Unit 6: Period 6 (1865–1898)

Executive Summary

Period 6 covers the Gilded Age: explosive industrialization, urbanization, immigration, western settlement, and the labor and farmer protests they spawned.

Industrialization

Railroads knitted the nation; steel (Carnegie) and oil (Rockefeller) built corporate giants through vertical and horizontal integration. The rise of trusts and monopolies prompted the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). Inventors — Edison, Bell — transformed daily life. Social Darwinism and the gospel of wealth justified inequality.

Urbanization and immigration

Cities swelled with rural migrants and the 'new immigration' from southern and eastern Europe. Tenements, political machines (Tammany Hall), and settlement houses (Jane Addams's Hull House) defined urban life. Nativism targeted the newcomers.

The West

Homesteaders, railroads, and mining transformed the Plains. Native resistance — the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) — ended with defeat at Wounded Knee (1890) and the Dawes Act's assimilation policy. The frontier closed in 1890 by the census's reckoning.

Gilded Age politics

Parties were closely balanced; patronage and corruption (Credit Mobilier, Tweed Ring) marked the era. Civil service reform (Pendleton Act, 1883) began cleaning house. Tariffs, currency (gold vs silver), and regulation divided the parties.

Labor and farmer movements

Workers organized — Knights of Labor, AFL — and struck (Haymarket 1886, Homestead 1892, Pullman 1894). Farmers formed the Grange and Populist Party, demanding railroad regulation, silver coinage, and reform. The Populists' 1896 defeat at Bryan's hands closed the era, but many demands later became law.

Exam traps

Vertical integration controls supply chains; horizontal integration buys competitors — don't mix them. Social Darwinism misapplied evolution to justify inequality. The Dawes Act intended assimilation but broke up tribal lands. The 'Gilded Age' term is Twain's — gold on the surface, corruption beneath.