INDUSTRIALISM AND THE NEW CITY OUTLINE

Which of the following two quotes better represents what you believe?

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” (A.C.)

                                                         --or--                                                  

         “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” (B.S.)

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.

“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?

The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:

I. Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1.  War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:

                     1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.

                     1864: Congress grants 131 million acres

                     1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2.         Resources:     land, raw materials, people,

ideas=booooooom!

…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.

…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.

                     1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel

1919: more than 24 million tons

        

                     1860: 20 million tons of coal

1910: 500 million tons of coal

                     1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum

1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum

3. Integration:

         a. Horizontal Integration:

--monopolize one part of the productive process

Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:

--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail line.

4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:

                     Laissez faire: “let it do”

                     Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

                                 “the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:

The Robber Barons

         Notable examples:

ü  John D. Rockefeller

ü  Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

ü  J.P. Morgan

ü  Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall

Street”

                                             (bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold

secrets)

ü  Cornelius Van Derbilt:

(steamships and railroads: $100 million)

Gentlemen:

You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.

                                             Sincerely,

                                                         CVD

II. The New Impoverished City

1. Rapid Urbanization:

1860:   25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census

called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas

2. Tenement Buildings:

1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

3. Contamination:

         1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

        

         Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all

the towns it washed.”

4. Crime-Filled:

         Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881

 7340 in 1898

(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

5. Women in Workforce:

         1/7^th of the Paid workforce

         (2.6 million of the 17.4 million)         

                     500,000 married, yet they were paid less than

men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

6. Immigration:

         1890-1900: 3.5 million

         1900-1910: 7 million

Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):

Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in

the national stomach.”

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.” 

Jacob Riis on social fluidity

                     Ellis Island:

7. Child Labor:

         1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

         --Monongah, West Virginia, 1907:

                                             Martin Honick

Prior to the disaster, Fairmont citizens regularly criticized miners. One Fairmont man wrote that miners in Monongah were "possibly the lowest grade of European workmen that can be imported" (Roberts 1904, 13). Relations were especially difficult, according to McAteer, between “immigrants and ‘native’ peoples” (70). One newspaper in Worthington, a town near Monongah, warned that “a lot of Italians from Monongah have been committing depredations on the farms in the vicinity…those who suffer from their petty thieving propose to resort to the shot gun in the future” (Ibid.). Others in the region shared this disdain for the miners of West Virginia. One report pondered, “We have often wondered what kind of animals they have digging coal in West Virginia…Their ignorance must be more dense, their prejudice more bitter and their blindness more intense than that of any other body of miners we have ever heard tell of” (Corbin 1981, 25).

Genevieve McDonnell, a Fairmont resident, agreed and expressed this sentiment in her poem, "To Stricken Monongah," published in the Fairmont Times on December 14^th: "We are coming, O Monongah, to thy vigil--feast of woe. We have leveled all the barriers of caste.” If anything, life in Fairmont before the Monongah explosion accentuated class differences. Before the explosion, most residents of Fairmont derided the miners and their families. But this poet mused, “Our souls will blend with your souls to the last, in a fellowship of anguish we are marshaling to thy aid." Residents of Fairmont had never before discussed such an egalitarian, heartfelt outreach to the miners in Monongah. Another Fairmont man, in the Fairmont Times on December 9^th, captured perfectly this newfound solidarity: "We are all akin today, miner, business man, boss, official, stockholder, citizen, all brothers in a kindred sorrow." Noting all masculine roles, this man recognized an affiliation between men that symbolically broke down class divisions. As he wrote, they were now “all akin.” The loss of male life caused residents of Fairmont to, in the words of another contributor, "forget their personal differences, growing out of business and personal strife, and set about to do some act of kindness." Following this major disaster, stark class and ethnic boundaries that normally separated Fairmont from Monongah blurred. The dynamic public response overrode previous public distinctions of wealth and ethnicity. As one Fairmont man insisted in his letter to the Fairmont Times, "Monongah's sorrow was a common sorrow."

Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)

"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession."

III. Justifying the New World:

Living in this time, you would have to respond to the poverty.

Two of those responses are here:

1. SOCIAL DARWINISM:

         William Graham Sumner:

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?

2. Progressivism:

RECONSTRUCTION OUTLINE

At the end of a war,

…what must be reconstructed?

…what are the biggest obstacles to repairing a broken Union?

Political Reconstruction

     A. PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

              1. Lincoln

              2. Johnson

     B. CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION

              1. RADICALS IN CONGRESS

Thaddeus Stevens & Charles Sumner

“The foundations of their institutions

must be broken up and re-laid, or all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain.” (Stevens)

                                         Frederick Douglass (1865):

"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."

              2. MODERATES IN CONGRESS

Wade-Davis Bill (ironclad oath)

 --passed Congress at end of 1864:

--sent to the President.

What are his options?

              3. Freedmen's Bureau

     C. JOHNSON'S “RESTORATION”

              --Black Codes

     D. RADICALS STRIKE BACK

              1. First Civil Rights Bill

              2. First Reconstruction Acts

              3. 14th Amendment

              4. Tenure of Office Act

              5. Fifteenth Amendment

     E.      The Compromise of 1877

                       1. Hayes versus Tilden

2. The “End” of Reconstruction

The Souls of Black Folk (1901) W.E.B. DuBois:

"For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods...he may not leave the plantation of his birth...in the whole rural South the black farmers are...bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis...The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

COURSE SYLLABUS

History 232 Section 1 (CRN 30019)

Tue/Thu  7:45-9:50am

Classroom: CB 02

Office: Faculty Towers 201A

Instructor: Dr. Schmoll

Office Hours: MTWTH 10-11am

…OR MAKE AN APPOINTMENT!!!

Email: bschmoll@csub.edu

Office Phone: 654-6549

Course Description: We will examine the political, social, and cultural foundations of American history from 1870 to the Present. We will cover Reconstruction, the problems of an increasingly urban and industrialized society, and the United States in World Affairs.

Course Reading: 


1.      Philip Caputo, Rumor of War

2.      Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

3.      Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

4.      Robert McElvaine, Down & Out in the Great Depression

5.      Recommended: Paul Johnson, History of the American People, or Firsthand 
America, or any textbook on U.S. history



Grading Scale: 


3%       Debate on Dropping of the Bomb

10%     Participation


2%       Immigration Interview


30%     Writing About Civil Rights


25%     Midterm Exam

30%     Final Exam

The Blog: If you have questions or comments about this class, or if you want to see the course reader or the syllabus online, just go to http://history232spring2014.blogspot.com/ 


You need to sign in to this blog this week. 
You will also have short readings on the blog. I will announce these in class.



Attendance:
Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. If you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 15% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass. 


Being Prompt:
Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective (at what time of day did the Battle of the Marne begin?), that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude. There’s an old saying: better two hours early than two minutes late. Old sayings are good.
So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. And no, I’m not the jackass who watches for you to be late that one time and stands at the door and points in your face. If you are late a few (that means three) times, you will lose the entire 10% participation grade. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident. But if you are late several times, you will not be able to receive a participation grade above 50%.



The Unforgivable Curse: 
Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? C’mon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone one time to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Oh, and guess what, this room is designed to give your teacher a perfect view of you with a phone beneath the table; is that text message really worth 10% of the quarter grade? Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that, but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing: when you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies were on to something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for a while.



In-Class Essay on Civil Rights:
In the later part of the quarter, we will be writing an in-class essay on some aspect of the Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s. We will have several readings, lectures, and class discussions leading up to this assignment. 



Interview:
You have the opportunity to conduct an interview this quarter. I will give you more details in class, but basically, you should begin to consider who your subject will be. For the interview, you will need to find someone who is at least 50 and decided to immigrate to this country.  I’ll give you a handout and guidelines to direct your interview.



Participation: You do not need to be the person who speaks out the most, asks the most questions, or comes up with the most brilliant historical arguments to receive full credit in participation. If you are in class and on time, discuss the issues that we raise, avoid the temptation to nod off, to leave early, or to text people during class (the three easiest ways to lose credit), and in general act like you care, then you will receive a good participation grade! 

Just being here does not guarantee a 100% participation grade, since you must be regularly actively involved for that to be possible.

 

In fact, to get a 90% participation grade or higher, you must attend all classes, contribute thoughtful comments to the larger class discussion every day, participate actively with those around you, and avoid the obvious: no sleeping, no texting, no using this course to study for other courses, no being late.

To get an 85%, you can miss one class and must contribute at least one comment per week to the large class discussion, participate actively with those around you, and avoid the obvious: no sleeping, no texting, no using this course to study for other courses, no being late.

To get an 80%, you can miss one class and must participate actively with those around you, and avoid the obvious: no sleeping, no texting, no using this course to study for other courses, no being late.

To get a 75%, you can miss two classes and must participate actively with those around you, and avoid the obvious: no sleeping, no texting, no using this course to study for other courses, no being late.

Show up tardy more than once or fail to participate in the dialogue and the participation grade will begin to diminish quickly.

Academic Integrity
The principles of truth and integrity are recognized as fundamental to a community of teachers and scholars. The University expects that both faculty and students will honor these principles and in so doing will protect the integrity of all academic work and student grades. Students are expected to do all work assigned to them without unauthorized assistance and without giving unauthorized assistance. Faculty have the responsibility of exercising care in the planning and supervision of academic work so that honest effort will be encouraged and positively reinforced. 
http://www.csub.edu/studentconduct/documents/academicintegrity.pdf

Course Schedule:

4/1 Intro/Intro to Reconstruction/Jourdan Anderson/Assign Immigration Interview

4/3 Reconstruction/HOMEWORK DUE TODAY: SIGNED STATEMENT

4/8 Industrialism

4/10 New Imperialism/1890s/How the Other Half Lives Reading Due today

4/15 Progressivism/Immigration Interview Due

4/17 More Progressivism

4/22 World War I/Prohibition

4/24 Woman Suffrage/Harlem Renaissance

4/29 EXAM #1

5/1  The Great Depression/New Deal/McElvaine reading due today

5/6   More New Deal/From Quarantine to War

5/8  Bomb Debate/Post War Conformity

5/13 Desert Exile Due/The Cold War

5/15 Cold War Culture

5/20 Civil Rights/Prep the In Class Essay

5/22 Writing About Civil Rights(in class essay)

5/27 New Rights Movements

5/29 War in Vietnam/Caputo Reading Due Today

6/3  Political life from Ike to LBJ

6/5 Watergate and the Turbulent 70s/EXAM #2

FINAL EXAM: Thursday June 12, 11:00am-1:30pm

REMEMBER, although this syllabus is the “law” of the class, I reserve the right to change it at any time to suit the particular needs of our class. If I must do so, it will always be in your best interest, and I’ll always advise you as soon as possible.