Chapter 24 Terms and Definitions

Transcontinental Railroad: The rail line completed in 1869 when the Union Pacific (built westward) and Central Pacific (built eastward) met at Promontory Point, Utah, linking the nation coast to coast.
Land Grants: Vast tracts of public land given by the federal government to railroad companies to subsidize construction, which railroads then sold to settlers or held for profit.
Robber Barons: A critical nickname for the ruthless industrial and financial titans of the Gilded Age, who built vast fortunes through monopoly, exploitation, and sometimes fraud.
Andrew Carnegie: A Scottish-immigrant industrialist who built a vertically integrated steel empire using the Bessemer process, later giving away much of his fortune to libraries and philanthropy.
Bessemer Process: A method of blasting air through molten iron to burn off impurities and mass-produce steel cheaply, fueling the explosive growth of the American steel industry.
Vertical Integration: A business strategy, used by Carnegie, of controlling every stage of production — from raw materials to transportation to manufacturing — to cut costs and increase efficiency.
Horizontal Integration (Trust): A business strategy, used by Rockefeller, of merging or absorbing competing companies in the same industry into one giant combination to eliminate competition.
John D. Rockefeller: The founder of Standard Oil, who used horizontal integration and ruthless tactics to dominate the oil-refining industry and become the nation's richest man.
Standard Oil Company: Rockefeller's oil empire, organized in 1882 as one of the first and most powerful trusts, controlling around 90 percent of American oil refining at its peak.
Interlocking Directorate: A practice, pioneered by financier J. P. Morgan, of placing the same officials on the boards of competing companies to coordinate their operations without formal merger.
Social Darwinism: The application of Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to human society, used by defenders of big business to justify wealth inequality as natural law.
Gospel of Wealth: Andrew Carnegie's 1889 essay arguing that the rich had a moral duty to use their fortunes to benefit society, funding libraries, schools, and other public goods.
Knights of Labor: A broad labor organization, open to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and Black Americans, that pushed for the eight-hour day and cooperative ownership before declining after Haymarket.
American Federation of Labor (AFL): A federation of craft unions of skilled workers founded in 1886 under Samuel Gompers, which focused on practical "bread and butter" goals like higher wages and shorter hours.
Samuel Gompers: The long-serving president of the American Federation of Labor, who favored collective bargaining and concrete economic gains over sweeping political reform.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877: A wave of nationwide strikes after wage cuts on major railroads, suppressed only after federal troops intervened, revealing deep labor unrest.
Haymarket Square Riot: An 1886 Chicago labor rally that turned deadly when a bomb killed police officers; the backlash was blamed on anarchists and badly damaged the Knights of Labor.
Homestead Strike: A violent 1892 strike at Carnegie's Pennsylvania steel plant, crushed after armed Pinkerton guards clashed with workers and state militia occupied the town.
Pullman Strike: An 1894 nationwide rail strike sparked by wage cuts at the Pullman Palace Car Company, broken by a federal court injunction and troops sent by President Cleveland.
Eugene V. Debs: The leader of the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike, jailed for defying the injunction, who later became a prominent socialist leader.
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890): The first federal law aimed at breaking up monopolistic trusts, though its vague wording made it largely ineffective against big business in its early years.