question

Which of the following describes the Gilded Age?

answer

An era marked by personal greed and a corrupt partnership between business and politics

question

Which of the following developments was a key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age?

answer

The growth of industrialism in the United States

question

Which of the following big businesses came to dominate American life in the second half of the nineteenth century?

answer

Railroading

question

Which of the following factors boosted nineteenth-century railroad construction in America significantly?

answer

Monetary aid and land grants from federal and state governments

question

How was it possible that Jay Gould was described as both the world's richest man and the most hated man in America when he died in 1892?

answer

He was a symbol of all the most troubling aspects of big business in America.

question

Which relatively new building material both improved railroading in the late nineteenth century and depended on it?

answer

Steel produced through the Bessemer process

question

What was the purpose of vertical integration, which was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century?

answer

It placed all aspects of the business, from mining raw materials to marketing and transporting finished products, under the control of the chief operating officer.

question

Carnegie Steel achieved the tremendous productivity that Andrew Carnegie insisted on

answer

by forcing employees to work long hours under extremely dangerous conditions for low pay.

question

Which of the following occurred soon after Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania in 1859?

answer

Thousands launched their own small refineries.

question

What was the main purpose of crude oil in the United States before the advent of the automobile?

answer

Lubrication and lighting in the form of kerosene

question

John D. Rockefeller first organized Standard Oil as a trust to

answer

control the key elements of production and corner the market for oil.

question

Rockefeller ultimately reorganized Standard Oil as a holding company in the late nineteenth century to

answer

legally combine competing companies under a central administration.

question

Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?

answer

The company had employed both horizontal and vertical integration to control more than 90 percent of the oil business.

question

In her History of the Standard Oil Company published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as

answer

the man whose business methods made him a symbol of heartless monopoly capitalism.

question

How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?

answer

Bell used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed both local and cross-country communication

question

Where had electricity been put to use in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century?

answer

Mostly in urban areas

question

The industries that grew up around the revolutionary inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated that

answer

the age of the inventor was becoming the age of the corporation

question

The turn of the twentieth century saw individual entrepreneurship in the United States yield to

answer

finance capitalism.

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Prominent business leaders of the late nineteenth century, such as J. P. Morgan, believed

answer

consolidation and central control were preferable to competition.

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How did J. P. Morgan achieve his stunning reorganization and consolidation of businesses in the late nineteenth century?

answer

He sometimes formed a community of interest, comprised of a few directors he chose.

question

What was accomplished by J. P. Morgan's railroad companies' practice of issuing watered stock?

answer

Watered stock kept investors happy but caused overcapitalization and debt for the railroads.

question

J. P. Morgan acquired the core of what would be the largest corporation in the world when he purchased

answer

steel interests formerly controlled by Andrew Carnegie.

question

What is an oligopoly?

answer

A competitive business system in which several large companies control production in an industry

question

What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?

answer

Progress is the result of competition, and social reforms and other modes of human interference impede progress.

question

What message did Andrew Carnegie promote in his gospel of wealth

answer

Millionaires should be trustees and agents for the poor.

question

The economic theory of laissez-faire gained political clout in the late nineteenth century because

answer

the Supreme Court increasingly was reinterpreting the Constitution to protect business

question

The Supreme Court's late-nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment helped big business by

answer

elevating property rights over all other rights

question

Which of the following factors explains the high voter turnout in national elections during the last three decades of the nineteenth century?

answer

Voting was an important way to get a government job

question

To what did the term solid South refer in the decades after Reconstruction?

answer

The states of the old Confederacy, which voted Democratic in every election for the next seventy years

question

What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?

answer

The desire among some Southerners to shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one

question

What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?

answer

An increasing number of lynchings across the South

question

According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in

answer

economics and the shifting social structure of the South

question

How did American women respond to the denial of their right to vote in the late nineteenth century?

answer

Women participated in the political process though the antilynching, suffrage, and temperance movements.

question

The presidents who served in the last part of the nineteenth century—Rutherford B. Hayes through William McKinley—

answer

were overshadowed by business development and party politics at state and local levels.

question

Who dominated national politics in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century?

answer

Dynamic party bosses

question

President James A. Garfield unwittingly helped the cause of civil service reform when he

answer

was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker

question

Why were most people looking for government jobs in the 1880s worried about having to pass an examination to qualify?

answer

Few potential employees had enough education to pass a written examination.

question

The Pendleton Act of 1883 established the Civil Service Commission an

answer

made it impossible to remove people in civil service jobs for political reasons

question

What was an important consequence of the civil service reform of the 1880s?

answer

Business became even more influential in politics than before.

question

Having stated that "the paramount issue this year is moral rather than political," supporters of Grover Cleveland in 1884 were chagrined to learn that Cleveland had

answer

fathered a child out of wedlock.

question

Why were Irish Catholic voters offended by James G. Blaine's campaign?

answer

Blaine neglected to respond to a slur on Catholic voters.

question

The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the 1880s because

answer

it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services.

question

The most enthusiastic supporters of the tariff in the nineteenth century were

answer

industrialists and westerners who traded in wool, hides, and lumber.

question

Democrats dubbed the Republican-dominated Fifty-first Congress the "Billion Dollar Congress" because it spent the nation's surplus on

answer

lawmakers' own constituents

question

The Supreme Court's decision in Wabash v. Illinois (1886), which reversed its ruling in Munn v. Illinois (1877),

answer

led to passage of the first federal law regulating the railroad industry.

question

How effective was the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first federal regulatory agency?

answer

It was so weak in its early years that it served as little more than a historical precedent.

question

What did the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act have in common?

answer

a) They testified to the nation's growing willingness to use federal measures to intervene in big business on behalf of the public interest.

question

The Greenback Labor Party believed that the government should issue paper currency based on

answer

the country's total wealth.

question

When advocates of bimetallism referred to the crime of '73, they were talking about

answer

the decision by Congress in 1873 to stop buying and minting silver.

question

President Grover Cleveland hoped to increase the nation's flagging gold reserves during the economic depression in the winter of 1894-95

answer

through making a deal with a private group of bankers, headed by J. P. Morgan, to purchase gold abroad and supply it to the government.

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