This week in class, it was up to us students to create the essential question for the unit. We divided up into groups, analyze documents, and then come up with the essential question and a total of forty multiple choice questions that will appear on our final exam. During this unit, we are learning about the monopolies in business following the Civil War. Huge businesses arose after the war and in many cases, one company would gain control of an entire industry, creating a monopoly. These monopolies are controversial because they both helped and hurt the economy and the people after the Civil War. We specifically focused on John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie who were both leaders of monopolies. Our class split into groups to cover different parts of this unit. We used sources such as several video clips from ABC Clio which we watched and took notes on. After this, we came together as a class and came up with an essential question. The essential question we came up with is, “How did the actions of monopolistic leaders, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, affect the common worker?” John D. Rockefeller was a very competitive man. He eventually became the leader of the oil industry. He became a wealthy man by helping the Union during the Civil War. When oil started being drilled, he saw an opportunity to prosper. He opened up a few oil companies to start pumping oil, and he started buying other competitors around him. When the depression hit, many oil companies around him started to crash, but his was able to stay efficient and strong. He saw this as an opportunity for even more power and was able to expand his company and prosper while others were crumbling. He bought out most of the oil companies in the U.S. and started partnering with intelligent business partners such as Henry Flagler. If he wasn't able to buy a company, he would partner with them so he was still able to regulate prices and gain power. He was able to keep production costs low meaning lower prices for the population. He founded the Standard Oil Company which absorbed almost all of the competing oil companies and was able to negotiate lower shipping prices, stabilizing and lowering oil prices. However, people got nervous about his ruthlessness and having too much power, and they thought he was just making decisions for greed and money. They eventually took it to the Supreme Court where he was forced to disperse his trusts. He gave a lot of his money to charities and donated to education, medicine, and science. He believed strongly in spreading his wealth, and he said in an interview with William Hoster " I believe the power to make money is a gift of God ... to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man". He was able to become one of the wealthiest men in U.S. history because of his monopoly. Andrew Carnegie was similar to Rockefeller in that he affected the common workers positively and negatively. To learn more about Carnegie, we read the“Andrew Carnegie Bio.” Carnegie was once poor, but then he become one of the wealthiest men in the world, demonstrating a “rags to riches” type of story. He became wealthy by gaining power in the U.S. steel industry. He also used vertical integration, which was a system in which a company’s supply chain is controlled by that company. This allowed him to control raw materials, transportation, and distribution within in the steel industry, managing every stage of the production process from beginning to end. Similar to Rockefeller, Carnegie was also a philanthropist and he to donated millions of dollars to medicine, education, and science. He also donated money to create libraries and promote world peace. Carnegie also demonstrated the idea of gospel of wealth which is defined as the moral obligation to use wealth for public good. However, although this quality of him was beneficial to the common worker, in the year of 1892 there was homestead strike of Carnegie's homestead mill. The strike, which we learned about by watching the Homestead Strike Video, revealed Carnegie’s plan to destroy the iron and steel worker’s union, which resulted in a public outcry. His reputation was ruined by this outcry as seen in the Editorial in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, early August, 1892. This editorial declares the following about Carnegie, “Three months ago Andrew Carnegie was a man to be envied. Today he is an object of mingled pity and contempt. In the estimation of nine-tenths of the thinking people on both sides of the ocean he has not only given the lie to all his ascendants, but confessed a moral coward…” The Homestead Strike showed how Carnegie negatively affected the common worker. When the depression hit the United States in 1893, Carnegie used the depression to his advantage and acquired land to connect the steel producing center to the northwest water routes. This also demonstrates how Carnegie negatively impacted the common worker. As you can see, the Monopolistic leaders, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, both hurt and helped the average worker. Both men monopolized their industry so it was very difficult for men already in the oil and steel business to stay afloat. Carnegie hurt his workers during the Homestead Strike, and both he and Rockefeller were later criticized by the public and media. At the same time their monopolies helped better the economy. Although they were said to be people only influenced by greed they continued to donate to charity and help better people's lives.
The main focus in class this week was freedom. The essential question for this topic was Who 'gave' freedom to enslaved
Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To
what extent were Abraham Lincoln's actions influenced
by the actions of enslaved Americans? Freedom from above in this case would mean that the freedom of the slaves would come from those on top of the social pyramid. These people would include officers, government officials and even President Lincoln himself. Freedom from below would include slaves that obtained freedom from their actions alone. In class, we looked at two pictures that could depict freedom from above or below. The pictures are shown below.
The picture to the left showing President Lincoln would be considered freedom from above while the picture to the right would be considered freedom from below. We also looked at some documents from Lincoln himself. In a open letter, Lincoln says "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." In this case, freedom would be coming from above, from the most powerful American at the time. Although Lincoln did not blatantly say that he 100% wanted to free the slaves, he hinted at his opinion. In an 1862 letter from General Ambrose E. Burnside to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, freedom seems to come from below. Ambrose is telling Stanton about how his city is "being overrun with fugitives from surrounding towns and plantations", who are putting pressure on pro-slave advocates. The "below" group is seen here taking control of their problems, and provoking a change for themselves. In society today we see many instances where freedom comes from below. We see many of these people who are seen as below to get reinforcement from those that are considered above. One example of this is Bruce Jenner and his recent coming out as transgender; he is an Olympic athlete, and a star on various Kardashian reality tv shows. Other transgender people have been fighting and protesting for equality, but now that a more popular and powerful voice has stepped out and represented the community equality is more possible. The story has had incredible coverage all over the place, and Bruce Jenner has become a voice for all transgender people, just like Lincoln became a voice for the enslaved people.
