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The Triumph of Industrial Capitalism,...
Overview
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1873 and 1893 were years remembered primarily as the beginnings of two disastrous economic depressions, or "panics." Americans witnessed nationwide labor strikes and sustained price deflation. Farmers’ crops were worth less at harvest-time than at planting-time and manufacturers increased production to maintain profit levels only to see their prices fall. However the two decades also marked the most dramatic economic transformations in the history of the world. The U.S. was on its way to becoming the leading capitalist nation on earth.
The manufacturing and banking industries of the late nineteenth century produced businesses that were unprecedented in the U.S. "Big Business" generated wealth in staggering concentrations and made a few men richer than anyone could have imagined. Social class became a reality in the United States during this period. The gap between the owners and the workers became obvious. The Homestead Act, passed during the Civil War was designed to ensure that the Trans-Mississippi West was settled by small, hard-working, independent framers. They arrived taking advantage of the opportunity to start a new but so, too, did railroad tycoons and commercial farmers, immigrant workers and miners. They all participated in one way or another displacing the Indians who had lived in the west for centuries. As the west was settled and developed it was soon an integral part of the nation’s political economy of global capitalism. Beef, timber, gold, and silver were sent back east and the mythic independent, self-sufficient, and self-reliant westerner was just another cog in the industrialization of America.
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