United States History II: Industrialization to the Present

This is Unit Two of Social Sciences and History, part one of two: United States history from the last West to the nineteen twenties. Unit one closed on Reconstruction's collapse. This part carries one idea. Industrialization was a chain, not a heap of facts: new technology made large-scale production possible, large-scale production concentrated ownership, concentrated ownership made wage labor the common condition and pulled workers into cities, and cities and squeezed farmers produced the politics that answered all of it. The exam tests that causation, and the chain is paid off in the sequencing entry at the center of this lecture. Then the same nation turned outward, to empire and to a war whose treaty it refused. By the end you will be able to classify a business combination. To put industrialization's consequences in order as causation. To pair the age's ideas with their politics. To classify a senator in the treaty fight by what he wanted changed. And to answer the sample question on women's wartime work with access to work and nothing grander.

Two entries on the last West: the belief that settled it, and what settlement did to the peoples already there.

The belief that settled the West.

SSH 0101 Manifest Destiny and the Last West

Manifest Destiny, John O'Sullivan's phrase, named the belief that White Americans had a duty to settle the West. Homesteaders took the Oregon Trail, miners followed strikes like the Comstock Lode, and cattle drives followed the railroads. Bonanza farms succeeded by the eighteen seventies while family farms struggled. In mining and cattle alike, big business replaced the lone prospector within a generation.

What expansion did to the peoples already there.

SSH 0102 Reservations, Allotment, and Americanization

The Indian Wars ended with the Plains nations forced onto reservations; Sand Creek and Wounded Knee were massacres. Reformers' Americanization policy followed: boarding schools and allotment of tribal land to households, with surplus reservation land sold to settlers. The anchor's judgment is that well-meaning reformers traumatized children and impoverished nations. The course states the record: schools, allotment, land lost.

Four entries on industry, labor, city and ideas: the businesses industrialization built, the workers who built them, the cities that absorbed them, and the ideas the age used to explain itself.

The businesses industrialization built.

SSH 0103 Steel, Oil, and the Forms of Big Business

Communications, electric power and steel were the decisive technologies after the Civil War. Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil and Morgan in finance grew through vertical integration, horizontal integration, trusts and holding companies: one firm owning the mines, the mills and the railroads between them. Control of whole industries passed to fewer hands. The forms are sorted later in this lecture.

The workers who built it.

SSH 0104 Wage Labor and the First Unions

For the first time most workers were employed by others, with no legal limit on hours or conditions. The Knights of Labor admitted all wage earners; the American Federation of Labor federated craft unions. The Haymarket affair of eighteen eighty-six turned opinion against unions, and the century ended with most laborers unrepresented. Consumer culture grew alongside: department stores, mail order, credit.

The cities that absorbed them.

SSH 0105 Urbanization, Immigration, and the Great Migration

Electricity and steam freed factories from rivers, and cities filled with workers from the countryside and from southern and eastern Europe. African Americans left the rural South for northern cities, the Great Migration, pushed by violence and poverty and pulled by wages and the vote. Both groups met discrimination and blame for urban ills. Settlement houses, largely run by women, offered relief.

The ideas the age used to explain itself.

SSH 0106 Social Darwinism, Pragmatism, and the Social Gospel

Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism held that the fittest rightly prospered, an apologia for inequality. William James's pragmatism tested ideas by results; John Dewey's instrumentalism put education at the center. The social gospel asked churches to act in this world, and realist novels portrayed working lives. The exam pairs social Darwinism with laissez-faire and the social gospel with reform. Keep the pairing.

Four entries on Gilded Age politics and the farmers: machines and patronage, the farmers' revolt, sorting a business combination, and the chain of consequences in order.

Politics in the Gilded Age.

SSH 0107 Machines, Patronage, and Civil Service

Gilded Age politics was local machines and federal ineffectiveness. Bosses like Tammany's Tweed ran cities on graft. Stalwarts defended patronage, Half-Breeds wanted civil service, and Mugwumps bolted over corruption. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act were both weakly effective. Tariffs and gold against silver were the live issues, and few measures reached struggling Americans directly.

The farmers' revolt.

SSH 0108 Farmers, Populists, and 1896

Overproduction and high tariffs squeezed farmers. The Grange of eighteen sixty-seven and the Farmers' Alliance organized them, and the Populist Party formed in eighteen ninety-one with a subtreasury plan for crop loans. Bryan's silver campaign of eighteen ninety-six, backed by Populists, lost to McKinley. The anchor's glossary says eighteen ninety and its text ninety-one; the course follows the text.

Sorting the forms of business combination.

SSH 0109 Classifying a Business Combination

The exam names a firm's growth strategy and asks which form it is, and the anchor supplies four. Vertical integration acquires the stages of one product's life, from raw material to delivery. Horizontal integration merges with or buys similar firms doing the same stage. A trust places the stock of several firms with trustees who run them together. A holding company owns a majority of the stock in several companies and controls them from a central entity. A steelmaker buying iron mines, coke ovens, a railroad and ore ships is vertical, every stage of steel. A refiner buying or bankrupting rivals until it holds most of the country's refining is horizontal, one stage repeated. Rival railroads handing their shares to a board that sets one set of rates is a trust. A company created only to hold controlling shares in a dozen operating firms is a holding company. To tell vertical from horizontal, ask whether the firms acquired do the same work or different work along one chain. The trap is treating trust and monopoly as synonyms: a trust is a legal device, a monopoly a market condition.

Putting industrialization's consequences in order.

SSH 0110 Sequencing Industrialization's Consequences

Exam questions on this period ask which development followed which, and the anchor's chain runs from technology to business to labor to city to politics. New technologies, above all steel, electricity and communication, made large-scale production possible. Large-scale production concentrated ownership in trusts and integrated firms. Concentrated ownership made wage labor the majority condition and provoked organization, the Knights, then the craft federation. Factories freed from rivers pulled workers into cities from the countryside, from Europe and from the South. Cities produced machines, graft and reformers, and farmers squeezed by railroads and tariffs produced the Alliance and the Populists. Given Populist Party, Haymarket affair, the Knights' rise and Standard Oil's consolidation, the order is consolidation, the Knights, Haymarket, the Populists: the seventies, the early eighties, eighty-six, ninety-one. The chain is causal, not merely chronological, and the exam tests the causation. A question that puts unions before the wage-labor majority has the arrow backward. Anchor the chain at steel first and the Populists last. This is the lecture's idea, made into a procedure.

Four entries on Progressivism: who the Progressives were, two strategies for Black civil rights, the vote for women, and reform in the White House.

The movement that answered these consequences.

SSH 0111 Progressivism: Who, What, Why

Progressivism began as grassroots reform and reached Washington after nineteen hundred. Muckrakers exposed social ills. Educated middle-class Protestants dominated, but Black Americans, women and rural people joined, seeking democracy, efficiency and social justice: the initiative, referendum, recall and direct primary, and La Follette's Wisconsin Idea. Mainstream Progressives feared the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, who wanted workers' power by direct action.

Two strategies for Black civil rights.

SSH 0112 Washington, Du Bois, and the NAACP

Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise of eighteen ninety-five urged hard work and accommodation to earn White goodwill. W. E. B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement demanded immediate political, social and economic equality. The NAACP was founded in nineteen oh nine by an interracial coalition that included Du Bois. The exam pairs the two as strategies: accommodation against immediate equality.

The vote for women.

SSH 0113 Woman Suffrage to the Nineteenth Amendment

Stanton, Anthony, Catt and Paul built the case for a constitutional amendment. Paul's Silent Sentinels picketed the White House for years, and their hunger strike and force-feeding became a scandal. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in nineteen twenty. Suffrage came to fruition partly through the war's circumstances and, unlike prohibition, it stayed. The women's movement then waned for a time.

Progressivism in the White House.

SSH 0114 Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson: Progressivism in the White House

Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal confronted big business, sided with workers in disputes, and preserved federal land. Taft pushed antitrust cases but lost his mentor's support. In nineteen twelve Roosevelt's New Nationalism ran against Wilson's New Freedom, and the split handed Wilson the presidency. Wilson delivered a wave of Progressive legislation, and then the war shunted reform aside for national security.

Five entries on empire and the Great War: the turn outward in ninety-eight, the big stick and the dollar, the road into the war, the treaty the Senate refused, and the aftermath at home.

The turn from isolation to empire.

SSH 0115 From Isolation to Empire: 1898 and the Open Door

Turner's frontier thesis and Mahan's sea power underpinned expansion; businesses wanted markets and missionaries wanted converts. The Spanish-American War of eighteen ninety-eight brought Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, alongside Hawaii, and Hay's Open Door notes claimed equal access to China's markets. The Anti-Imperialist League objected and was overruled by a public that read empire as prestige and progress.

The big stick and the dollar.

SSH 0116 The Roosevelt Corollary and Dollar Diplomacy

The Roosevelt Corollary declared that the United States would police chronic wrongdoing in Latin America. The big stick relied on the threat of force more than its use; Taft's dollar diplomacy used economic power instead, Central American debts paid with American dollars and troops behind them. Taft's efforts in Asia alienated Japan, a tension the anchor traces to the Second World War.

The road into the Great War.

SSH 0117 Neutrality to War, 1914–1917

Wilson kept the United States neutral through his first term, but German submarine warfare made neutral trade impossible. Fifty-six members of Congress voted against the war resolution, and it passed. Liberty bonds, propaganda, and laws that silenced dissent followed, upheld in Schenck as a clear and present danger. Unit six carries the war's global course; here, the American entry and the Zimmermann telegram.

The treaty the Senate refused.

SSH 0118 The Treaty Fight: Irreconcilables, Reservationists, Article X

Wilson's Fourteen Points proposed open diplomacy, free trade, freedom of the seas, an end to secret treaties, and a League of Nations to keep peace by discussion. The Allies at Versailles cut his vision down, and the Senate rejected what remained. The exam asks who rejected it and why, and the anchor sorts the senators into two groups. Irreconcilables opposed the treaty on every ground. Reservationists would have accepted it with amendments removing Article X, the clause pledging members to defend one another's territory, which they read as surrendering Congress's power to declare war. To classify a senator, ask what he wanted changed: no League on any terms is an Irreconcilable; yes if Article X goes is a Reservationist; yes as written is a Wilson Democrat. Wilson refused the reservations, the Reservationists would not vote without them, and the two refusals together sank the treaty. The trap is blaming one group alone. Neither had the votes by itself; the treaty failed because Wilson would not compromise with the group that would have. Article X, not the League as an idea, was the sticking point.

The aftermath at home.

SSH 0119 Red Scare, Red Summer, Normalcy

Demobilization brought the flu pandemic, economic trouble and fear of Bolshevik revolution, and the Red Scare restricted radical dissent. Race riots in the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen killed over two hundred fifty people. Harding won a landslide in nineteen twenty on a return to normalcy. Voters wanted low taxes, less Progressivism and less foreign involvement, a break from years of mandates and war.

Two entries to close: the decade of prosperity and backlash, and the sample question on women's wartime work across three wars.

The decade that followed.

SSH 0120 The Twenties: Prosperity, Backlash, New Voices

Ford's moving assembly line made the Model T affordable, and radio, movies, advertising and credit followed. Cities embraced the new; rural traditionalists resisted, as the Scopes trial of nineteen twenty-five and the Second Klan showed. The Harlem Renaissance flourished, with Garvey and Du Bois answering racism by different campaigns. Prohibition fed organized crime, and Harding's scandals, Coolidge and Hoover carried Republican ascendancy to the crash.

The sample question on women's wartime work.

SSH 0121 Wartime Conditions and Women's Work, Three Wars

Sample question nine asks what wartime conditions did for women, and the key is greater access to work. The anchor states the pattern three times. In the Revolution, the war provided new opportunities and new challenges for women alongside enslaved and free Black people. In the First World War, as soldiers left, women and African Americans took jobs previously reserved for White men. In the Second, new employment opened for women and ethnic minorities as White men enlisted or were drafted, with Rosie the Riveter as the symbol. Look for the option that names access to work and nothing grander; distractors offer permanence, political power or equal pay. The anchor is explicit that most First World War gains were temporary, that the postwar culture expected the old order back, and that women who made professional gains in the Second World War were often dismissed afterward. The trap is overclaiming. The key says access to work, not lasting equality; the course adds that the door was closed again after each war, as the anchor records.

Look at what you can now do. You can classify a business combination by asking whether the firms acquired do the same work or different work along one chain, and you can tell a trust from a monopoly. You can put industrialization's consequences in order from steel to the Populists, and you know the exam tests the causation, not the calendar. You can pair social Darwinism with laissez-faire, the social gospel with reform, Washington with accommodation and Du Bois with immediate equality. You can classify a senator in the treaty fight by what he wanted changed, and say that two refusals, not one group, sank the treaty. And you can answer sample question nine with access to work and nothing grander. Part two opens on the crash, and follows the New Deal, the Second World War, the Cold War and the sample question on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the early twenty-first century.