History 258 The Industrial Revolution in America

Spring 2000

Prof's instructions: Write a 4-5 page analytic essay (double-spaced) in response to the following statement. The goal is not to dissect the statement's wording but to present your own assessment of the relationship between republican values and American industrialization in the nineteenth century. Be sure to explain and document your thesis by making reference to specific evidence from the assigned materials, including primary as well as secondary sources. For scholarly apparatus, you may use either brief parenthetical notations (such as Licht, Industrializing America, p. 10) or more formal footnotes or endnotes. You are encouraged to use direct quotations but to keep them short. Acknowledge, where appropriate, evidence that tends to undermine your interpretation, and explain why you nonetheless stand by your position. Write clearly and concisely. End with a succinct concluding paragraph. The paper is due by 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 16. You may submit hardcopy at my office (King 141) or e-mail me an attached file in Microsoft Word 97 or 98. Under college rules, I cannot accept a late paper unless you get an official incomplete for the course.

Statement: "Thomas Jefferson proved prophetic. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to most Americans that industrialization endangered the basic republican values of liberty, virtue, independence, and equality. In the preamble of their constitution, the Knights of Labor denounced, '[t]he recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth, which, unless checked, will invariably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.' In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy compared the social order of his era 'to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.' Likewise, Andrew Carnegie observed, 'The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change that has come with civilization.' But for all their concern about the growing stratification of society, few people wished to forsake the material benefits of industrialization for a return to agrarian society. Instead, late nineteenth-century Americans debated how best to adapt republican values to fit new industrial realities. The result was a distinctively American form of social conflict, a battle of ideas more than class struggle in the European sense. In this ideological contest Carnegie's 'Gospel of Wealth' triumphed over the Knights' cooperative vision and Bellamy's utopian ideal because Carnegie had a more realistic conception of human nature and how to promote the public good."