Study Guide
Who Built America, chapters 1-2
Progress and Poverty & Community and Conflict
1. United States as “great power”
2. South as colony of the North: It was an example of southern dependence on northern capital and expertise.
3. Jim Crow
4. White farmers: Which of the following hurt white farmers in the South in the 1880s and 1890s? The long-term decline of world cotton prices
5. The Populist moment: Which is the most accurate statement about the relationship between white and black farmers in the South in the late nineteenth centuries? They had many problems in common but were divided by race and racism.
6. The “New South”: Who worked in cotton mills in the “New South”? Poor white farmers who were losing their land to creditors
7. Wounded Knee Massacre
8. Dawes Act: The breakup of Indian tribal lands into individually owned plots and pressure on Indians to adopt the language and culture of the white majority
9. The Gilded Age
10. Republican Party and national politics: Pro-worker rhetoric combined with policies that favored wealthy industrialists
11. Railroad & labor: Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Italians and African Americans
12. A new business elite and an industrial working class
13. Average working day: Ten dollars a day, six days a week
14. Self employed Americans: decline from one half to one third
15. rapid technological innovation (e.g., Bessemer process): used by employers to replace or control workers
16. Energy sources: Water and animal power were replaced by oil, gas, and the expanded use of coal, all of which led to greater air pollution.
17. Andrew Carnegie
18. heavy industry production (capital goods)
19. steam power
20. investment capital
21. Vertical and horizontal integration: Men like Carnegie and Rockefeller attempted to control competition through vertical and horizontal integration.
22. the business cycle
23. pollution
24. rural displacement
25. Urbanization: They were the center of industrial growth and grew twice as fast as the population as a whole.
26. urban planning (e.g., sanitation)
27. Immigration (new immigrant waves): Ten million immigrants came to the United States between 1860 and 1890 for various reasons but especially because they were part of a global labor market, and they went where they had the best potential for employment.
28. Chinese immigration
29. Mexican immigration
30. ghettoization
31. Separations: class, occupation and race (impact on wages and labor militancy): Workers were divided by skill, ethnicity, race, gender, and age, but all workers faced a declining standard of living because of a decline in real wages.
32. African Americans in the north
33. rise of public schools
34. general rise in material comfort
35. Child labor: In the late nineteenth century, one in six children between the ages of 10 and 15 years held jobs?
36. Lewis Hine
37. widening gap between rich and poor
38. Jane Addams
39. wages of whiteness
40. Steady rise of the middle class
41. Middle-class women
42. Working-class women: Women did various jobs, including domestic service, home work, and “white-collar” work, though most who could afford to stay at home did so
43. Social Darwinism: some people are poor because they are naturally inferior, so it is against the laws of nature to intervene on their behalf.
44. Horatio Alger myth
45. Upward mobility?
46. labor militancy and goals:
47. Great Uprising of 1877
48. Knights of Labor (K of L)
49. American Federation of Labor (AFL)
50. Haymarket
51. Albert Parsons and anarchism
52. Haymarket martyrs
53. Homestead Steel Strike
54. Henry Frick & the lock-out
55. Tactics used by capital
56. Alexander Berkman
57. Emma Goldman
58. Pullman Strike
59. John Peter Atgeld
60. Grover Cleveland
61. Eugene Debs & ARU
62. “Gattling Gun on paper”
63. Debs imprisoned
64. Debs as socialist
65. Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act: They made a weak effort to regulate business because they were shaped by business-oriented members of Congress.
Study Guide
Nash, chapter 20 Becoming a World Power
Zinn, The Empire and the People
1. Wounded Knee Massacre
2. Control of Southern labor force (Jim Crow, Lynch Law)
3. Depressions of late 19th century
4. Control over domestic wage labor force (yellow dog contracts, guards, militias, injunctions, troops etc)
6. Twin drives of capitalism and nationalism
7. Imperialism abroad (ease class tensions at home, find markets for surplus production, cheap raw materials, secure geo-strategic interests)
8. Continental imperialist expansion
9. Monroe Doctrine, 1823
10. Asian trade: “opening” of Japan (1853-54), China (1859), Hawaii (1870s-1890s) --- etc.; Latin America and Caribbean
11. A.T. Mahan
12. Roosevelt, Mahan, Lodge, Beveridge
13. Open door trade policies backed by force
14. Spanish American War, 1898
15. Jose Marti
16. The Appeal to Reason (Eugene Debs, editor) --- “[War is] a favorite method of rulers for keeping the people from redressing domestic wrongs”
17. Samuel Gompers (AFL) and the Spanish War -- “glorious and righteous”
18. Cuba --- United Fruit, American Tobacco Co., Bethlehem Steel
19. Platt Amendment --- Cuban colonial vassalage
20. Puerto Rico, Wake Island, Guam, Philippines
21. Rudyard Kipling and The White Man’s Burden
22. President McKinely on Philippines annexation (228)
23. Emilio Aguinaldo & Filipino insurrectos
24. Senator Beveridge on Philippines annexation (229)
25. Anti-Imperialist League
26. Mark Twain --- “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out of doors . . . And so, by these Providences of God --- and the phrase is the government’s, not mine --- we are a World Power.”
27. Henry McNeil Turner --- “An unholy war of conquest”
28. Open Door Policy in China
29. Boxer Rebellion (1900)
30. Roosevelt and the Panama Canal
31. Roosevelt Corollary
32. Roosevelt as “big cop”
33. Banana Wars
34. Smedley Butler on Interventionism (Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?).
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
27. American intervention in the Soviet Union