Week 3 Reflection : Industrial Capitalism

The Gilded Age was a term created by Mark Twain describing the 19th century which was all polished to be something it was not or in other words, pretty on the outside, ugly on the inside.   

Factory

The Industrial economy developed in the late 19th century. Industrialization can be defined as the process in which goods are made, mostly in factories. With industrialization becoming popular, many farm workers moved to places where industrial economies were booming to find work. By the 1900s employment in manufacturing had increased by millions. With the transition in population, came the need for more housing. The living wage came about due to white men seeing the need to separate themselves from the rest of the workers in order to make a higher compensation and be awarded the best positions. The living wage only benefitted white men because it allowed for employers to pay others less based on race, gender, and ethnicity. Women workers were paid less because their work wasn’t viewed as important. They were also paid less because they didn’t have families to support, that was believed to be a man's job. The Civil Service Act was created to enforce applicants for certain government jobs to take a test. With all these negative things arising within the work force came reasons for employees to form unions against their employers. The Pullman Strike was a major railroad strike in the late 1800s. The Pullman Palace Car Company ended up cutting their workers' wages down in results to economic depression. The worker wages were already low to begin with. With the workers' wages being decreased many families began to starve and face other financial issues that were hard to overcome. The company's president refused to listen to the workers complaints which made them walk out on their jobs. This strike ended up with thousands of workers walking away from their jobs and multiple railroads being shut down. The federal government formed an injunction. This was the first time an injunction was used to break a strike. President Cleveland ordered troops to make sure the trains went back into motion. The workers did not back down which resulted to the troops reacting with violence and ended with between 4 and 30 workers being killed and others being wounded. Among the strike ending, some workers weren’t rehired while others were under the condition that they never join a union again. On July 7th, Eugene Debs and four other leaders of the American Railway union were arrested for violating the injunction. 

This strike was an example of the myth of “Free Market”. Free market is the idea that companies and individuals do compete free from government influence. This is false because government influences how and what happens to the individual. The United States became industrialized because of the influence the government had. The government provided subsidized railroads, passed limited liability laws, crushed labor laws, enacted high tariffs and used force to remove Indians from the western lands needed for expansion. 

Taylorism was a new way of producing goods. It made hiring easier and labor strikes more difficult. It also made skilled workers obsolete. This led to the expansion of railroads. This expansion pushed Americans West. More jobs were created, larger volumes of good were shipped and connections between farms and industrial cities formed into national markets. In the late 19th century, new communication forms emerged. This included the phonograph, the telephone and radio, and newspapers and magazines. Also, sports came emerged including basketball, bicycling, and football. With the emerge of industrialization, farmers blamed railroad workers for farms being in such bad shape. 

Industrialization was responsible for the leap and fail in the United States economy in the 19th century. The government made it possible for the Unites States to thrive in this time period. 

Overview of the Gilded Age by Mintz, S & Mcneil, S

website :http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=9&smtID=1

Gilded Age by History.com Editors

https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/gilded-age#section_3