Industrialization Urbanization Immigration

Homestead Steel

Who built a Modern, Industrial America? Industrial capitalists like John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie?  Bankers like J. Pierpont Morgan?  Industrial workers drawn to the United States from Europe by the lure of jobs?  It was not this simple of course.  America possessed the raw materials, the technology, and transportation network that made mass production possible.   Washington too contributed substantially to the growth of big business, despite its professed adherence to laissez-faire economics.

Homestead Steel, pictured above, demonstrates many of the themes common to the Gilded Age.  Carnegie Steel, of which Homestead was a part,  is an example nonpareil of the consolidation of  big business, the application of new technologies, the adoption of innovative organizational methods, and assembly line production that defined the new role of the industrial worker.  The 1892 Homestead strike was infamous as an example of the conflict between labor and management in the economically troubled 1890s. Carnegie's steel interests would form the core of America's first billion dollar corporation, United States Steel, organized by banker J. Pierpont Morgan.  Carnegie, along with Rockefeller, would become two of America's great philanthropists.  In the meantime they fell back on Social Darwinism explanations to legitimize their accumulation of great wealth and economic power.  But it would be Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust that became the epitome of "monopoly" in the Gilded Age and set the stage for Progressive reform.

Questions:

• Were Carnegie and Rockefeller robber barons?  Entrepreneurs that increased America's wealth and power?  Did the giant enterprises they created stifle competition? In what way are monopolies inimical to democracy?
• Why did workers lack power?  Did unions such as the AFofL advance the cause of organized labor?  Did strikes such as Homestead and Pullman help or hurt the cause of workers?  Why were unions thought to be the hotbeds of radical thought such as socialism and anarchism? For examples, see   "Homestead:  Households of a Mill Town" or Haymarket Affair.

Urbanization

American Cities grew at an astounding rate during the Gilded Age.  Urban populations increased because of in-migration from rural America to the city and because of the migration of millions of new immigrants from abroad, primarily from Europe.  Cities were the most visible symbols of both the wealth and poverty engendered by industrialization.  In New York City for example, millionaires resided in prodigious luxury in their mansions along Fifth Avenue while only a few miles away on the Lower East Side the "other half"  huddled together in their overcrowded and unsanitary tenements.  Yet cities were magical places for poor and rich alike.  It would be in cities that you would find the new marvels of the industrial age, buildings reaching to the sky and engineering feats such as the Brooklyn Bridge.  Here people found all kinds of leisure activities, baseball, vaudeville, and amusement parks like Coney Island.  Here also they would find museums and public libraries.  By 1900 one in five Americans lived in cities with a population over 100,000.  While the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Poster pictured above) not only displayed America's technological prowess to the millions of wide-eyed visitors but would lead the country is proposing ways to make cities beautiful.

Immigration