Native American Policies
Completed in 1869, this major infrastructure project connected the East Coast to the West Coast, accelerating white settlement and claiming Native American lands.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
Passed in 1862, this federal act granted 160 acres of public western land to settlers who agreed to farm and improve it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie used this business strategy to control every step of his steel manufacturing and distribution process, cutting out middlemen.
What is vertical integration?
Securing higher wages, shorter working hours, and safer workplace conditions were the primary objectives of these Gilded Age workers organizations like the AFL and Knights of Labor.
What are labor unions?
In the 1870s and 1880s, the US government attempted to kill off most of the American Buffalo (Bison) population. This was their reason for killing the Buffalo.
What is to destroy Great Plains Native American food sources and economic sources? (harm Native American societies)
This 1862 act granted federal lands to states to build higher education institutions focused on agriculture, engineering, and military tactics.
What is the Morrill Land-Grant Act?
Due to rapid industrialization and factory mechanization during the Gilded Age, many independent craftspeople and artisans were replaced and became these.
What are factory laborers / wage workers?
Both western farmers and urban factory workers suffered economically during the Gilded Age. What group in society was doing well economically?
Who are owners of large corporations/monopolies/trusts
(railroads, steel, oil industries)
This 1871 law ended the federal practice of treating Native American tribes as sovereign nations, making them subjects of the United States instead.
What is the Indian Appropriations Act?
Late 19th-century American farmers supported this economic movement because it would expand the money supply and raise crop prices (cause inflation).
What is the Free Silver Movement (Bimetallism)?
During major Gilded Age labor disputes between unions and big corporations (like the Pullman Strike and Homestead Strike), the federal government provided support for this side of the labor dispute, by sending in troops.
Who are big corporations?
Documented in Jacob Riis's 1890 photojournalism book How the Other Half Lives, these dark, overcrowded, and unsanitary multi-family urban apartment buildings housed many working-class families during the Gilded Age.
What are tenements (or tenement houses)?
This 1887 law attempted to forcefully integrate Native Americans into mainstream American society by abolishing tribal land ownership, distributing reservation land into individual family plots, and opening remaining lands to white settlement.
What is the Dawes Act?
In his famous 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech, William Jennings Bryan argued passionately against this economic policy.
What is the Gold Standard?
By 1890, this striking economic statistic illustrated the extreme wealth inequality present throughout the Gilded Age, where 1% of the American population owned this percentage (%) of American wealth.
What is 50% of American wealth?
During Gilded Age labor strikes, non-union workers hired by corporations to replace striking employees were derogatorily called this.
What are scabs?
Off-reservation "Indian boarding schools", such as Carlisle, forced Native American children to cut their hair, wear European-style clothes, and abandon their native languages to force this process.
What is Cultural Assimilation/Genocide?
("Kill the Indian, Save the Man")
Drafted in 1892, the Populist Party platform (Omaha Platform) called for silver coinage (bimetallism), along with numerous other demands to support poor farmers.
Name one other policy supported by the Populists.
What is:
Free Silver / Government Ownership of Railroads + Telephones / 8-hour workday / Limits on immigration / Higher tax on the rich / Direct election of Senators
In Joseph Keppler's 1889 cartoon "The Bosses of the Senate," huge trust figures loom over tiny politicians to show this major political problem of the Gilded Age.
What is trust/corporate/monopoly/big business influence over the US government?
Major Gilded Age corporations frequently suppressed worker strikes by asking for government support, firing strikers, and hiring guards like the Pinkertons to do what to workers?
What is physically beat and intimidate workers to end the strike.