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AP US History
Chapter 17 Guilded Age
| Glossary Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Jay Gould | He made money by purchasing enough stock in vulnerable, failing railroad companies to take control of them, and then threatening to undercut his competitors, forced them to buy him out at a high profit. The railroads he bought often went bankrupt. |
| John D. Rockefeller | He used the trust, a form of horizontal integration, to give his monopoly a more secure legal standing. |
| John Pierpont Morgan | During the depression of the 1890s, he saved the United States from going bankrupt with his plan for private bankers to purchase gold abroad and supply it to the treasury. |
| Gilded Age | A name created by Mark Twain to describe the tremendous increase in wealth caused by the industrial age. The fabulous lifestyles of the wealthy hid the many social problems of the time, including poverty, increased crime, and corruption in government. |
| Stalwarts | A Republican faction that remained loyal to the Grant administration and were tainted by its corruption. |
| Half-Breeds | Favored tariff reform and social reform, major issues from the Democratic and Republican parties. They did not seem to be dedicated members of either party. |
| Mugwumps | Northeasterners who felt that the nation should be put in the hands of honest, competent men like themselves. Their primary goal was to abandon the spoils system and replace it with a professional civil service. |
| Andrew Carnegie | He used vertical integration which allowed him to control every aspect of his steel business, from the mining of ore to its transport to factories to the production of steel. No one outside of his company made money from steel production. |
| Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner | These two men believed that Darwin's theory of natural selection could be seen in human society where the strong survived and the weak died out. They promoted the idea of Social Darwinism. |
| The Gospel of Wealth | Andrew Carnegie's 1889 book that states the rich should undertake philanthropic projects to benefit the poor. Carnegie donated many libraries around the country. |
| The Spoils System | The awarding of jobs for political purposes. The system allowed parties to reward voters, and also gave people the chance to get rich from public office and caused most respectable Americans to view the entire political system as sordid and corrupt. |
| President Garfield | Was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker who was motivated by political partisanship. Although Guiteau was mentally unbalanced, the press condemned the spoils system for creating the political climate that produced him. |
| Wabash v. Illinois | The Supreme Court ruled that because railroads crossed state boundaries, they could not be regulated by the states. Because more than three-fourths of all railroads crossed state lines, the decision made it virtually impossible for state railroad laws. |
| Thomas A. Edison | Inventor of the phonograph |
| Vertical integration | A business system pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the 1870's, in which all aspects of a business are under the control of a single person or corporation. Also called a monopoloy. |
| laissez-faire economics | A belief that the government ought not interfere in the economy at all. The true capitalist system. |
| Alexander Graham Bell | Inventor of the telephone |
| President U.S. Grant | Was personally honest, but not only tolerated financial and political corruption among top aides, but protected them once exposed. He gave all his relatives government jobs. |
| Black Friday | Two crooks named Gould and Fisk tried to buy up all the US gold. The attempt failed when Grant released government gold into the stock market. This caused the stock market to crash on Friday, Sept. 24, 1869. |
| Boss Tweed | A big crook who used bribery and rigged elections to stay in power in N.Y. Milking the government for millions, he is an example of the scandal that took place under the Grant administration. |
| Credit Mobilier | A company that built railroads at a high price. When their stocks rose they sold them for huge profit. They also bribed many congressmen and the vice president with shares of their stocks. Another scandal under the Grant administration. |
| Jim Crow Laws | Another name for the black codes. |
| Chinese Exclusion Act | Congress wanted to pass laws to prohibit the immigration of the Chinese to America, but Hayes vetoed it. Eventually, Congress passed the legislation anyway. |
| Cornelius Vanderbilt | Was one of America's biggest railroad builders. He made so much money that he left a fortune of over $100 million. |
| Early Labor Unions | National Labor Union, Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor are example of these 19th century organizations designed to help workers. |