GILDED AGE POLITICS & CORRUPTION
This term refers to the late 19th-century era marked by rapid industrial growth and widespread political corruption.
What is the Gilded Age?
This farming system left many Southern farmers in chronic debt.
What is sharecropping?
This railroad connected the Atlantic and Pacific and accelerated western settlement.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
John D. Rockefeller built this oil empire using horizontal integration.
What is the Standard Oil Company?
This 1886 event damaged the labor movement after a bomb exploded at a rally.
What is the Haymarket Square Riot?
These immigrants came largely from southern and eastern Europe after 1880.
What are "new" immigrants?
This group were the largest supporters of the People's Party.
Who were farmers?
This Populist-supported policy proposed backing money with both gold and silver.
What is bimetallism?
This railroad construction scandal exposed corruption involving Union Pacific insiders and members of Congress.
What is the Credit Mobilier scandal?
These laws enforced racial segregation in the South.
What are Jim Crow laws?
This system confined Native Americans to specific lands controlled by the federal government.
What is the reservation system?
This legal arrangement allowed corporations to combine while avoiding regulation.
What is a trust?
This violent 1892 strike occurred at Carnegie’s steel plant.
What is the Homestead Strike?
These organizations exchanged services for votes in cities.
What are political machines?
This political movement represented frustrated farmers and workers.
What are the Populists?
This severe economic downturn began after railroad overbuilding and bank failures.
What is the Panic of 1873?
This Supreme Court case upheld “separate but equal.”
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This law broke up communally owned tribal lands, granting individual plots (allotments) to Native American families to encourage farming and assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture, while selling off "surplus" lands to non-natives
The Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
This business strategy involves controlling all stages of production.
What is vertical integration?
This 1894 strike disrupted rail traffic nationwide.
What is the Pullman Strike?
This corrupt New York City political ring was led by Boss Tweed.
What is the Tweed Ring?
This general term describes innovation that increased farm productivity through machines like reapers and plows.
What is mechanization of agriculture?
This phrase described Republican efforts to remind voters of Democratic ties to the Civil War.
What is “waving the bloody shirt”?
This pattern describes the seasonal movement of migrant laborers.
What is circular migration?
This 1864 massacre killed Cheyenne and Arapaho people in Colorado.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
This business strategy eliminated competition by buying out rivals.
What is horizontal integration?
Two examples of demands made by various labor groups during the Gilded Age (there are more than two).
What are: 8 hour work day, better working conditions, higher pay, better living conditions, pay in cash not script?
Jane Addams founded this settlement house in Chicago.
What is Hull House?
This election realigned American politics and signaled a shift toward urban, industrial interests.
What is the Election of 1896?
This political practice rewarded loyal supporters with government jobs.
What is patronage?
This 1882 law marked the first major federal restriction on immigration based on nationality.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Also known as Little Bighorn, this 1876 battle was a major Native victory.
What is the Battle of the Greasy Grass?
This 1887 law was the first federal attempt to regulate railroads.
What is the Interstate Commerce Act?
This individual helped lead the Pullman Strike of 1894 and went on to be one of the most prominent leaders of organized labor.
Who is Eugene V. Debs?
This organization led the fight for women’s suffrage.
What is the National American Woman Suffrage Association?
This 1896 Democratic candidate championed free silver and delivered the “Cross of Gold” speech.
Who is William Jennings Bryan?
This economic philosophy argued that government should not regulate business.
What is laissez-faire economics?
This voting restriction exempted white voters from literacy tests.
What is the grandfather clause?
This 1890 event marked the tragic end of armed Native resistance on the Great Plains.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre?
This 1890 law attempted to curb monopolies but was weakly enforced at first.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
This labor agreement required all workers to join the union.
What is a closed shop?
This ideology justified economic inequality by applying “survival of the fittest” to society.
What is Social Darwinism?
This fiery Populist orator urged farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” becoming one of the movement’s most outspoken female leaders in the 1890s.
What is Mary Elizabeth Lease?
This agreement settled the disputed election of 1876 and resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
This reform law established civil service exams to reduce corruption.
What is the Pendleton Act?
This Native American religious movement of the late 1880s promised the return of ancestral lands and the disappearance of white settlers, alarming U.S. authorities.
What is the Ghost Dance?
This steelmaking process drastically lowered production costs, promoting both industrialization and urbanization.
What is the Bessemer-Kelly Process?
This economic trend encouraged Americans to buy mass-produced goods through advertising and department stores.
What is consumer culture?
These groups debated whether currency should be backed by gold alone or silver.
Who are the Gold Bugs and Silverites?