Gilded Age Flashcards
What is conspicuous consumption?
Doing something that shows people you have a lot of money.
What is social mobility?
The ability to move up and down between social classes, rich to poor, poor to rich, etc
What is meritocracy?
The government and leaders will be elected and kept in office through their skill. Also refers to regular citizens who should be getting ahead based on how smart they are or how talented they are.
What is philanthropy?
large donations by private citizens to charitable causes. often given to universities, the arts, libraries, medical schools or advancements, etc. does not include regular charity, such as donating $100 to an organization.
What are strikebreakers?
workers, typically new immigrants, who are brought in by factory owners to “break” a strike by workers who are protesting for higher wages or better working conditions. these strikebreakers often worked for even lower wages than those who were on strike and were often targeted by the workers who were fired.
What does it mean to be blacklisted?
If you were a worker fighting for higher wages or better working conditions, you might be targeted as a troublemaker. If the factory owner targeted you as “blacklisted” it would mean that owner would call other factory owners to make sure you weren’t hired.
Andrew Carnegie: Robber Baron or Captain of Industry?
Carnegie could be looked at as a robber baron because you could argue he exploited his workers and therefore “robbed” them of fair wages to enrich himself. You could also argue he was simply earning as much money as the system allowed and he was following all laws but created a monopoly as a captain of the steel industry.
Social Darwinism
ideology that twisted Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest to apply to humans. those who followed this philosophy believed that the weakest members of our society, or those who were “unfit” should be left to die off so the human race would be stronger.
Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall
Boss tweed was a New York City politician who ran a political machine (symbolic, not an actual machine) called Tammany Hall. He oversaw a lot of people who carried out his wishes. For example, as new immigrants came into Ellis Island, he would often send Tammany officials to the docks to offer them a job or some place to stay. In return, they were expected to vote for Tammany officials during elections. Tweed then used taxpayer money to engage in fraud by pocketing extra cash. For example, construction workers tied to Tammany might charge the city $400 per window in a new government building, when it actually cost them $200. They would then funnel the money back to Tammany. In practice, a lot of immigrants benefited from Tammany, but they were also taken advantage of.
Unions
when workers organized themselves as a group for better working conditions so one troublemaker couldn’t be fired
Andrew Carnegie
Was born in Scotland and was one of the few examples of someone working their way from poverty to the top class. He claimed he had respect for his workers but really just wanted to make money.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
railroad tycoon -where he made his money. extremely wealthy; example of conspicuous consumption
John Rockefeller
monopolized the oil industry
John Roebling
built Brooklyn Bridge; shows the incredible feats and innovation during the Gilded Age
Thomas Alva Edison
electricity, inventor, light bulb; again, incredible ingenuity and innovation of the Gilded Age
Alexander Graham Bell
telegraph; telephone
Andrew Mellon and J.P. Morgan
bankers who monopolized the banking industry and came up with ingenious new methods of banking
Why was the era in American History at the end of the 19th century called the Gilded Age?
It was called the gilded age because it looked good on the outside but really was a mess on the inside or fools gold.
Income inequality
also known as the income gap, it means how far away the rich are from the poor. During the Gilded Age, there was a huge gap between rich and poor. That gap had been much smaller prior to the Civil War. For the past 30 years, the income gap had continued to widen again, approaching the Gilded Age income inequality. we watched a video on income inequality in class (I just posted the link on the calendar for today, 3/3, so you can watch it again if you need to) that describes the myth in America today. Most Americans think that wealth distribution is more fair than it actually is and actually want the wealth to be more fairly distributed. the top 1% controls 40% of all the wealth in America and some other statistics show how much income inequality there is between the rich and the poor. income inequality was also terrible during the Gilded Age and would eventually contribute to the Great depression
Homestead Strike & Pinkertons
Carnegie’s manager, Henry Frick, wanted to cut wages and break up the steel union. The workers went on strike. Frick tried to stop the strike by hiring strikebreakers so he wouldn’t have to give into the demands of the union and hired a private army (Pinkertons) to protect the strikebreakers from being assaulted by the workers who Frick was trying to get rid of. In a confrontation between the Pinkertons and striking workers, someone opened fire and people on both sides were killed. The governor sent the militia to maintain order and the workers, after 4 months, went back to work at the lower wage.
George Eastman
3rd largest philanthropist after Carnegie and Rockefeller. Created the Eastman Kodak company, which became the largest photography company in the world. Started from nothing, so is a rags to riches story like Carnegie and Rockefeller. Different from them in that he gave away his money anonymously and insisted on giving most of it away while he was alive.
Russell Conwell
believed that if a person worked hard, they could go from rags to riches (lectured about this idea all over America). significant because he used God and religion to make people believe that God was punishing poor people and that the rich were honest, good men who achieved wealth because God wanted it that way; mixture of social darwinism and America’s longstanding Puritan values
Thomas Nast
Nast was the political cartoonist that we saw in the video on NY. He was a journalist who published cartoons that were critical of Boss Tweed and wanted to uncover the ugliness underneath the Gilded Age. Tweed was angry because his constituents (voters) often couldn’t read, but they understood what was happening from the cartoons.
Social class
We will use the definition the NY Times used which is that 1) education, 2) job, 3) income and 4) wealth are used to determine which social class you fall into (rich, upper middle, lower class, etc)
