Social Causes
More people meant more workers willing to take low wages.
What is cheap labor?
Taxes on foreign goods that protected American factories. Answer: What are tariffs?
What are tariffs?
Coal, iron ore, oil, timber, and copper used to make goods.
What are natural resources?
Grew to more than five times their size after the Civil War, connecting raw materials to factories and factories to consumers.
What are railroads?
Complete control of a product, allowing companies to overcharge consumers.
What are monopolies?
The belief that hard work leads to success.
What is the work ethic?
Federal land given to railroad companies to build new lines.
What are land grants?
Privately owned tools, factories, and money used to make goods.
What is capital?
Companies that raise money by selling stock.
What are corporations?
An era where great wealth covered serious social problems.
What is the Gilded Age?
The population grew rapidly after the Civil War, partly because of immigrants.
What is a growing population?
Gave inventors exclusive rights to their inventions, encouraging new ones.
What are patents?
Left behind steam power, factories, and mass production.
What is the First Industrial Revolution?
Railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone let businesses sell nationwide.
What is a national market?
Critics' name for business leaders who exploited workers.
Who are the Robber Barons?
The idea that each person is responsible for getting ahead.
What is individualism?
A "hands-off" policy where the government was supposed to stay out of business.
What is laissez-faire?
A free enterprise system where people freely buy and sell, unlike a planned economy, where the government decides what to produce.
What is a market economy?
New machines and processes, adopted by businesses, transformed steel, communications, electricity, oil, and transportation.
What are inventions and innovation?
Banned unfair railroad practices like pools and rebates.
What is the Interstate Commerce Act (1887)?
The belief that the most talented succeed, used to justify free competition.
What is Social Darwinism?
The Pacific Railway Act funded a transcontinental railroad, and the Homestead Act gave settlers free land.
What are the Civil War laws?
Wartime demand doubled Northern manufacturing.
What is the Civil War stimulus?
Risk-takers like Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), and J. P. Morgan (banking).
Who are entrepreneurs?
Banned trusts that restrained trade and began government regulation of business.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)?