse. We see Edison, Tesla, all these famous names. Open up labs. We see the electrification of America, which is rapid and starts in the East Coast and and sprawls out from places like New Jersey, New York.

[9:04]The telephone. The telegraph was a great invention in the mid 19th century to reach California through wired communication. But now we see the telephone and the ability to reach very far, very fast with voice communication, which is a revolutionary breakthrough. Growth of the railroads. So I love railroads. I'm a huge fan. I enjoyed traveling on the high-speed network in China and in in Europe, in Germany. So I'm a big proponent of the railroads and America was at the forefront of railroad building in the 19th century. They all got torn up in the 20th century, so that's another topic for another day. Railroads were incredibly important in moving coal, moving oil, moving products to new markets in the country. So the growth of railroads and the rates that they charged, for example, if Leland Stanford, another famous university, some of you may be wanting to go to Stanford University. It's named after a railroad baron. So he could charge person A $20 per car and person B, maybe his friend, and charge him $10 per car. So this was a huge competitive advantage and was extremely beneficial for people on the inside, but it was very detrimental to people on the outside. Trade policies and protectionism. We see America protect its nascent industries from the more developed ones in Europe, especially in the U.K. Protectionist measures are put in place to help with the oil industry, the mining industry and so on.

[10:52]How significant were the consequences of rapid economic growth in the late 19th century? Whenever there is a new market being developed, you're going to need more workers. So immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe became a big thing, especially people from places that previously did not immigrate to America before. So there are different waves of immigration. When I do an A.P. U.S. history video on this, you'll see what I mean in detail. But we have, you know, the first wave of immigrants from the British Isles. Then we have immigrants from other places in Western Europe. And then it just kind of keeps going eastward. By this point in the Gilded Age, we're seeing a lot of people from the Russian Empire, for example. A lot of Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement. We see a lot of people from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy, that is the poorer part of Italy. So for economic reasons, people come over to America. Many different Germans. We see all different types of people, different languages, different religions. And it becomes a real mix of people coming in, which causes nativist sentiment. Immigrants are blamed for crime. Immigrants are blamed for not being American enough and and so on and so forth. Which is a theme that is going to be recurring in American history, as you can tell right now. Industrial growth and periods of economic recession, example, the Panic of 1873. So this is a boom-bust cycle. We see this massive economic growth. People start speculating. People start making huge bets on railroads that they think will be completed and make a lot of money. And the railroad never gets land or it's never built and those people lose all their money. We see something called the Panic of 1873. This is just one example of depression level economic contraction. There are things that go up and there things that go down. There's euphoria and despair. So markets are incredibly volatile during this period. Impact of urbanization on living conditions, example given housing, health and safety. We see places like New York City just explode in population and the infrastructure in the city is not equipped to handle with this massive influx of people. So there's going to be a lot of disease being spread. There's going to be a lack of sanitation because the plumbing and all these types of things aren't developed yet. And living conditions are squalid in many cities. So we'll see this being tackled by the journalists who want to improve working conditions and living conditions for these new immigrant families. Rise of organized labor in industry and agriculture, example given the Granger Movement and labor movement. The Granger Movement is agricultural, but I really want to focus on the labor movement. For example, if there's a strike, the owners would hire strike breakers in order to beat up the people that were striking for better pay and better conditions. Chances are there are some of you that have played the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, probably my favorite video game in top three. But there's something called the Pinkerton Agency in that video game. And that's a real agency. That was a real organization that was for higher that would break strikes and do all kinds of nasty things for the right price. People die in strikes. We also see assassinations of political figures during this time. We see William McKinley being shot and killed and that's what leads to Theodore Roosevelt becoming president. So a lot of violence, a lot of unrest and it's all due to this massive shift and change in society. What were the main aims and policies of the Progressive Movement and how popular were they? Limits on party machines and bosses. For this one, you just need to know Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. It was basically a system set up to perpetuate the party rule in New York City. The corruption was insane. They were taking building contracts and grossly inflating the price of the materials and labor. There are buildings in New York City that were just 10 times the cost of what they really should have been if it was an honest and fair bidding process. These types of things you can look into to see how the political machines were a big problem in American democracy at that time. Temperance and prohibition. We've already gone over alcohol and its role in society. Temperance was seen as just reducing the amount of alcohol in American life through taxation. But prohibition is something that will be tried. It will be part of the American experiment. And a constitutional amendment will be made to ban the sale and transportation. It won't be repealed until F.D.R. becomes president. It is arguably a key contributor in the rise of gangsters like Al Capone and people like that. Female emancipation. The female rights Act. We see Seneca Falls, that's something that you need to know. There are a lot of famous female figures during this time period. A lot of colorful individuals. There was a woman named Carrie Nation, who would just go into bars with a axe and smash it to bits. It was an interesting time in American history. It ranged from polite discourse and petitions to axe wielding bar smashers. Regulation of private corporations. This is an interesting one. I can go on a long time about this one, but corporations seem to have a very special place in American society. There was a presidential candidate not too long ago named Mitt Romney, saying corporations are people, my friend. That was a quote that really stuck in a lot of voters' minds. Unregulated corporations only have one job. They are there to make profits. Businesses are there to make money, so it's very simple. We will see more regulations put on companies and corporations for environmental purposes, for workers rights purposes. We will see a more restrained version of capitalism from the beginning of this period to the end of it. How successful was the Progressive Movement up to the 1920s? Achievements of the progressive presidents. Well, there's Taft, there's Teddy Roosevelt. There's a few progressive presidents. I'm going to stand by what I said before. I think the Progressive Era was very successful. There's always going to be rollbacks of things that were made in progressive movements, but the expansion of democracy. We see a lot of positive things. Now is a good time to mention Woodrow Wilson. We see Theodore Roosevelt. There's going to be a very interesting election in 1912. It's going to be a four-way race with Woodrow Wilson winning the presidency. He would consider himself a progressive president. So there was a good two decades where you can argue progressives were in charge of the U.S. presidency. Constitutional reforms. So no from the 16th to the 19th amendment. 16th is the federal income tax one. Ouch. 17th is the direct election of senators. 18th is prohibition. 19th is woman's suffrage. There are a lot of other reforms during this time period, but please know those and the impact that they had on American society. State versus federal successes. If you're going to say the Progressive Movement was not as effective as it could have been, you could look at the state level. In the South, civil rights were an issue that didn't have much progress. We still see massive corporations pay their workers very little and a few people at the top reaping most of the profits. So there are successes and failures at the state and federal level. Pro and Con them and then you can come to your own conclusion about how successful the movement was. Limits of the Progressive Movement. Again, civil rights is the key one. There's a lot of different details you can write about there. Women did get the right to vote, but there were other aspects like equal pay and equal social status that weren't truly fulfilled. So that's another limitation of the Progressive Movement. And workers. They did gain some rights, but as mentioned, there's still toiling away in the mines, in the steel mills, doing very difficult and dangerous work for little pay while people like Carnegie becomes the richest man in the world. Wrapping up here, understanding the content. There's a great history channel series called The Men Who Built America. I highly recommend that. I'll put a link in the description, so you can check it out. But it was an amazing time if you're looking at how massive a change of the human condition was. Going from a primarily agricultural, sustenance-based type of lifestyle in the early 1800s to what we would call the modern world by the 1920s. In the course of human history, this is one of the most drastic and sharp changes that we've ever experienced and we're still dealing with the fallout now. As mentioned, the Gilded Age, it wasn't golden all the way through. It's much like the Olympic medals now. It's just 0.5% gold and 99.5% other metals, silver and so on. So just a little veneer to show things are great, but if you scratch the surface, you'll see there is massive social unhappiness. There's unrest, there's political assassinations, there's all kinds of things going on that are a byproduct of this massive social change. So prosperity was not there for everyone just yet. And last but not least, the Progressive Era. It was a reaction to the excesses of the Gilded Age. So when you're writing your essays, please think of causation, the Gilded Age, and then what did the Progressive Era do in order to alleviate the negative aspects of the Gilded Age?