Gilded Age Apush

AP US History Review Sheet – Chapters 23 and 24

1. In the Presidential election of 1868, U.S. Grant’s victory was due to the votes of former black slaves. 2. In the late 19th century, those political candidates who campaigned by ‘waiving the bloody shirt’ were reminding voters of the treasonous Confederate Democrats during the Civil War. 3. A weapon that was used to put Boss Tweed, leader of New York City’s infamous Tweed Ring, in jail was the cartoons of the political satirist Thomas Nast. 4. The Credit Mobilier scandal involved railroad construction kickbacks involving the Union Pacific Railroad. 5. One cause of the Panic of 1873 was the construction of more factories than the market could bear. 6. As a solution
to the panic of 1873, debtors suggested inflationary policies. 7. One result of Republican ‘hard money’ policies was to help elect a Democratic House of Representatives in 1874, and later the creation of the Greenback Labor party. 8. During the Gilded Age, the Democrats and the Republicans had few significant economic differences. 9. The presidential elections of the 1870s and 1880s aroused great interest among voters. 10.
One reason for the heavy turnouts and partisan fervor was the Gilded Age was sharp ethnic and cultural differences in the membership of the two parties. 11. During the Gilded Age, the lifeblood of both the Democratic and the Republican parties was political patronage. 12. The major problem in the 1876 presidential election centered on the two sets of election returns submitted by Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. 13. The Compromise of 1877 resulted the end Reconstruction, and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. 14. The seque3nce of presidential terms of the ‘forgettable presidents’ of the Gilded Age (including Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms) was Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and Cleveland. 15. In the 1896 case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that ‘separate but equal’ facilities were constitutional. 16. At the end of Reconstruction, Southern whites disenfranchised African-Americans with poll taxes (made illegal in federal elections via the 24th Amendment in 1964, and in state elections subsequent to that via Supreme Court ruling), literacy tests (made illegal by the Voting Rights Act of 1965), grandfather clauses (made illegal by Supreme Court decision in 1915), and economic
intimidation. 17. The legal codes that established the system of segregation were called Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow was the name of a character in a minstrel show. 18. The railroad strike of 1877 started when the four largest railroads cut salaries by ten percent.

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19. Labor unrest in the 1870s and 1880s resulted in the use of federal troops during strikes. 20. In the wake of anti-Chinese violence in California, the U.S. Congress passed a law prohibiting immigration of Chinese laborers to American (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) 21. One of the main reasons that the Chinese came to the U.S was to dig for gold. 22. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated while in office; the second was James Garfield. The third was William McKinley, and the fourth and last was JFK. 23. President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a deranged, disappointed office seeker. 24. The Pendleton Act required appointees to public office to take a competitive examination, and outlawed the requirement that federal workers contribute to election campaigns. 25. With the passage of the Pendleton Act, politicians now sought money from big corporations. 26. The 1884 election contest between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland was noted for its personal attacks on the two candidates. 27. U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur were all Republicans. Grover Cleveland was a Democrat. Cleveland and Wilson would be the only Democrats elected between 1860 and 1928. 28. On the issue of the tariff, President Grover Cleveland advocated a lower rate. 29. The major campaign issue of the 1888 presidential election was tariff policy. 30. In the later decades of the 19th century, it was generally true that the locus of political power was Congress. 31. The early Populist campaign to create a coalition of white and black farmers ended a racist backlash that eliminated black voting in the South. 32. The political developments of the 1890s were largely shaped by the most severe and extended economic depression up to that time. 33. Economic unrest and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act led to the rise of a pro-silver leader – a charismatic young Congressman from Nebraska – William Jennings Bryan. 34. President Grover Cleveland aroused wide-spread public anger by his action of borrowing $65 million in gold from J.P. Morgan’s banking syndicate. 35. During the Gilded Age, most of the railroad barons built their railroads with government assistance. 36. The national government helped to finance transcontinental railroad construction in the late nineteenth century by providing railroad corporations with land grants. 37. The only transcontinental railroad built without government aid was the Great Northern. 38. The greatest single factor helping to spur the amazing industrialization of the post-Civil War years was the railroad network.

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39. The U.S. changed to standard time zones when the major rail lines established the division of the continent into four zones so that they could keep schedules and avoid wrecks. 40. Agreements between railroad corporations to divide the business in a given area and share the profits were called pools. 41. Efforts to regulate the monopolizing practices of railroad corporations first came in the form of action by state legislatures. 42. The first federal regulatory agency designed to protect the public interest from business combinations was the Interstate Commerce Commission. 43. One of the most significant aspects of the Interstate Commerce Act was that it represented the first large-scale attempt by the federal government to regulate business. 44. After the Civil War, the plentiful supply of unskilled labor in the U.S. helped to build the nation into an industrial giant. 45. One of the methods by which post-Civil War business leaders increased their profits was elimination of as much competition as possible. 46. Carnegie – steel; Rockefeller – oil; Morgan – banking; Duke – tobacco; Vanderbilt – railroads. 47. The steel industry owed much to the inventive genius of Henry Bessemer (the Bessemer Process, which made it possible to make a better grade of steel, at a better price.) 48. J.P. Morgan monitored his competition by placing officers of his bank on the boards of companies that he wanted to control. This method was known as an interlocking directorate. 49. America’s first billion-dollar corporation was United States Steel. 50. The first major product of the oil industry was kerosene. 51. The oil industry became a huge business with the invention of the internal combustion engine. 52. John D. Rockefeller used the following tactics to achieve success in the oil industry – extorting rebates from railroads, pursing a policy of rule or ruin, employing spies, and using high-pressure sales methods. 53. The gospel of wealth, which associated godliness with wealth, discouraged efforts to help the poor. 54. The Fourteenth Amendment was especially helpful to giant corporations when defending themselves against regulation by state governments. 55. The Sherman Anti-trust Act was at first primarily used to curb the power of labor unions. 56. During the age of industrialization, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. 57. In the late 19th century, tax benefits and cheap, nonunion labor attracted textile manufacturing to the “new South.” 58.
The group most effected by the new industrial age was women. 59. The image of the “Gibson Girl” represented an independent and athletic “new woman.” Page 4.

60. Generally, the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century interpreted the Constitution in such a way as to favor corporations. 61. In its efforts on behalf of workers, the National Labor Union won an eight-hour workday for government workers. 62. The Knights of Labor believed that conflict between capital and labor would disappear when labor would operate business and industries. 63. The most effective and most enduring labor union of the post-Civil War period was the American Federation of Labor. 64. By 1900, American attitudes toward labor began to change as the public came to recognize the right of workers to bargain collectively and strike. Nevertheless, the vast majority of employers continued to fight organized labor. 65. By 1900, organized labor in America had begun to develop a positive image with the public. 66. Historians critical of the captains of industry and capitalism concede that class-based protest has never been a powerful force in the U.S. because America has greater social mobility than Europe
has. 67. The following were important factors in post-Civil War industrial expansion: a political climate favoring business; a large pool of unskilled labor; an abundance of natural resources; and American ingenuity and inventiveness. 68. The first transcontinental railroad was completed by the construction efforts of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads.