American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Chapter 17: INDUSTRIAL SUPREMACY

Main themes of Chapter Seventeen:

• How various factors (raw materials, labor supply, new technology, business organization, growing markets, and friendly governments) combined to thrust the United States into worldwide industrial leadership



• How this explosion of industrial capitalism was both extolled for its accomplishments and attacked for its excesses



• How American workers, who on the average benefited, reacted to the physical and psychological realities of the new economic order

• The reasons for the rapid industrial development of the United States in the late nineteenth century



• The impact of individual entrepreneurship and technological innovations in promoting industrial expansion, and the development of new industries such as steel, oil, automobiles, and aviation



• The changes that were taking place in the incorporation, organization, and management of American business



• The ways in which older notions of individualism and the newer concept of Social Darwinism combined to preach the gospel of wealth and to justify the social consequences of the new industrial capitalism



• The critics of the new industrial capitalism, and the solutions they proposed



• The conditions of immigrants, women, and children in the work force



• The attempt by organized labor to form national associations, and the reasons why craft-based labor organizations became the norm



• The reasons that organized labor generally failed in its efforts to achieve its objectives