American history The “Omaha Platform” of the People’s Party
Power and Wealth for Whom?
Industrialization, 1880-1910
IDEOLOGIES OF WEALTH AND POVERTY
- Social Darwinism
- “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other” – W.G. Sumner
- “The Gospel of Wealth” -- Andrew Carnegie
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND
INCORPORATION
- Innovations in transportation, power, and communication
- Innovations in mass production
- Structuring business: Integration, combination, and merger
- Facilitating business:
- Laissez Faire
CULTURES OF CONSUMPTION
- Mass retailing and marketing -- grocery stores, department stores, and catalogs
- Elites and “conspicuous consumption”
- Growth of the “new” middle class
WEALTH FOR ALL?:
URBAN WORKING CLASSES
- The growth of the cities
- Working-class life: work, politics, and leisure
CLASSLESS SOCIETY?: MYTHS AND REALITIES
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: ENERGY
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Ideologies of Wealth and Poverty
- Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism
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Ideologies of Wealth and Poverty
Social Darwinism in the
United States
Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted. They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things
William Graham Sumner, 1883
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Ideologies of Wealth and Poverty
The man of wealth is …the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer-doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
Andrew Carnegie
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Technological Innovations:
Transportation: Railroads
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Technological Innovations:
Transportation: Internal Combustion (uses gasoline)
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Technological Innovations:
Power: Coal-generated Electricity
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Technological Innovations:
Communication: Telephone
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Innovations in Production:
Ford, Assembly Line, Automobile
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Structuring Business:
- Vertical integration
- Horizontal integration
- Mergers and consolidation
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Industrialization and Incorporation
Facilitating Business:
Laissez Faire
- Philosophy: “Robber Barons”
- Policy: The Supreme Court and the corporation as individual
J. P. Morgan
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Cultures of Consumption
Mass Retailing and Marketing
Grocery stores
Catalogs -
Sears & Roebuck
Department Stores -
Marshall Fields
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Cultures of Consumption
Elites and “Conspicuous Consumption”
John Singer
Sargent,
Repose,
1911
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Cultures of Consumption
The “new” Middle Class:
- Housing and early suburbs
- Culture of “respectability:
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Wealth for All?
- Growth of the cities
- Working-class life
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Industrialization, Class Conflict, and the Meaning of American Freedom
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International Circulation of Working-Class Resistance
- Marx, Communist Manifesto, 1848
- Rose Schneiderman, Triangle Fire Speech, 1911
- Emiliano Zapata, Land, and Mexico
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