Essay About Intentioned Americans And Factory Work

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APUSHAfter the Civil War, the Great Plains became a battleground between the nomadic Plains Indians and the U.S. Army. The destruction of the buffalo herds on which they depended for subsistence opened the way for the destruction of the Indians. Well-intentioned Americans tried to “civilize” the Indians through measures such as the Dawes act, but it was the massacre at Wounded Knee that finally marked the end of conflict on the Plains. Completion of the transcontinental railroad opened the Plains for settlement, and the railroad companies actively recruited settlers. Homesteaders faced obstacles they had not foreseen-isolation, drought, the perils of the commercial agricultural market-but many persevered. By 1912 all of the Western lands had been brought into the Union. In California and Texas there were frequent clashes between Anglo and Mexican populations as the Mexicans gradually lost control of their lands; many Spanish-speakers ended up in urban barrios. In New Mexico and Arizona, adaptation went somewhat more smoothly. Nonetheless, Mexicans gradually lost status, and most became laborers. All three of these sectors of the economy enjoyed periodic booms in the West, from the Comstock Lode to the great cattle drives to the bonanza wheat farms of North Dakota. However, these booms often led to busts, and they did serious harm to the environment. Dime novels and Wild West shows reinforced the idea of the West as a moral arena in which good triumphed; Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and other writers portrayed the cowboy as a knight-errant on a pinto pony. John Wesley Powell and John Muir powerfully described the Western landscape and urged its conservation. Abundant resources and technological innovation combined with other factors to fuel industrial growth. Railroads pioneered new business techniques; Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others successfully transferred these techniques to other industries, such as steel and oil. Pools were created to limit competition but were replaced by more efficient trusts and, ultimately, holding companies, leading to huge corporations. Technology contributed new ways of manufacturing as well as new products to stimulate growth. Many inventions, such as the telephone and electric light bulb, changed daily life. Advertising and marketing stimulated demand for the growing output of products. Lack of capital and a poor education system hamstrung southern development. Major growth came with the establishment of cotton textile mills and a handful of heavy industries, such as steel, but the South lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Factory work depended on unskilled workers who performed mind-numbing routine tasks, often hazardous, for low pay. Immigrants became the mainstay of the industrial work force, but children as young as eight worked in coal mines and cotton mills. Women worked out of their homes and entered both the factory and the office work force. Workers tried to create all-encompassing structures, such as the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, to protect workers rights, but these attempts failed. The American Federation of Labor, focusing on skilled workers and practical issues, was far more successful. Violence flared, used by strikers and strikebreakers alike; governments generally were willing to use violence against strikes. Social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth were attempts to explain and justify the harshness of the new industrial order, although a number of utopian thinkers protested. A flood of immigrants jostled against native-born Americans, who feared and disliked them; the immigrants were crowded into ghettos. The wealthy created fashionable enclaves, the middle class moved to the suburbs, and the physical changes in cities sharpened class awareness. Victorian morality and its emphasis on gentility shaped the middle class. The cult of domesticity demanded that women maintain culturally refined homes. Department stores were designed to make shopping and spending a pleasure. Higher education flourished, with college football taking center stage in the middle- and upper-class sports scene. Corrupt bosses and the machines they ran bilked cities of hundreds of millions of dollars. Reformers ignored wages and working conditions, and tried to end poverty by improving the moral character of the poor. Reform groups included the Salvation Army, the YMCA, and settlement houses. Urban immigrants thronged saloons, dance halls, vaudeville theaters, and amusement parks. They listened avidly to ragtime and cheered on professional baseball teams and sports heroes such as boxer John L. Sullivan. Genteel Victorianism found itself pitted against immigrant rowdiness and spirit. Mark Twain and others challenged the “genteel tradition” in literature, while architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright reshaped the urban landscape. Women struggled to escape the bonds of Victorian gentility. Public schools were seen as a place to inculcate middle-class values and overthrow immigrant patterns. Both major national parties pursued centrist courses, with Republicans supporting big business and Democrats warning against government interference. Greenbacks and the coinage of silver were major issues, and Civil Service reform emerged. Big business and the GAR combined to defeat Cleveland in 1888. Farmers formed a succession of movements, including the Grange and the Alliance, to try to reassert control over their lives; these led to the Populist party in 1892. African-Americans were increasingly excluded from political life. Corporate interests continued to dominate politics. Populists won more than a million votes in the 1892 election, reflecting deep dissatisfaction among western and southern farmers. The Panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression devastated individuals and led to political unrest, such as Coxeys Army. The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, a prairie orator and supporter of free silver, while the Republicans ran William McKinley, a conservative Ohioan. Populism collapsed as an organized movement, many of its ideas incorporated into the two larger parties. The Republican coalition that put McKinley in the White House would control national politics for the next fifteen years. The 1890s saw a surge of expansionist and warlike (jingoistic) sentiment. The Spanish-American War gave the United States control in the Caribbean and expanded American power far into the western Pacific with the acquisition of the Philippines. A bitter guerrilla war in the Philippines showed American determination to keep the new U.S. empire, despite angry criticism from a vocal group of anti-imperialists.