TITANS AND TRUSTS
[STAAR]
This steel magnate controlled every stage from ore to rail through vertical integration, then argued in "The Gospel of Wealth" that the rich were mere trustees of their fortunes.
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
[STAAR]
CLUE: This cigar maker founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and organized skilled craftsmen around wages and hours rather than remaking society.
RESPONSE: Who is Samuel Gompers?
[STAAR]
CLUE: Opened in New York Harbor in 1892, this station processed some twelve million arrivals over the next six decades.
RESPONSE: What is Ellis Island?
[STAAR]
CLUE: Formed in 1892, this third party demanded free silver, a graduated income tax, and government ownership of the railroads.
RESPONSE: What is the Populist (People's) Party?
[STAAR]
CLUE: This Tammany Hall boss and his ring stole tens of millions from New York City before Thomas Nast's cartoons helped bring him down in 1871.
RESPONSE: Who is William "Boss" Tweed?
This 1873 satirical novel, co-written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, skewered land speculation and congressional bribery. Its title supplied the name historians still use — and the metaphor is precise, since the material named is a thin layer of gold applied over something cheap.
RESPONSE: What is The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today?
[STAAR]
This oilman used horizontal integration and secret railroad rebates to control about ninety percent of American refining by 1880.
RESPONSE: Who is John D. Rockefeller?
[STAAR]
CLUE: Led by Terence Powderly, this organization tried to unite skilled and unskilled, women and Black workers, into one national body before collapsing after 1886.
RESPONSE: What are the Knights of Labor?
[STAAR]
CLUE: This 1882 law was the first in American history to bar an entire nationality from immigrating, and it was renewed repeatedly for sixty years.
RESPONSE: What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
[STAAR]
CLUE: This Nebraskan won the 1896 Democratic nomination at thirty-six by warning bankers they would not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
RESPONSE: Who is William Jennings Bryan?
[STAAR]
CLUE: Passed in 1883 after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President Garfield, this act created competitive exams and a merit-based federal civil service.
RESPONSE: What is the Pendleton Civil Service Act?
[STAAR / IB]
CLUE: This 1890 federal law outlawed "every contract, combination... or conspiracy in restraint of trade," though for its first decade it was used far more often against unions than corporations.
RESPONSE: What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
[STAAR / IB]
CLUE: A bomb thrown at a Chicago rally for the eight-hour day in May 1886 produced this event, which shattered the Knights of Labor by tying all labor organizing to anarchism in the public mind.
RESPONSE: What is the Haymarket affair?
[STAAR / IB]
CLUE: This reformer opened Hull House on Chicago's Halsted Street in 1889, pioneering the settlement house movement.
RESPONSE: Who is Jane Addams?
[STAAR / IB]
CLUE: This farmers' organization, founded in 1867, won state laws capping grain elevator rates that the Court upheld in Munn v. Illinois.
RESPONSE: What is the Grange (Patrons of Husbandry)?
[STAAR / IB]
CLUE: After Wabash v. Illinois stripped states of the power to regulate interstate rates, Congress responded in 1887 with this law and the first federal regulatory commission.
RESPONSE: What is the Interstate Commerce Act?
[IB]
CLUE: Devised for Standard Oil by attorney Samuel Dodd in 1882, this legal device let shareholders in dozens of separate companies swap their stock for certificates held by a single board of nine men.
RESPONSE: What is the trust?
[IB]
CLUE: Carnegie left for Scotland while Henry Clay Frick locked out workers and hired 300 Pinkertons at this 1892 Pennsylvania steelworks, breaking the strongest union in the industry.
RESPONSE: What is the Homestead Strike?
[IB]
CLUE: This Danish immigrant's 1890 photographic exposé of New York's Lower East Side slums used the new flash powder to show middle-class readers rooms they would never enter.
RESPONSE: Who is Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives)?
[IB]
CLUE: Adopted in Nebraska in July 1892, this document opened by declaring the nation "brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin" and became the Populist Party's founding statement.
RESPONSE: What is the Omaha Platform?
[IB]
CLUE: These reform-minded Republicans bolted their party in 1884 rather than support the scandal-tainted James G. Blaine, and their defection helped elect Grover Cleveland.
RESPONSE: Who are the Mugwumps
[IB]
CLUE: This 1895 sugar case gutted the Sherman Act by ruling that manufacturing was not interstate commerce, leaving a company that controlled 98 percent of American refining legally untouchable.
RESPONSE: What is United States v. E. C. Knight Co.?
[IB]
CLUE: In this unanimous 1895 decision the Supreme Court upheld Eugene V. Debs's contempt conviction from the Pullman boycott, confirming that federal judges could break a strike by decree without a jury.
RESPONSE: What is In re Debs?
[IB]
CLUE: This Congregationalist minister's 1885 bestseller Our Country cast Anglo-Saxon Protestants as divinely appointed to lead, framing both nativism at home and expansion abroad as a single mission.
RESPONSE: Who is Josiah Strong?
[IB]
CLUE: Charles Macune's boldest proposal would have had the federal government build warehouses where farmers could store crops and borrow against them at two percent, breaking the crop-lien system outright.
RESPONSE: What is the subtreasury plan?
[IB]
CLUE: Mark Hanna raised roughly $3.5 million to keep McKinley on his front porch while Bryan traveled 18,000 miles, producing a Republican dominance that lasted until 1932. Historians call this contest a realigning election — name the year.
RESPONSE: What is 1896?