The Second Industrial

Revolution

The Expanding Industrial Economy

Railroads and the National Market

Andrew Carnegie

J.P. Morgan

John Rockefeller

Steel Production, 1880-1914

American Attitudes Toward the Robber Barons

The Haves vs. the Have-Nots

This was the cover of Matthew Hale Smith’s book about NYC. This illustrates the growing fear of rising poverty in the midst of growing wealth

A View of Urban Poverty

Jacob A. Riis, author How the other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890)

Gilded Age Politics

Political Corruption

Political Stalemate

How healthy was Gilded Age politics?

Gilded Age Society

American Social Darwinism

William Graham Sumner

What a blessing to let the unreformed drunkard and his children die, and not increase them above all others…How wise to let those of weak digestion from gluttony die, and the temperate to live. What benevolence to let the lawless perish, and the prudent survive.

--The Christian Advocate(1879)

Debating Freedom in the Gilded Age

Horace White

The right of each man to labor as much or as little as he chooses , and to enjoy his own earnings, is the very foundation stone of….freedom.

The Overwhelming Labor Question

The Knights of Labor

Terrance Powderly

Henry George

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

--Henry George, Progress and Poverty

Edward Bellamy

Bellamy’s Utopia

The Social Gospel

Walter Rauschenbusch

Labor Unrest

1880-1900: more than 23,000 strikes (most in the industrial world)

The Haymarket Riot, 1886