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86. What name is used to refer to a person from one area who tries to take an active part in the political life of another area, especially, in the US, a Northerner who was politically active in the South in the 1860s and 1870s, in order to gain from the situation rather than to help people in the South? Carpetbaggers (саквояжники).
87. What were some of the negative effects of industrialization in the 19lh century, and how did the US Government respond to them?
(1865 to about 1900, the U.S. became the world's leading industrial nation, witnessing meteoric expansion in the pace and scale of production. The availability of land; the diversity of climate and the corollary economic diversity; the ample presence of navigable canals, rivers, and coastal waterways that filled the transportation needs of the emerging industrial economy; and the abundance of natural resources; fostered the cheap extraction of energy, fast transport, and the availability of capital that powered this Second Industrial Revolution.
Where the First Industrial Revolution shifted production from artisans to factories, the United States pioneered an expansion in organization, coordination, and scale of industries spurred on by technology and transportation. Railroads opened up vast markets, helping to explain steady growth in aggregate demand. The transcontinental railroad, built by Irish and Chinese immigrants, provided access to previously remote expanses of land. Railway construction boosted demand for capital resources, credit, and rapid increases in land values.
Meanwhile, technological advances in iron and steel making, like the Bessemer process and open-hearth furnace, combined with similar innovations in chemistry and other sciences to vastly improve the productivity and efficiency of industry. New communication tools, like the telegraph and telephone allowed actions to be coordinated across great distances. Innovations also occurred in how work was organized, as when Henry Ford developed the assembly line (a manufacturing process in which interchangeable parts are added to a product in a sequential manner to create an end product) or Fredrick Taylor the formalized ideas of scientific management.
Industry learned how to coordinate such diversity of economic activities across broad geographic areas. To finance such large-scale enterprises, the corporation emerged as the dominant form of business organization. Corporations also grew by combining into trusts, creating single firms out of competing firms. Business leaders backed government policies of laissez-faire (политика невмешательства). High tariffs sheltered U.S. factories and workers from foreign competition (which hardly existed after 1880); federal railroad subsidies enriched investors, farmers and railroad workers, and created hundreds of towns and cities; and all branches of government at all levels generally sought to stop organized labor from using violence to win strikes. Powerful industrialists, like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller held great wealth and power; their employees were the best-paid in the world. In this context of cutthroat competition for accumulation, the skilled labor of the old-fashoned petty artisan and craftsman gave way to well-paid skilled workers and engineers as the nation deepened its technological base. Meanwhile, a steady stream of immigrants encouraged the availability of cheap labor, especially in the mining and manufacturing sectors.)
Despite their remarkable progress, 19th-century U.S. farmers experienced recurring periods of hardship. Several basic factors were involved -- soil exhaustion, the vagaries of nature, a decline in self-sufficiency, and the lack of adequate legislative protection and aid. Perhaps most important, however, was over-production (e.g. sharecropping: tenant farmers "shared" up to half of their crop with the landowners in exchange for seed and essential supplies. An estimated 80 percent of the South's African American farmers and 40 percent of its white ones lived under this debilitating system following the Civil War. Most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt, from which the only hope of escape was increased planting.) Food prices were falling, and farmers had to bear the costs of high shipping rates, expensive mortgages, high taxes, and tariffs on consumer goods.
The life of a 19th-century U.S. industrial worker was far from easy. Even in good times wages were low, hours long and working conditions hazardous. As published in McClure's Magazine in 1894: "[The coal mine workers] breathe this atmosphere until their lungs grow heavy and sick with it" for only "fifty-five cents a day each." Little of the wealth generated went to the proletariat. The situation was worse for women and children, who made up a high percentage of the work force in some industries and often received but a fraction of the wages a man could earn. Periodic economic crises swept the nation, further eroding industrial wages and producing high levels of unemployment.
The elimination of competition, and the creation of monopolies, often forced workers to work for specific companies. To limit competition, railroads merged and set standardized shipping rates. Trusts - huge combinations of corporations - tried to establish monopoly control over some industries, notably oil. These giant enterprises could produce goods efficiently and sell them cheaply, but they could also fix prices and destroy competitors. To counteract them, the federal government took action. The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to control railroad rates. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 banned trusts, mergers, and business agreements "in restraint of trade."
The late 19th century was a period of heavy immigration, and many of the workers in the new industries were foreign-born. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 forbade the existence of monopolies as a "felony," major corporations found loopholes that allowed them to continue controlling national industries. The companies usually demanded long hours of exhausting work for low pay.
At the same time, the technological improvements, which added so much to the nation's productivity, continually reduced the demand for skilled labor. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, was a coalition of trade unions for skilled laborers. Yet the unskilled labor pool was constantly growing, as unprecedented numbers of immigrants -- 18 million between 1880 and 1910 -- entered the country, eager for work.
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