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Kay Bradley

DH Great Depression Causes + Why it lasted so long - 0 views

  • prosperity of the 1920s was a cruel illusion
  • most families lived belo
  • poverty line.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • 60 percent of the nation's families earned less than $2,000 a year
  • Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely.
  • The farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921
  • The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy.
  • Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country's 30,000 banks failed.
  • small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans.
  • consumer debt also weakened the economy
  • poor distribution of income
  • During the 1920s, there was a pronounced shift in wealth and income toward the very rich
  • poorest 93 percent of the non-farm population actually saw its disposable income fall.
  • Because the rich tend to spend a high proportion of their income on luxuries, such as large cars, entertainment, and tourism, and save a disproportionately large share of their income,
  • business investment had begun to decline.
  • housing starts
  • 1924 immigration law
  • Soaring inventories
  • reduce investment and production
  • stock market speculation
  • The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, played a critical, if inadvertent, role in weakening the economy.
  • allowed the money supply to fall dramatically
  • "liquidity crisis."
  • the Federal Reserve allowed the country's money supply to decline by 27 percent between 1929 and 1933.
  • Instead of actively stimulating the economy by cutting interest rates and expanding the money supply-
  • tariff policies damaged the economy by depressing foreign trade
  • Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922
  • Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930
  • By 1933, international trade had plunged 30 percent.
  • Unlike most of Western Europe
  • the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance.
  • Community Ches
  • Red Cross
Kay Bradley

1920s questions - 2 views

F Block 1. Name an example of a conflict that ensued form the diffs between modernism and traditional values 2. Why are the 1920s considered their own era 3. While the auto industry increased...

started by Kay Bradley on 17 Mar 11 no follow-up yet
Kay Bradley

Economic history of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787, established that the entire nation was a unified, or common market, with no internal tariffs or taxes on interstate commerce.
  • He succeeded in building a strong national credit based on taking over the state debts and bundling them with the old national debt into new securities sold to the wealthy. They in turn now had an interest in keeping the new government solvent. Hamilton funded the debt with tariffs on imported goods and a highly controversial tax on whiskey
  • Hamilton believed the United States should pursue economic growth through diversified shipping, manufacturing, and banking
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  • He sought and achieved Congressional authority to create the First Bank of the United States in 1791; the charter lasted until 1811.[17]
  • Thomas Jefferson and James Madison opposed a strong central government (and, consequently, most of Hamilton's economic policies), but they could not stop Hamilton,
  • As president in 1811 Madison let the bank charter expire, but the War of 1812 proved the need for a national bank and Madison reversed positions. The Second Bank of the United States was established in 1816, with a 20 year charter.[18]
  • Cotton, at first a small-scale crop in the South, boomed following Eli Whitney's invention in 1793 of the cotton gin,
  • Millions moved to the more fertile farmland of the Midwest. States built roads and waterways, such as the Cumberland Pike (1818) and the Erie Canal (1825), opening up markets for western farm products.
  • The Whig Party supported Clay's American System, which proposed to build internal improvements (e.g. roads, canals and harbors), protect industry, and create a strong national bank
  • President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), leader of the new Democratic Party, opposed the Second Bank of the United States, which he believed favored the entrenched interests of rich. When he was elected for a second term, Jackson blocked the renewal of the bank's charter. Jackson opposed paper money and demanded the government be paid in gold and silver coins. The Panic of 1837 stopped business growth for three years
  • Railroads made a decisive impact on the U.S. economy especially in the 1850-1873 era, making possible the transition to an urban industrial nation with high finance and advanced managerial skills. Railroads opened up remote areas, drastically cut the cost of moving freight as well as passenger travel, and stimulated new industries such as steel and telegraphy, as well as the profession of civil engineering.
  • Atlanta, Billings, Chicago, and Dallas
  • the railroad became the first large-scale business enterprise and the model for most large corporations.[24]
  • Panics did not curtail rapid U.S. economic growth during the 19th century. Long term demographic growth, expansion into new farmlands, and creation of new factories continued. New inventions and capital investment led to the creation of new industries and economic growth. As transportation improved, new markets continuously opened.
  • By 1860, on the eve of Civil War, 16% of the people lived in cities with 2500 or more people; a third of the nation's income came from manufacturing. Urbanized industry was limited primarily to the Northeast; cotton cloth production was the leading industry, with the manufacture of shoes, woolen clothing, and machinery also expanding. Most of the workers in the new factories were immigrants or their children. Between 1845 and 1855, some 300,000 European immigrants arrived annually. Many remained in eastern cities, especially mill towns and mining camps, while those with farm experience and some savings bought farms in the West.[26]
  • The industrial advantages of the North over the South helped secure a Northern victory in the American Civil War
  • Industrialists came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and political affairs.[26]
  • the region maintained its dependence on cotton
  • An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution."
  • By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.[2
  • The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.
  • Parallel to these achievements was the development of the nation's industrial infrastructure
Kay Bradley

16. Capital and Labor | THE AMERICAN YAWP - 2 views

  • The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict
  • it was federal troops that finally defeated them
  • American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • Nearly 100 Americans died in “The Great Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property.
  • galvanized the country
  • It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States
  • II. The March of Capital
  • John Pierpont Morgan
  • Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize and battle against the power of capital.
  • revolutions in American industry
  • Technological innovations
  • national investments
  • slashed the costs of production and distribution
  • New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms
  • National credit agencies
  • Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.
  • Taylorism
  • Frederick Taylor
  • Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.
  • use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing
  • sewing machines
  • packers’ “disassembly” lines
  • grain reapers
  • Duke cigarette rollers
  • Henry Ford made the assembly line famous
  • Cyrus McCormick
  • Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world
  • by 1900 the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing nation
  • massive economies of scale
  • New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating
  • A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners
  • legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of massed capital
  • After the Civil War, however, the corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively, investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.
  • But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments
  • between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy
  • Competition melted away in what is known as “the great merger movement.”
  • Monopoly had arrived
  • Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity
  • But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions
  • new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them
  • One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.
  • The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration—it would encourage the survival of the weak.10
  • H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11
  • By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders
  • American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions
  • The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line.
  • skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.
  • Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  • The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize
  • The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s
  • It welcomed all laborers,
  • In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day,
  • culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886.
  • The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism
  • Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square
  • The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.
  • Homestead, Pennsylvania.
  • Henry Clay Frick
  • Pinkerton detectives,
  • Still, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the industrial landscape.
  • 1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country.
  • workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.
Kay Bradley

Pre civil war south 4/5 - 0 views

  • At the same time, southern intellectuals began to defend slavery as a positive factor. After 1830, white Southerners stopped referring to slavery as a necessary evil. Instead, they argued that it was a beneficial institution that created a hierarchical society superior to the leveling democracy of the North. By the late 1840s, a new and more explicitly racist rationale for slavery had emerged.
  • With the emergence of militant abolitionism in the North, sharpened by slave uprisings in Jamaica and Southampton County, Virginia, the South began to see itself as surrounded by enemies.
  • Before the 1830s, southern statements on slavery had been defensive; afterward, they were defiant.
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  • began to denounce the North’s form of capitalism as “wage slavery.”
  • Beginning in 1837, southern leaders held the first of a series of commercial conventions in an attempt to diversify the southern economy and to rescue the South from northern “pecuniary and commercial supremacy.”
  • Efforts to develop the southern economy were surprisingly successful. Southern railroad mileage quadrupled between 1850 and 1860--although southern track mileage still trailed that of the free states by 14,000. By 1860 Richmond manufactured more tobacco than any other America city and exported more goods to South America than any other American port, including New York.
  • Regional independence was also called for in religion. Due in large part to fear of antislavery agitation, southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians sought to sever their denominational affiliations with northern churches
  • Southerners also called for a distinctive and peculiarly southern literature. More than 30 periodicals were founded with the word “Southern” in their title, all intended to “breathe a Southern spirit, and sustain a strictly Southern character.”
Kay Bradley

Pre civil war south 3/5 - 0 views

  • Although slavery was highly profitable, it had a negative impact on the southern economy. It impeded the development of industry and cities and contributed to high debts, soil exhaustion, and a lack of technological innovation.
  • did not develop urban centers for commerce, finance, and industry on a scale equal to those found in the North. Virginia’s largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850
  • Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies.
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  • 1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.
  • 1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.
  • 1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.
  • Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth.
Kay Bradley

The New England and Middle colonies (article) | Khan Academy - 0 views

  • Navigation ActsA series of acts passed between 1650 and 1673 that established three rules of colonial trade: first, trade must be carried out only on English ships; second, all goods imported into the colonies had to pass through ports in England; and third, specific goods, such as tobacco, could be exported only to England
  • Proprietary colonyColonies that were under the authority of individuals that had been granted charters of ownership, like Maryland and Pennsylvania.
  • The New England colonies were founded to escape religious persecution
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  • Motivations for colonization:
  • The Middle colonies, like Delaware, New York, and New Jersey, were founded as trade centers,
  • The Middle colonies were also called the “Breadbasket colonies”
  • New England colonies attracted Puritan settlers with families
  • Demographics
  • not single indentured servants
  • Middle colonies attracted a diverse group of European migrants, including Germans, Scots-Irish, French, and Swedish
  • Economics in the colonies: Colonial economies developed based on each colony’s environment
  • New England colonies depended on fishing, lumbering, and subsistence farming
  • Middle colonies also featured mixed economies, including farming and merchant shipping
  • Establishing representative governments:
  • Mayflower Compact
  • Taking into account that the English colonies were still under the British crown, creating the Mayflower Compact was unusually democratic for the time.
  • rench, and Dutch colonizers, the English colonizers rarely married Native Americans
  • Unlike the Spanish
  • F
  • Wampanoag
  • Narragansett
Kay Bradley

The Granger Revolution - 0 views

  • The Grangers, an organization of farmers formed in the late 1860s, were being oppressed by the dominance and ubiquitous influence of the railroads
  • Since there was no regulation of big business, and the nature of the economy necessitated high volume transportation of crops, these farmers had no choice but to give in to the whims of the railroad tycoons. When the burden became too great to endure, the Grangers organized a revolt, which eventually led to government regulation of the railroads and other monopolies.
  • The popularity of the Grangers was "less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against the monopolistic practices of railroads and elevators and to institute for themselves cooperative methods of buying and selling.
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  • This meant that they had to rely on corporately owned railroads and grain elevators for the transport of their crops. To make matters worse, "elevators, often themselves owned by railroads, charged high prices for their services, weighed and graded grain without supervision, and used their influence with the railroads to ensure that cars were not available to farmers who sought to evade elevator service."
  • the Grangers read their Farmer's Declaration of Independence, which cited all of their grievances and in which they vowed to free themselves from the tyranny of monopoly
  • Munn v. Illinois
  • Following this ruling, several pieces of legislation,
  • were passed. Though they were soon repealed, they represented the first attempts at regulating a private monopoly
  • collectively known as the Granger
  • Laws,
Kay Bradley

Digital History The Dispossessed 1930s - 0 views

  • 70 percent of Charleston's black population was unemployed
  • salt pork, hominy grits, corn bread, and molasses. Income averaged less than a dollar a day.
  • In Chicago, 70 percent of all black families earned less than a $1,000
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  • assuring landlords a windfall of an extra $142 a month. Buildings that previously held 60 families now contained 300
  • Mexican Americans faced serious opposition from organized labor
  • repatriated
  •  
    "70 percent of Charleston's black population was unemployed"
Kay Bradley

Digital History The Great Depression in Global Perspective - 0 views

  • International trade fell 30 percent
  • "Beggar-thy-neighbor" trade policies were a major reason why the Depression persisted as long as it did.
  • 30 million people were unemploye
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • One response to the depression was military dictatorship
  • collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,
  • fascism and militarism
  • Hitler outlawed labor unions
  • restructured German
  • industry into a series of cartels
  • massive program of military rearmament
  • totalitarian communism.
  • Stalin's
  • welfare capitalism
  • Canada
  • Great Britain
  • France
  • Under welfare capitalism, government assumed ultimate responsibility for promoting a reasonably fair distribution of wealth and power and for providing security against the risks of bankruptcy, unemployment, and destitution.
  • the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States.
  • European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.
  • It produced a major political realignment
  • committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.
  • he Depression strengthened the federal presence in American life, producing such innovations as national old age pensions, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, public housing, federally subsidized school lunches, insured bank deposits, the minimum wage, and stock market regulation.
  • fundamentally altered labor relations
  • national labor policy protective of collective bargaining.
  • transformed the farm economy by introducing federal price supports and rural electrification
  • fundamental transformation in public attitudes.
  • t led Americans to view the federal government as the ultimate protector of public well-being.
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