358 Chapter 15 | New Ideas aNd Old Ideas | Period six 1865 –1898period SiX
1865– 1898Working With Secondary SourceS
AP® Short Answer Questionseconomic consolidation
America’s growing wealth had its positive and negative aspects. The country enjoyed an
unprecedented rise in economic strength, which resulted in the development of a new
middle class that enjoyed greater leisure time. But the distribution of this wealth and the
power that this wealth carried remained problematic. Industry fostered a new class of
poverty. To what extent was prosperity meant to be shared among all people?
You have already read various sources that illustrate different approaches toward
economic growth in this time period. Now read the two passages below, and consider
the extent to which America’s wealth acquisition sowed the seeds of greater conflict or
prosperity—or both.The railroads pioneered in developing ways to control prices in the face of
excess capacity and heavily fixed costs. During the 1870’s, the railroads formed
regional associations, of which the Eastern Trunk Line Association was the most
powerful....... [T]he manufacturers sought other ways of obtaining firmer legal control
over the factories in their industries. They began personally to purchase stock in
one another’s companies. After 1882 when the Standard Oil Company devised
the trust [an arrangement where one company holds property in others] as a
way of acquiring legal control of an industry, companies began to adopt that
device....
In many cases these new consolidations embarked on a strategy of vertical
integration.... In the mid-1880’s, the trust [Standard Oil] began to build its own
distribution network of tank farms and wholesaling offices. Finally, after enlarging
its buying organization, it moved in the late-1880’s into the taking of crude oil
out of the ground.
— alfred d. Chandler Jr., “The Role of Business in the United states: a Historical
survey,” Daedalus 98 (winter 1969): 23–40.
Despite the clear advantages held by business managers in countering the job
actions of workers—access to the policing powers of government, the ability
to hire strikebreakers in great numbers, especially with immigrants and African
Americans in desperate search of work—the deck obviously was not completely
stacked against the strikers. One important weapon they had at their disposal was
community support.... In the early 1880s, more than 50 percent of all strikes did
not involve a formal trade union organization. The proportion of work stoppages
orchestrated by unions rose over the next two decades, but by 1900, one-third of
all strikes were still waged without union intervention.
—walter licht, Industrializing America (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 88–89.16_STA_2012_ch15_343-360.indd 358 24/04/15 10:42 AM