US industrial society, reform, world wars and depression
Industrial order
The Gilded Age combined explosive industrial growth with political corruption. Railroads created national markets; Carnegie integrated steel, Rockefeller dominated oil through trusts, and vertical and horizontal integration lowered costs and crushed competition. Social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth justified inequality, while workers organized in the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and industrial unions. Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), and Pullman (1894) turned public opinion against radical labor.
Cities, immigrants, and the West
Immigration from southern and eastern Europe transformed cities, where political machines such as Tammany Hall traded services for votes. Reformers pushed civil service reform (Pendleton Act, 1883) and railroad regulation (Interstate Commerce Act, 1887; Sherman Antitrust Act, 1890). Farmers organized the Grange and the Populist Party, whose Omaha Platform demanded free silver, an income tax, and direct election of senators. In the West, the Dawes Act (1887) broke up tribal lands, and Wounded Knee(1890) was a massacre often used as a period marker; Indigenous resistance, communities and political action did not simply end there. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned 'separate but equal.'
Traps: 'laissez-faire' is misleading-government provided land grants, tariffs, and troops. Populists were not only farmers, and their platform was not socialist. Plessy did not create segregation; it constitutionalized it.
Worked example: if asked why the Sherman Antitrust Act had little effect at first, note that courts used it more against unions than trusts, and its wording was vague.
Rule of thumb: industrialization created both enormous wealth and organized resistance-link economic change to political response.
Progressivism and war
Progressives sought to tame industrial capitalism through regulation and expertise. Muckrakers exposed corruption; municipalities adopted initiative, referendum, and recall; the Sixteenth Amendment authorized the income tax, the Seventeenth provided direct Senate election, the Eighteenth imposed Prohibition, and the Nineteenth granted women suffrage. Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal, Taft's trust-busting, and Wilson's New Freedom expanded federal power. World War I began with neutrality, but unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram brought intervention. The Committee on Public Information sold the war; the Espionage and Sedition Acts suppressed dissent, upheld in Schenck v. United States ('clear and present danger'). The Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty and League of Nations.
Twenties to forties
The 1920 s mixed prosperity, consumer credit, and cultural conflict: Harlem Renaissance, Scopes trial, nativist quotas, and the second Klan. The Great Depression began in 1929; the New Deal created Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the TVA, though it did not end the Depression. World War II mobilized the economy, interned Japanese Americans (Korematsu), and ended with the atomic bomb.
Traps: do not confuse the Progressive amendments' numbers. The New Deal did not produce full recovery-war spending did. Schenck upheld conviction; the 'clear and present danger' test was not a free-speech victory.
Worked example: if asked what most expanded federal power from 1933 to 1945, cite the New Deal's regulatory agencies plus wartime economic mobilization.
Rule of thumb: crisis expands the state-progressives, the Depression, and war each enlarged federal authority.