3) Labour and Capital

Managers cutting wages, increasing workloads and making people redundant all led to the railroad strike. The managers had mainly been targetting members of unions. On the 14th July 1877, workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia started walking out after the Baltimore & Ohio railroad cut wages for the 3rd time in a year. The strike spread from West Virginia to other railroads, and then to factory workers and wives. It created a general strike. Big companies were the main targets and there was a lot of violence. Buildings, engines and railroad cars were set alight. The strike lasted for 45 days.

The militia were sent out in the attempt to put down the strike. In Baltimore, Maryland, the Sixth Maryland Regiment fought its way through the rock-throwing crowd killing 10 people and wounding 25 more after firing shots.

The strike was eventually put down but it led to armouries being established all over which are still in use today for things like teen parties. The National Guard was also established that aimed to look out for workers.

The workers shut down two-thirds of the railway tracks and it was feared there could be a workers' revolution like that in the Paris Commune of 1871. The US government realised they couldn't have large-scale industrialisation without class conflict.

Industrialisation began as early as the 1820s and was very underway in the 1840s. This process sped up in the years after the Civil War to an incredible extent. Lightbulbs, mass printing and petroleum products appeared during this time. Work also became organised according to the clock and the US became a consumer culture.

By 1910, the US had a third of the world's railroad track. Immediately after the Civil War, railroad track was concentrated in the north, but this now started spreading to the south. They connected already existing industrial and economic cities (like they did in Europe) as well as creating railroad in places where cities were allowed to expand. This created a ripple effect in the US economy, e.g., they replaced iron railroads with steel tracks. Things like the coal mining industry and the steel industry experienced booms because of the railroads.

The greater interconnectedness that came with the railroads highlighted the different time zones apparent across the US. So, the railroad users started using the 4 standard time zones: pacific time, mountain time, central time and eastern time. This soon led to the government agreeing to introduce the 4 standard time zones. Railroad time became national time.

The growth of the railroad also led to a growth of wealth. The government gave the railroad workers 180 million acres of land as a land grant, saving them a lot of money. Property also became more valuable the closer it was to the railroad.

Faraday invented the first electrical generator that allowed a sustained electrical current. It was used in lighthouses, but it got very hot and sparked a lot causing fires. Thomas Edison then created his Electric Light Company and the lightbulb that created cheap and convenient lighting. He built a powerplant in the Wall Street industrial area that lit 85 buildings. He had a generator that created DC but this could be fairly unreliable. George Westinghouse solved the distribution problem by using AC and transformers to distribute electrical power.

Financiers were also important in the electrical industry with many of the inventions being patented. The industry required a lot of money and managerial expertise to grow.

The number of electrical plants continued to grow from just 1 in 1882 to nearly 4000 in 1920.

• After the Civil War, the electrical industry began to be used to generate a lot of capital. Shares of the companies were sold which created a lot of money without one person worrying about losing everything.
• The ownership and management of the companies was dispersed among various people so the death of an owner wouldn't cause the company to collapse.
• Businesses were adapted so that, if the company went under, the owner wouldn't lose too much depending on how much they had invested in it.
• Boards of directors were created and a managerial class soon emerged.
• Competition could cause problems for companies though. So, people's stocks were given in trust to selected people that allowed them to have some control over the industries. For example, soon, nearly the whole of the oil industry was under the control of the trust. Although this was soon exposed and then made illegal in Sherman's Anti-Trust Act.
• The Merger Movement was then created as a new way to deal with competition. J. P. Morgan established that the financier was the person who should be in charge of the money in a business. Mergers began to increase and it soon led to a lot of industries involved in the merger movement.

Most people were now working in towns rather than in the country, transforming the country into one of industrialisation. But working in factories involved working in very harsh conditions and receiving low wages. For example, at the Carnegie Steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania, there were 12 hour shifts with no days off except for Christmas and the 4th July. Sometimes, some would work 24 hour shifts so that others could have the Sunday off. There were no breaks, people went deaf from the machinery and there were lots of deaths on the job. Women and children were often preferred due to their smaller hands and them being more docile so they were less willing to resist work.

Frederick Winslow Taylor came from a well-off family but refused to go to university instead wanting to work in industry. He discovered there were certain aspects of the job that could be made easier and more cost efficient, allowing more money to be made. He suggested to the manager that he could work out how much a worker could produce in a day and then work out wages accordingly. The work was then reorganised into simple repetitive tasks that people could do with no previous experience. 'Taylorism'.

In response to these changes, workers came together in large groups and formed the first trade unions. They formed large corporations of their own that were resisted by businesses who said it wasn't democratic even though they were doing the same thing. There were 3 approaches to these unions:

• The Knights of Labor. This was a union that was very inclusive of all producers and races. But, it became associated with extremism and was on the brink of extinction in the 1890s.
• The American Federation of Labor (A. F. of L.). This trade union called for higher wages, fewer hours and an increase in safety, among other things. This one included skilled, native-born workers.
• The International Workers of the World (the I. W. W, or the Wobblies). This trade union wanted to organise the entire industry hoping for one big union that included everybody. It was the most radical of the unions and they wanted a revolution.