Study guide: From Gilded Age to Progressivism

📋 Course Outline

1. Gilded Age and Progressive Era
2. Resources of Industrialization
3. Wildcat Capitalism and Big Business
4. Capitalism’s Social Consequences
5. Progressive Reforms and Institutions
6. Roosevelt and Progressive Contradictions
7. Origins of Muckraking
8. Muckraking’s Golden Age and Decline

📅 Key Dates

1. 1861–1920The Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era followed one another
2. 1898The Klondike gold rush occurred in Alaska
3. 1919–1920The 18th Amendment established Prohibition and the 19th Amendment granted women voting rights
4. 1920Warren Harding promised a “return to normalcy,” marking the end of the Progressive Era

📖 1. Gilded Age and Progressive Era

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Gilded Age: A period of rapid industrial growth, limited government control, corruption, technological invention, Big Business, and severe poverty and labor exploitation.
• Progressive Era: A reform movement between conservatism and radicalism that sought stronger government regulation of the economy and improvements in society without advocating communism.

★ Must-know

• The Gilded Age included the 1877 Great Railroad Strike and the 1894 Pullman Strike.

Further detail

• Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 work The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today gave the period its name and emphasized the contrast between apparent prosperity and corruption.

💡 Memory Hook

Gilded prosperity contrasted with Progressive reform

📖 2. Resources of Industrialization

★ Must-know

• By 1900, American steel output exceeded the combined output of Great Britain, France, and Germany.

• Industrialization relied on:

  • New England’s water-powered textile mills
  • Pennsylvania’s coal deposits for steel production
  • coal and gas
  • petroleum
  • gold, iron, copper, and zinc

Further detail

• The frontier was declared closed in 1893, according to Frederick Jackson Turner.

• Chicago grew from 30,000 inhabitants in 1860 to approximately 2 million inhabitants in 1900.

💡 Memory Hook

Coal, oil, water, and minerals → industrial growth

📖 3. Wildcat Capitalism and Big Business

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Wildcat capitalism: A system relying on slashing labor costs, selling below cost to eliminate competition, using unfair or illegal practices, consolidating corporations, and intensifying speculation.

★ Must-know

• Republican governments promoted industrialization after the Civil War through high tariffs, non-interventionism, and support for railroad companies and employers.

• The Standard Oil Trust, created in 1882, controlled 90% of U.S. oil production in the early 1900s.

Further detail

• U.S. Steel, formed through a merger involving Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, controlled 80% of U.S. steel production.

• More than 4,000 independent companies merged into approximately 250 trusts during the 1890s and 1900s.

💡 Memory Hook

Robber barons controlling railroads, trusts, and markets

📖 4. Capitalism’s Social Consequences

★ Must-know

• Industrial workers commonly faced a 77-hour work week, no minimum wage, no unemployment benefits, no social security, and dangerous workplaces with high death rates.

📌 African Americans faced de facto segregation in the North and de jure segregation in the South, where Plessy v. Ferguson established the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1896.

• The Knights of Labor operated from 1869 to 1890, the American Federation of Labor was founded in 1886 for skilled workers, and the Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 for workers broadly.

Further detail

• The American Railway Union, associated with Eugene Debs, organized the Pullman Strike in 1894.

• The AFL advocated:

  • an 8-hour day
  • a 6-day week
  • an end to child labor
  • higher wages

💡 Memory Hook

Industrial wealth versus low wages and dangerous work

📖 5. Progressive Reforms and Institutions

★ Must-know

• Progressive reforms addressed:
  • wages
  • retirement funds
  • working conditions
  • child labor
  • citizens’ representation
  • women’s voting rights
  • housing conditions
  • drinking and prostitution

Further detail

• The Progressive Party, also called the Bull Moose Party, was founded in 1912 under Theodore Roosevelt.

• Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago represented the settlement house movement and sought to improve housing and social conditions.

💡 Memory Hook

The Progressive “3 Cs”: corporations, consumers, conservation

📖 6. Roosevelt and Progressive Contradictions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal centered on control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation of natural resources.

★ Must-know

• Theodore Roosevelt strengthened executive power and used the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act against excessive corporate power.

• Progressivism did little for African Americans, supported economic imperialism through Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and the Big Stick policy, and included literacy tests and forced sterilization.

Further detail

• Roosevelt helped resolve the 1902 coal strike in Pennsylvania by favoring negotiations between employers and workers.

• The Children’s Bureau was created under William Howard Taft in 1912, the Clayton Antitrust Act was passed under Woodrow Wilson in 1914, and the Women’s Bureau was created in 1920.

💡 Memory Hook

Reform at home alongside imperialism and exclusion

📖 7. Origins of Muckraking

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Muckraking: Investigative journalism that exposed corruption, monopolies, poor living conditions, and abuses of industrial capitalism.

📝 Essential Points

• The term “muckraker” was associated with Theodore Roosevelt in April 1906 and referred to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from 1698.

• Muckraking emerged amid: appalling industrial working conditions, massive immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, the Grange, founded in 1867, the People’s Party, founded in 1891

• Early investigative journalism included:

  • Civil War battlefield reporting
  • The New York Times’s opposition to Boss Tweed
  • Nellie Bly’s reporting on mental hospitals
  • Ambrose Bierce’s attacks on railroad magnates

💡 Memory Hook

Investigative journalism exposed facts; yellow journalism pursued sensation

📖 8. Muckraking’s Golden Age and Decline

★ Must-know

• The golden age of muckraking lasted approximately from 1900 to 1910 and relied on nationally distributed, inexpensive weeklies and monthlies that allowed time for investigation.

• The January 1903 issue of McClure’s featured:

  • Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil
  • Lincoln Steffens on political corruption
  • Ray Stannard Baker on poor working conditions

• Ida Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil led to a federal investigation in 1904–1906 and the Supreme Court’s 1911 decision to break up the monopoly.

• Jacob Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives helped inspire the New York Tenement House Act of 1901, while Lewis Hine’s photographs exposed child labor and contributed to reform efforts. - How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in May 1911 killed 146 people and prompted laws on workplace safety and working hours.

• Muckraking declined as readership became less receptive, international news displaced domestic news, Big Business improved its public relations, and World War I brought the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act.

Further detail

• Lincoln Steffens’s investigations of corruption in seven cities became The Shame of the Cities in 1907, while David Graham Phillips’s 1906 series “The Treason of the Senate” contributed to the 17th Amendment in 1917.

💡 Memory Hook

Expose abuses → mobilize reform → face backlash and wartime censorship

📊 Synthesis Tables

Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Dimension	Gilded Age	Progressive Era
Government	Limited intervention and support for Big Business	Greater regulation of the economy
Business	Trusts, monopolies, corruption, and speculation	Antitrust action and consumer protection
Labor and society	Low wages, dangerous work, and poor housing	Labor, housing, voting, and social reforms
Politics	Industrial expansion with weak oversight	Reform movement between conservatism and radicalism