HIST 2020 Chapter 18 – Flashcards

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Which of the following describes the Gilded Age?
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An era marked by personal greed and a corrupt partnership between business and politics
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Which of the following developments was a key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age?
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The growth of industrialism in the United States
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Which of the following big businesses came to dominate American life in the second half of the nineteenth century?
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Railroading
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Which of the following factors boosted nineteenth-century railroad construction in America significantly?
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Monetary aid and land grants from federal and state governments
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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?
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He was a symbol of all the most troubling aspects of big business in America.
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Which relatively new building material both improved railroading in the late nineteenth century and depended on it?
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Steel produced through the Bessemer process
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What was the purpose of vertical integration, which was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century?
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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.
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Carnegie Steel achieved the tremendous productivity that Andrew Carnegie insisted on
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by forcing employees to work long hours under extremely dangerous conditions for low pay.
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Which of the following occurred soon after Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania in 1859?
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Thousands launched their own small refineries.
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What was the main purpose of crude oil in the United States before the advent of the automobile?
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Lubrication and lighting in the form of kerosene
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John D. Rockefeller first organized Standard Oil as a trust to
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control the key elements of production and corner the market for oil.
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Rockefeller ultimately reorganized Standard Oil as a holding company in the late nineteenth century to
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legally combine competing companies under a central administration.
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Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?
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The company had employed both horizontal and vertical integration to control more than 90 percent of the oil business.
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In her History of the Standard Oil Company published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as
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the man whose business methods made him a symbol of heartless monopoly capitalism.
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How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?
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Bell used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed both local and cross-country communication
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Where had electricity been put to use in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century?
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Mostly in urban areas
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The industries that grew up around the revolutionary inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated that
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the age of the inventor was becoming the age of the corporation
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The turn of the twentieth century saw individual entrepreneurship in the United States yield to
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finance capitalism.
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Prominent business leaders of the late nineteenth century, such as J. P. Morgan, believed
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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?
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He sometimes formed a community of interest, comprised of a few directors he chose.
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What was accomplished by J. P. Morgan's railroad companies' practice of issuing watered stock?
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Watered stock kept investors happy but caused overcapitalization and debt for the railroads.
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J. P. Morgan acquired the core of what would be the largest corporation in the world when he purchased
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steel interests formerly controlled by Andrew Carnegie.
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What is an oligopoly?
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A competitive business system in which several large companies control production in an industry
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What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?
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Progress is the result of competition, and social reforms and other modes of human interference impede progress.
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What message did Andrew Carnegie promote in his gospel of wealth
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Millionaires should be trustees and agents for the poor.
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The economic theory of laissez-faire gained political clout in the late nineteenth century because
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the Supreme Court increasingly was reinterpreting the Constitution to protect business
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The Supreme Court's late-nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment helped big business by
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elevating property rights over all other rights
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Which of the following factors explains the high voter turnout in national elections during the last three decades of the nineteenth century?
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Voting was an important way to get a government job
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To what did the term solid South refer in the decades after Reconstruction?
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The states of the old Confederacy, which voted Democratic in every election for the next seventy years
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What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?
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The desire among some Southerners to shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one
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What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?
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An increasing number of lynchings across the South
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According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in
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economics and the shifting social structure of the South
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How did American women respond to the denial of their right to vote in the late nineteenth century?
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Women participated in the political process though the antilynching, suffrage, and temperance movements.
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The presidents who served in the last part of the nineteenth century—Rutherford B. Hayes through William McKinley—
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were overshadowed by business development and party politics at state and local levels.
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Who dominated national politics in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century?
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Dynamic party bosses
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President James A. Garfield unwittingly helped the cause of civil service reform when he
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was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker
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Why were most people looking for government jobs in the 1880s worried about having to pass an examination to qualify?
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Few potential employees had enough education to pass a written examination.
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The Pendleton Act of 1883 established the Civil Service Commission an
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made it impossible to remove people in civil service jobs for political reasons
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What was an important consequence of the civil service reform of the 1880s?
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Business became even more influential in politics than before.
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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
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fathered a child out of wedlock.
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Why were Irish Catholic voters offended by James G. Blaine's campaign?
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Blaine neglected to respond to a slur on Catholic voters.
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The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the 1880s because
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it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services.
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The most enthusiastic supporters of the tariff in the nineteenth century were
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industrialists and westerners who traded in wool, hides, and lumber.
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Democrats dubbed the Republican-dominated Fifty-first Congress the "Billion Dollar Congress" because it spent the nation's surplus on
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lawmakers' own constituents
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The Supreme Court's decision in Wabash v. Illinois (1886), which reversed its ruling in Munn v. Illinois (1877),
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led to passage of the first federal law regulating the railroad industry.
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How effective was the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first federal regulatory agency?
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It was so weak in its early years that it served as little more than a historical precedent.
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What did the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act have in common?
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a) They testified to the nation's growing willingness to use federal measures to intervene in big business on behalf of the public interest.
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The Greenback Labor Party believed that the government should issue paper currency based on
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the country's total wealth.
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When advocates of bimetallism referred to the crime of '73, they were talking about
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the decision by Congress in 1873 to stop buying and minting silver.
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President Grover Cleveland hoped to increase the nation's flagging gold reserves during the economic depression in the winter of 1894-95
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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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