Willard, and the Anti-Saloon League were formed. Finally, in , the 18th Amendment prohibited the sale and drinking of alcohol. Finally, after the owners refused to negotiate and the lack of coal was getting to the freezing schools, hospitals, and factories during that winter, TR threatened to seize the mines and operate them with federal troops if he had to in order to keep it open and the coal coming to the people.
TR Corrals the Corporations The formed Interstate Commerce Commission had proven to be inadequate, so in , Congress passed the Elkins Act , which fined railroads that gave rebates and the shippers that accepted them. The Hepburn Act restricted the free passes of railroads.
Morgan and James J. Caring for the Consumer In , significant improvements in the meat industry were passed, such as the Meat Inspection Act, which decreed that the preparation of meat shipped over state lines would be subject to federal inspection from corral to can. The Pure Food and Drug Act tried to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of foods and pharmaceuticals.
Another reason for new acts was to make sure European markets could trust American beef and other meat. Earth Control Americans were vainly wasting their natural resources, and the first conservation act, the Desert Land Act of , provided little help.
More successful was the Forest Reserve Act of , which authorized the president to set aside land to be protected as national parks.
Under this statute, some 46 million acres of forest were set aside as preserves. Roosevelt, a sportsman in addition to all the other things he was, realized the values of conservation, and persuaded by other conservationists like Gifford Pinchot , head of the federal Division of Forestry, he helped initiate massive conservation projects.
However, in , TR announced that he would not seek the presidency in , since he would have, in effect, served two terms by then. In , a short but sharp panic on Wall Street placed TR at the center of its blame, with conservatives criticizing him, but he lashed back, and eventually the panic died down.
In , Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act , which authorized national banks to issue emergency currency backed by various kinds of collateral. Debs , who garnered , votes. TR left the presidency to go on a lion hunt, then returned with much energy. He had established many precedents and had helped ensure that the new trusts would fit into capitalism and have healthy adult lives while helping the American people.
He was also sensitive to criticism and not as liberal as Roosevelt. This investment, in effect, gave the U. Knox propose that a group of American and foreign bankers buy the railroads and turn them over to China. Taft also pumped U. Taft the Trustbuster In his four years of office, Taft brought 90 suits against trusts.
After Taft tried to break apart U. Taft Splits the Republican Party Two main issues split the Republican party: 1 the tariff and 2 conservation of lands. To lower the tariff and fulfill a campaign promise, Taft and the House passed a moderately reductive bill, but the Senate, led by Senator Nelson W. A split U. And since its supplies were running out against a besieging South Carolinian army, Lincoln had a problem of how to deal with the situation.
Lincoln wisely chose to send supplies to the fort, and he told the South Carolinian governor that the ship to the fort only held provisions, not reinforcements. However, to the South, provisions were reinforcements, and on April 12, , cannons were fired onto the fort; after 34 hours of non-lethal firing, the fort surrendered.
On April 19 and 27, Lincoln also called a naval blockade on the South that was leaky at first but soon clamped down tight. The Deep South which had already seceded , felt that Lincoln was now waging an aggressive war, and was joined by four more Southern states: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. They have not seceded, but at any moment, they just might. Thus, to retain them, Lincoln used moral persuasion…and methods of dubious legality: In Maryland, he declared martial law in order to retain a state that would isolate Washington D.
The war was one of brother vs. The Balance of Forces The South, at the beginning of the war, did have many advantages: It only had to fight to a draw to win, since all it had to do was keep the North from invading and taking over all of its territory. It had the most talented officers, including Robert E.
However, the South was handicapped by a shortage of factories and manufacturing plants, but during the war, those developed in the South. As the war dragged on, Northern strengths beat Southern advantages. While the European countries wanted the Union to be split which would strengthen their nation, relatively speaking , their people were pro-North and anti-slavery, and sensing that this was could eliminate slavery once and for all, they would not allow any intervention by their nations on behalf of the South.
Still, the Southern ideas was that the war would produce a shortage of cotton, which would draw England and others into the war, right? In the pre-war years, cotton production had been immense, and thus, England and France had huge surpluses of cotton. As the North won Southern territory, it sent cotton and food over to Europe. India and Egypt upped their cotton production to offset the hike in the price of cotton. The Decisiveness of Diplomacy The South still hoped for foreign intervention, and it almost got it on a few occasions.
This was due to an invention that made steel-making cheaper and much more effective: the Bessemer process , which was named after an English inventor even though an American, William Kelly , had discovered it first: Cold air blown on red-hot iron burned carbon deposits and purified it.
America was one of the few nations that had a lot of coal for fuel, iron for smelting, and other essential ingredients for steel making, and thus, quickly became 1. Carnegie and Other Sultans of Steel Andrew Carnegie started off as a poor boy in a bad job, but by working hard, assuming responsibility, and charming influential people, he worked his way up to wealth. Rockefeller Grows an American Beauty Rose In , a man named Drake first used oil to get money, and by the s, kerosene, a type of oil, was used to light lamps all over the nation.
Oil, however, was just beginning with the gasoline-burning internal combustion engine. Rockefeller crushed weaker competitors—part of the natural process according to him—but his company did produce superior oil at a cheaper price.
Other trusts, which also generally made better products at cheaper prices, emerged, such as the meat industry of Gustavus F. Swift and Philip Armour. The Gospel of Wealth Many of the newly rich had worked from poverty to wealth, and thus felt that some people in the world were destined to become rich and then help society with their money. It said the reason a Carnegie was at the top of the steel industry was that he was most fit to run such a business.
Corporate lawyers used the 14th Amendment to defend trusts, the judges agreed, saying that corporations were legal people and thus entitled to their property, and plutocracy ruled.
Not until was it properly enforced and those prosecuted for violating the law were actually punished. The South in the Age of Industry The South remained agrarian despite all the industrial advances, though James Buchanan Duke developed a huge cigarette industry in the form of the American Tobacco Company and made many donations to what is now Duke University.
Men like Henry W. Grady , editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper urged the South to industrialize. However, many northern companies set rates to keep the South from gaining any competitive edge whatsoever, with examples including the rich deposits of iron and coal near Birmingham, Alabama, and the textile mills of the South. However, cheap labor led to the creation of many jobs, and despite poor wages, many white Southerners saw employment as a blessing.
The Gibson Girl was young, athletic, attractive, and outdoorsy not the stay-at-home mom type. However, many women never achieved this, and instead toiled in hard work because they had to do so in order to earn money. A nation of farmers was becoming a nation of wage earners, but the fear of unemployment was never far, and the illness of a breadwinner the main wage owner in a family was disastrous.
Strong pressures in foreign trade developed as the tireless industrial machine threatened to flood the domestic market. In Unions There Is Strength With the inflow of immigrants providing a labor force that would work for low wages and in poor environments, the workers who wanted to improve their conditions found that they could not, since their bosses could easily hire the unemployed to take their places.
Corporations had many weapons against strikers, such as hiring strikebreakers or asking the courts to order strikers to stop striking, and if they continued, to bring in troops. The National Labor Union , formed in , represented a giant boot stride by workers and attracted an impressive total of , members, but it only lasted six years. It worked for the arbitration of industrial disputes and the eight-hour workday, and won the latter for government workers, but the depression of knocked it out.
A new organization, the Knights of Labor , was begun in and continued secretly until This organization was similar to the National Labor Union. It only barred liquor dealers, professional gamblers, lawyers, bankers, and stockbrokers, and they campaigned for economic and social reform.
Led by Terence V. Unhorsing the Knights of Labor However, the Knights became involved in a number of May Day strikes of which half failed. In Chicago, home to about 80, Knights and a few hundred anarchists that advocated a violent overthrow of the American government, tensions had been building, and on May 4, , Chicago police were advancing on a meeting that had been called to protest brutalities by authorities when a dynamite bomb was thrown, killing or injuring several dozen people.
Eight anarchists were rounded up yet no one could prove that they had any association with the bombing, but since they had preached incendiary doctrines, the jury sentenced five of them to death on account of conspiracy and gave the other three stiff prison terms.
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