The Second Industrial Revolution: Business and Economics in Late-19th Century America

1
The Second Industrial Revolution Business and
Economics in Late-19th Century America

1. The Rise of Heavy Industry
2. Big Business and its Practices
3. Captains of Industry or Robber Barons?
4. New Technologies that Changed America
5. Demographic Change

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STEEL
Flatiron Building, NYC
The Bessemer Process led to the production of
cheaper steel in the late 1800s.
Brooklyn Bridge
3
US Iron and Steel Production
4
US Becomes a World Manufacturing Powerhouse
5
Big Business increasingly replaced smaller firms
6
Questionable practices were sometimes used to
help big businesses expand and prosper

• POOLS
• Informal price-fixing or market-sharing
  arrangements between firms in the same industry
• TRUSTS
• Big businesses that buy up smaller businesses
  (usually in the same industry) to create one
  large firm

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Methods of Expanding Businesses
8
Andrew Carnegie
Carnegie/US Steel horizontal and vertical
integration
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John D. Rockefeller
Standard Oil Company horizontal integration
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A Political Cartoonists View of Rockefellers
Standard Oil Company
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John Pierpont Morgan and the financing of
business expansion
Investment Banking (stocks, corporate bonds)
12
Thomas A. Edison
The Electric Light, 1879
13
Alexander Graham Bell
The Telephone, 1876
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Late-1800s Society

• Population Growth
• Despite declining birthrate
• Immigration
• New Immigrants (Southern and Eastern Europe)
  came in large numbers
• What set New Immigrants apart from earlier
  immigrants?

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Where did Americans live in 1890?
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Cities in Late-1800s America

• Increasing physical division of different classes
  and ethnic groups

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Cities of the Late 1800s

• Impact of new technology
• Gas, then electric lights
• Telephones
• Transportation improvements and streetcar
  suburbs

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Victorian ArchitectureLate 1800s - Early 1900s
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Victorian Architecture
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Middle Class Life Education

• Education increasingly popular and advanced
• Public high schools in US
• 1870 160
• 1900 - 6000
• More colleges with a focus on research and
  professional education
• Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Univ. of Chicago

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Middle Class Women

• Domesticity still a powerful ideal
• Gradually increasing access to education
• New womens colleges
• Some access to professions (still difficult,
  though)

22
The Gibson Girl
The somewhat more liberated woman of the 1890s,
complete with shirtwaist blouse and ankle-length
skirt (popularized in advertisements drawn by
Charles Gibson)
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The Success Ethic

• Wealth available to anyone willing to pursue it
• HARD WORK GOOD CHARACTER SUCCESS