Welcome back, everybody. As you know, weve been in the gilded age for some time now and weve already seen the Technological Innovations that made some of this economic expansion possible. We saw both the economic transformations and the affects of those changes in the economy as far as lifestyles, both of the very rich, these opulent, robert barren lifestyles and on the other hand the very poor. Whether it was the People Living in the shacks of the new england mill towns or whether it was when we explored the gilded age city, the increasing problems of housing and of sanitation that came with this rapid and in many ways chaotic growth of the cities in the late 19th century. All of it, of course, accompanied by problems going along with immigration. And then last time we saw in particular there was some frustration with this new gilded age regime as we talked about the farmers in this period. That lecture really could have been called discontent in the gilded age part one. But today we turn our attention mostly back toward industry and in some ways back towards the cities as well. And i want to look at different types of frustrations with this new order in america. We started with the song eight hours which was a popular labor anthem in the 1880s. In some ways, that song speaks to what were going to be talking about today. On the one hand, eight hours for work, eight hours for rest. Were talking about labor relations. Were talking about more broadly speaking political economy. Were talking about the potential for state regulation. At least arguments over that. But that is somewhat straight forward. What about eight hours for what we will . Right, in the song, they say we want to feel the sunshine. In other words, were not machines. Were human beings. We want to have a life. We want to have a life outside of work and even those on the top of this new gilded age order are also as well see toward the end in many ways growing anxious about this new world that is growing about. As with so much else this semester, a lot of our story starts with the railroads. Youve seen how much the trance Continental Railroad changed the west, changed the economy and i already told you that Railroad Building bonanza didnt stop in 1869. Instead we continue to build by the end of the century, there were four trans Continental Railroads and all sorts of tributary lines to connect the different parts of the west to those main corridors. And it seemed like a good investment. Indeed the lions share of the stocks on the New York Stock Exchange were not industrial stocks, they were Railroad Stocks and a lot of people scrambled to get in on the ground floor and one of those projects was the Northern Pacific railroad. And the chief fund raiser for that project was jay cook. He has been a major financier during the civil war. Investors were starting to realize in the early 1870s that perhaps in our zeal for Railroad Building we had gone too far. Maybe were overbuilt. Maybe the Railroad Bubble is about to burst and all of a sudden jay cook had trouble raising money. He had trouble getting a loan. People found out he was overextended. And on september 18th, 1873, jay cook and company declared bankruptcy. When cook went under, it dragged down other businesses and railroads and banks with him. A panic hit wall street. Beginning september 20th, the New York Stock Exchange, which i said was heavily populated by Railroad Stocks, closed for ten days and over the next two months, 55 railroads went bankrupt and i didnt stop there. By 1874, 25 of the nations Railroad Bonds were in default and it wasnt just railroads that were affected. Over the following two years, there were over 18,000 business failures, many people including this cartoonist clung to the traditional view that ultimately this was a necessary evil, right . Failure is part of the capitalist system and we should see the panic as a sanitation officer cleaning all of the trash out of wall street. And maybe so. But in the meantime, a lot of people had to suffer. In the meantime, Railroad Construction ground to a halt. Unemployment skyrocketed in many sectors. In some cities, unemployment was as high as 25 and joblessness remained ratify for the next five years. At this same moment people were starting to ask questions about whether or not the railroad should have so much power within this new national economy. We saw the farmers asking these questions very loudly last time, didnt we . Here we see Railroad TycoonWilliam Henry vanderbilt pictured as the modern coloss sis of railroads along with some of his colleagues. As we saw last time, farmers considered their rates and their control over the economy to be extortion. And indeed other groups were starting to feel this way as well. The political efforts of frustrated farmers and some allied industrialists led to early attempts at state intervention. In the early 1870s, some states passed what we call the granger laws. They did things like set maximum freight and Grain Elevator rates. Forbid rate discrimination against short halls. Many consumers felt that the railroads were overcharging them. Its not just farmers who are frustrated. They created state railroad commissions to supervise and enforce this new Regulatory Regime. This happened in iowa, minnesota, wisconsin and illinois. In illinois it was there that the law was challenged by the firm of mun and scott who were accused of having overcharged their customers at their Grain Elevator in chicago. And they challenged their 100 fine and it went to the Supreme Court. And in 1877 by a 72 majority the court declared that when private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation. And incidentally the federal government is not acting, so theres a door open for the states to step in. But dont consider this a longterm win for statelevel regulation. Because in 1886 a 63 majority at the Supreme Court declared in another case that under the Commerce Clause of the constitution, states were forbidden from imposing direct burdens on interstate commerce and illinoiss Regulatory Regime was considered a direct burden on a radilroad and therefore state regulation was severely hampered moving forward after the case. This along with a couple of other cases in the late 1880s which extended 14th amendment protections to corporations acted to undermine these statelevel regulations. That doesnt mean the public stopped being frustrated with the abuses of the railroads. In fact, public outrage over the wabash decision led to passage of the interstate commerce act in 1887. It created the interstate commerce commission. It made it forbidden to have special rates and rebates for powerful shippers. You remember rockefellers scheme from a few weeks ago. There would be no rate discrimination against short hauls. There would be public inception of rates and if you abused these regulations you could face up to a 5,000 fine. So take that vanderbilt. Moreover, they werent through. In 1890 growing public frustration over the strengths of the trusts in particular, the standard oil trust, led congress to pass the sherman antitrust act which is named from the brother of william sherman. By 1890, 27 states had passed antitrust laws and congress was joining the parade. The sherman law outlawed every contract combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade, again, imposing a 5,000 fine per offense and potentially also a year in prison. But i dont want you to be misled. This hardly represents the foundation of a robust Regulatory Regime. For one thing, the president s of the gilded age were generally uncomfortable with this sort of state intervention. They held to a more traditional laissezfaire view. So this law was signed because it was in accord with Public Opinion, but didnt do too much to enforce them and the same can be said about his successors. In moments when the federal government had tried to enforce it, they were smacked down by the courts. In 1895 the court defanged the sherman act when it came to industrial combinations. Because in the case of u. S. Versus e. C. Knight, the court declared 81 that the sherman act did not apply to manufacturing monopolies. The u. S. Sugar Refining Company controlled 90 of its sector. Certainly this is consolidation, right . But they say production is not interstate commerce. Thats something different. They have narrowly defined the powers given to enforcement under the sherman antitrust act and it wouldnt be until the 20th century that the sherman act was used successfully against monopolies. Something well talk about in a later lecture. It wasnt only the government and Public Opinion, but also workers who were growing frustrated with the commands of gilded age businessman. And like the public and the legislatures, labor would be largely frustrated in its protests. The hard times of the 1870s meant a lot of things for workers. One thing it meant was that hard times begot poor wages, less security, less stability and at times harsh measures by management to try and keep their companies afloat. Railroads in particular had tried to respond to the crises of the 70s by cutting their own rates to try to get their own business and outdo their competitors and how do they make up for the losses of cutting these rates, they cut their workers wages. That led to a decade of mounting frustrations by the workers. There were a series of localized strikes in 1876 and in early 1877. And then resenting the wage cuts and resenting the public that was heaped on the workers if they stood up by themselves because it was believed by many that railroads are a public good and if you strike against a railroad, youre doing something especially evil. The workers began to resent all of this and their resentment exploded in the summer of 1877. A new group called the trainmens union. Baltimore police broke up the first round of pickets. But the next day, they took control of a key Railroad Junction in west virginia, a battle between local police and a mob required state militia intervention and eventually federal troops to restore order. Within days, these sorts of scenes were erupting in a dozen Railway Centers around the country. In baltimore, a mop tried to trap the militia in an armory. The soldiers fired and killed ten people. In pittsburgh, rioters burned rail yards and destroyed 2,000 cars and the depots all while exchanges fire with troops. Strikers in indianapolis seized control of the deep hole and halted all cars and trains except for trains carrying mail for reasons well see in a moment. By july 25th, in fact, all lines outside of new england and the south were being affected in one way or the other. You could feel the tension on streets around the country. In chicago, businessmen patrolled the streets with guns fearing a potential revolution. In buffalo the revolution was under way. And crowds swarmed the yards of the new york central and claimed control of the depots of the Lake Shore Railroad and the erie railroad. Ultimately this collapsed. It was easy to find people to work as strikebreakers. Unemployment was still around 8 nationally. These are estimates. Some companies were fearful of continued strikes and continued chaos and were willing to negotiate. But ultimately we cant call this in any way a win for labor. If anything, the press became increasing indignant over this outburst of street action and they called on the states to beef up their militias, to put down future agitation. Indeed with an eye to the future, statelevel militia units were enhanced and armories were constructed to prepare for the next events. Meanwhile, instances like those in the late 1870s caused many workers to ask a fundamental question. Wouldnt this be more easily accomplished if we had some Better Organization . And in this, many of them turned to a fledging organization, the nights of labor. The knights of labor started as a secret society founded by a garment worker in philadelphia who was obsessed with all sorts of rituals and so forth. After 1877 many workers became interested in organization and they looked to the knights. This was often spontaneous. The knights were never particularly effective recruiters. But people were looking for an organization. And so in 1879, the knights had 8,000 members. They were taken over by new leadership under tendernerrace powderly who moved the group toward reform. In the 1870s and 80s they began stressing monetary reform. They began discussing an eighthour day, organizing for cooperative schemes, trying to gain state and local political influence, many within the knights of labor began embracing the ideas of henry george who called for a single tax on land. Whats interesting besides their sort of wideranging agenda is their broad membership. This group sort of anomalous for this period in america, especially within labor. This group was highly inclusive. They reached across lines of craft, lines of skill, so its skilled and unskilled workers. It is immigrants and nativeborn workers. There are catholics and protestants in this organization. There are black members as well as white members. Female members as well as male members. And so this was a very large and Inclusive Organization and they were building a lot of momentum in the 1880s. Well see in a moment, they will have a precipitous decline, however. At the very moment when we see them start to decline, a totally different ideal in labor comes to the fore and that is craft unionism. And that is the American Federation of labor. Founded in 1886. Their leader is Samuel Gompers whose papers are held at our library. And they werent inclusive. They were focused only on elite craftsman. This is strategic, you can say, because the skilled craftsmen have a little bit more leverage when it comes to negotiation. Unskilled craftsman are replaceable. And they had much narrower goals. The phrase that gompers was pure and simple unionism. Were going to get a better wage, shorter hours. Woor n were not trying to change the world, though. This unionism would be the one that would survive the chaos that were going to talk about now moving forward. In the meantime the 1880s would witness recapitulations of many of the troubling themes of the 1870s. Once again, a Major Economic panic. This one in 1884, followed, once, by an industrial downturn, followed by labor troubles. Most noteworthy in this time was a period known as the great upheaval. Its a sporadic series of events. In may of 1884 there was a successful strike by unorganized Railroad Workers against the Union Pacific railroad. The railroad capitulated in two days. And the workers said, lets join the knights of labor. In june of 1884 we saw the beginning of a major mine strike in the hawking river valley of ohio where 4,000 workers, plus their families and the community, went out on strike. They the strike lasted six months. The miners lost the strike but whats noteworthy about this is it once again taught them the usefulness of organization and coordination. If you go on strike, you dont get paid. The strike doesnt last very long because you have to eat. But they were able to organization and raise funds. They had a hundred thousand dollars relief fund that enabled them to keep this fight up for six months. Once again it demonstrates to workers the value of organization. Then in march of 1885 came a major strike against the Missouri Pacific Railroad which was trying to have a pay cut. That strike spread to virtually the entire Southwestern Railroad network most of which was owned by our friend jay gould. The governors of nebraska and kansas intervened on behalf of the workers which i think tells us more about gould than it does about the governors. But nevertheless, gould gave back the pay cut. And once again workers saw value and organization. It meant dramatic growth for the knights of labor. In 1885, they had 100,000 members. By 1886, they had 700,000 members. But this would be the knights high watermark. And one reason for the decline is the first of several very famous but very telling episodes within American Labor relations, we can call them explosions in the gilded age and that is the hay market affair. There was a strike at the mccormick reaper works in chicago on may 3rd, 1886. They were calling for an eighthour day. There was violence between strikers and police. Shots were fired and two workers were killed. There were anarchists in chicago. And they said this violence to us is a wonderful example of our broader critique of american capitalism and the american system and we want to take advantage of this moment to use this tragedy in order to demonstrate to people the validity of our arguments. And so they called for protests beginning may 4th. The protests were well attended by the working classes, especially german immigrants. There was a large turnout. It was peaceful by all accounts, at least at the beginning. The rhetoric was relatively tame. According to the relatively tame mayor of chicago, a mainstream politician, who witnessed the events and was satisfied that things were going to be fine and went home. In fact, a lot of people were deciding that things were okay and it was time to go home, but it wasnt. Because what happened next, as the rally was starting to break up, someone threw a pipe bomb and a policeman was killed and the police began to fire and a shootout ensued and an additional six police and four protestors were killed in the cross fire. We never figured out who through the pipe bomb, but that doesnt really matter. We knew who to blame. The anarchists. These germans, these radicals. Four ended up being executed. Others received long prison sentences. One committed suicide by blowing himself up before he could be executed. Later on in the 1890s, john peter auldeld pardoned the surviving anarchists. We still dont know who threw the pipe bomb. We know it wasnt then. Nevertheless the resulting fear of radicalism led to increasing antilabor sentiment nationwide. I would like to talk about another explosion in 1892. 1892 was a period we could have picked any number of Major Incidents from 1892 to talk about. In new orleans there was a general strike that went on and on and involved 25,000 workers, dozens of different organizations, black workers and white workers in new orleans. There was a Major Incident in the coal mining fields of Eastern Illinois known as the coal creek war going into 1892 in which tennessee miners protested against the use of convict labor which was being used to undermine their wages. And they protested by arming themselves, burning down the stockades were the convicts were being held and releasing a lot of the prisoners. The militia came in and they ended up being defeated. The one im going to choose to spend a little bit more time on occurred in a place weve already gotten to know a little bit in this class. Homestead, pennsylvania. At Andrew Carnegie steel works. The Steel Workers were trying to organize and join a National Group known as the amalgamated iron and Steel Workers. At one point in his career, Andrew Carnegie favored the principle of collective bargaining but it was hitting a little too close to home now. And so carnegie changed his mind. But Andrew Carnegie did not become a Great Innovator and millionaire by being a fool. He decided this battle wasnt for him and left it to his number two, henry clay frick. Henry clay frick held the line against the union. On july 1st, 1892, he declared that he would not negotiate with this union. They were not legitimate. Instead he fortified the steel plant. But this was not the end of the story. The workers armed themselves, captured the plant, barricaded themselves inside. Now you have to talk to us. Well, frick had another move to make. He hired a group known as the pinkerton guards. Theyre referred to as a detective agency, but the real term is mercenary group. And they came in lumbering up the monongahela river to fight, 300 of them, to fight these strikers. But i didnt quite work out. When they arrived a brawl ensued, nine workers and one guard were killed as the workers started firing on them. The people of homestead were on the side of the workers. This is our families, these are our customers, our neighbors. And so they chased them out of town. They couldnt flee by their b j barges because they burned their barges. At the hay market affair, if you recall, local Law Enforcement had ultimately been effective in stopping the radicals. This couldnt be the case this time because the mayor, the sheriff, theyre on the side of the workers. In fact Public Opinion by and large was on the side of the workers. Thats not the end of the story. Because in the meantime anarchist broke into fricks office, shot him twice and repeatedly stabbed him. Burkeman is one of the great failures in assassination history. Not only did he fail to kill frick, he also undermined the strikers for whom he was professing sympathy. In many ways saw saw this outbu of violence as a discredit to the movement. There was enough shift that there was political cover for us to move up one level of government. If it wont be local. It can be the state. So the governor of pennsylvania had the state militia go in. The workers were extricated from the plant. Strikebreakers were brought in and there would not be successful longterm unionization of american Steel Workers until late 1930s. Episode three. Two years later, pullman, illinois. The context for this is the depression that we talked about in context of the farmers last time that started in 1893. What that meant is that in 1894, there was a lot of labor frustration, almost 1400 strikes. A recordbreaking 505,000 workers out on strike that year. And the other part of the context is the place, pullman illinois. Its one of these Company Towns. Weve talked about Company Towns. As Company Towns go, compared to the unheeded shacks with little water supply that weve seen in mine country or in the textile towns in new england, pullman was a relatively nice company town by all reports. The housing was decent standard, there were libraries and marks and playgrounds and schools and mr. Pullman saw himself as sort of patriarchal figure. He referred to his workers as his children. This ended up being a problem. In the town of pullman, what do they make . Pullman cars, sleeper cars for trains. You work in his factory, you live in his town where he owns everything. You shop in his stores, pay rent to mr. Pullman. This is a relatively decent standard of living. But then came the depression. And mr. Pullman decided he needed to help the companys bottom line and he called for a major wage cut for his workers. Up to 30 in come cases. But the rent was going to remain the same. Hes your boss but hes also your landlord. And so how are you going to argue this . One thing is, the rent was already exorbitant because compared to similar rental properties in that region, he was charging about 15 to 20 more. So not only is he not lowering the cost, but hes also cutting their wages. He said this was for the good of the company. But consider this, they paid a 2. 8 million worth of dividends in 1894. They were supposed to be losing money. And the dividends they paid that year were higher than the dividends they had paid in the previous year. While there was a real problem and production was down, its not as though the company was on the verge of collapse. So the workers tried to negotiate. They sent in a grievance committee. Mr. Pullman listened to what they had to say. He said thats interesting. You guys are fired. This offended the workers, as you can imagine, and it led to a strike. A walkout beginning may 11th. This would have been one of the thousandplus strikes of that year except it got bigger. Because the workers at pullman were aligned with a National Group, the American Railway union and they had the support of its president. And the American Railway union called for secondary strikes. Our switchmen, our Railroad Workers around the country will refuse to switch any pullman car into a train. When you have 40,000plus rail workers around the country saying this, it starts to get serious. By late june, Train Networks were being shut down around the country. They tried not to obstruct the mail because they did not want to right now afoul of the federal government. But management was quite, quite smart in how they handled this. They said if the train is not complete, meaning if you wont put in the pullman car, were not running it. They went to the federal government and they explained that it was the unionists who were being obstructionists and so the federal government started to take notice at the action going on. In chicago at hay market who had dealt with this . It had been local authorities. This is obviously too big in scale to be handled by local authorities. At homestead, it had been the state. But in illinois the governor is john peter and hes sympathetic to labor. And so this time it was going to be federal intervention. The Justice Department went to court. They got an injunction against the strikers, but the strikes continued and so debs was arrested on july 10th for contempt of court. Meanwhile the president had to act because the strikes continued and the president is still grover cleveland. We got to know him last time. The mail is being disrupted, management tells us its the fault of the workers. George pullman is a friend of mine, by the way, and dont forget that cleveland is like the other gilded age president s, pro business, pro management. And so they get the injunction based on two matters. Number one, theyre interrupting federal delivery of the mail and number two, this is viewed by the courts and the Justice Department as an illegal conspiracy in and restraint of trade. These fellows are in violation of the sherman antitrust act. And so the injunction is granted. The union does not back down and so we have to send in the army. Thousands of u. S. Soldiers. Fighting took place. Dozens were killed. The Supreme Court, the strike got broken up obviously. The following january, the Supreme Court ruled that the government was right, they were violating the law and so this gives great power to those seeking injunctions from courts against labor in the future. In all of these cases, a lot of americans knew who was to blame. It was the workers, it was the radicals, but also it was groups that weve talked about in great depth a week ago. It was these outsiders, these newcomers, these immigrants. And so its not just that we can blame the immigrants in the city for undermining american democracy. Its not just that we can blame the immigrants for challenging american religions traditions with their catholicism and judaism or challenging american cultural standards with their saloons and beer halls. But when we ask who is to blame for crime and anarchists and socialists, the answer, if you read this cartoon, is quite clear. Its the russian anarchists, the german socialists, the irish pauper and so forth and so on. Class and ethnicity, not for the first time in American History, but certainly to an increasingly powerful extent, were being conflated, were being intertwined, and this was going to be very potent weaponry against both the foreigners and the labor activists for decades to come as we will see. I started out saying this wasnt all about the workplace. It wasnt all about the economy. Some of the discontent in the gilded age was social in nature. You can understand this. When you work in a factory, you have no control, right . No control over what your work schedule looks like. In the mill towns they ring bells to drag you out of bed in the morning so you know its time to go to work. And they ring bells to clear the streets so you can go home and ring bells in the morning. They control your life. You dont set your schedule the way did if you were a peasant back in europe before you immigrated or you dont get to spend much time out of doors, you dont get a lot of time access to nature, you dont make your own schedule, you dont have any sense of craftsmanship in what youre doing. When you combine this in many cases with living in a very large city where entire life, while probably very fascinating, could be confined in a world of a few dozen blocks and remember that that world as weve read and as weve observed could be a very dark, dirty, diseased world, frustrating, stifling world. You start to understand why people would grow discontent with this arrangement. And so there were certain solutions that were proposed. One response to this was a push for recreation. Reformers in the gilded age cities and were going to get to know them very well in future lectures they believed that urban dwellers would benefit immensely from access to playgrounds and parks and beaches, like this beach we see here, being enjoyed by some of the immigrant textile workers that we met in previous lectures. And so one response to the discontent or at least the potential discontent of the cooped up urban dweller was the rise of recreation and urban parks. It had been going on for many decades, of course, they didnt invent parks in the gilded age. The most famous of those parks, central park in new york, began construction in its modern form beginning in 1858, completed in 1878. But more and more parks would follow as the gilded age approached the 20th century, this push for outdoor breathing spaces for the urban masses would become even more vehement. And while we have green spaces, we also need to make sure were keeping everybody fit and active. If they are physically active, that will keep them out of trouble on the one hand. If they are physically fit, that will help keep them morally fit. It will help them be wholesome, help them avoid the saloon potentially. Reformers in the city sought all sorts of means of keeping the masses from getting bored and lethargic as well as encouraging them to stay healthy physically and morally. You see some exercise classes here. And this in turn led to the increasing popularity of athletics. Sports were a way to bring order to people, to organize people not only into Community Organizations but also to keep them fit at the same time and to develop a sense of pride in your group, in your churchs team, in your unions team, in your towns team. Or in your schools team, which is very important then and now. This is a transnational phenomenon. I dont want to make you think that this is only american. Historians can tell you the same story about soccer clubs in britain or europe or cricket clubs and so forth arising in this same period. But in your case, its very important as well. This is the time when baseball in its modern form starts to get organized and formalized in the years after the civil war. And basketball is invented by dr. James naismith in 1891 at a ymca in springfield, massachusetts. And we start to have College Football. The First CollegeFootball Game took place in 1869 between princeton and rutgers. Rutgers won for those who play trivia, 64, if that ever comes up. That game, like our game, was very violent, but theres was far worse. No helmets, plenty of unnecessary roughness. No notion of unnecessary roughness. The game came close to getting banned a couple of times, but there was a president ial commission to discuss all of the carnage taking place on the College Football fields. Indeed, carnage is the right word for it. Its been estimated that in the year the president in question held this commission, 1905, there were as many as 45 deaths on College Football fields. One historian estimates that that was in the five years leading up to the commission. In the year 1905 itself, its been estimated that College Football games produced 18 deaths and 159 catastrophic injuries. And so we need to do something to organize this and make it less bloody. And so theyve worked on that. It wasnt only the working classes who found modern society and sought outlets for their constrained injuries either. The upper classes and intellectuals in the gilded age became increasing disenchanted with the weightlessness of their society. Many of them suffered from an incredibly vague but increasingly popular disorder called neurasthenia. It consisted of anxiety, fatigue, depression, stress, headaches. The diagnosis depended heavily on who you were. If you were of the working classes and you were whining about these things, you were either lazy or insane and the solution was for you to either be starved or institutionalized. If you were a woman, it was quite likely that you were hysterical and you need to be locked up in a room until they made you more hysterical and you read about this, for example, in the yellow wallpaper. But for a lot of people, male and female, these symptoms might mean you were suffering from nerve weakness. There was a neurologist named George Miller beard and he identified this disorder as a symptom of modern life. It was caused by this faster pace. Many things. But especially above all, it was caused by modern technology, technology was not natural. Its degrading us in our biology. Beards solution was a regimen of electrical shocks. Happily other physicians called for bedrest or isolation. To a lot of intellectuals, they said if this burnout is a symptom of modernity than our solution is to embrace antimodernism. They wanted something more than the superficial consumerism, the secularized drive for material gain that seemed to mark their times. And so many of them rejected modern society in favor of any number of more basic alternatives, a vague return to the simple life, a return to craftsmanship, working with your hands, a return in some cases to medieval style religious devotions or a new turn to ancient religious practices in the far east. A romanticization of all things oriental, they would have said at the time. They turned for alternatives to their modern society, oftentimes in a bizarre way. But it gives you nevertheless insight into their frustration with this society. For many of them, including the president that i didnt name but was referring to in the football discussion, for many of them, selfexertion was the tonic of choice. Theodore roosevelt was a young, sickly, elite, oldmoney boy and his solution to all of this was the vigorous life, particularly time spent in the great outdoors. And so in his very famous attempts to invigorate himself and his class, Theodore Roosevelt would hike mountains, hunt big game, engage in cattle ranching in the bad lands, lead military units and encourage his fellow white men to procreate as much as possible. These were some of his solutions, this vigorous life. These concerns from neurotic elites or confused, overwhelmed intellectuals, they may seem trivial and to a large extent they are. But the point here is that elites were just as interested in using central park and other parks for themselves as they were in creating the park as an among the lower sorts. We see them enjoying central park here. The point, in other words, is that during the gilded age, there was disenchantment coming from all directions. From those who needed a break from the monotony of industrial life, from those who feared the moral or social implications of an increasingly restless working class, from businesses who found themselves abused by monopolies, from states who found themselves powerless to stop monopolies, from workers who are finding themselves being crushed by monopolies and other companies as well, and also from those nearer the top of the gilded age social hierarchy who found their society increasingly vacuous and unsatisfying. Were not done with the gilded age yet. We have been away from the south for some time now. So next time, when we return, were going to turn our gaze back to dixie and observe their peculiar version of the gilded age. Have a wonderful weekend. Turn your papers in. Have a wonderful weekend. Weeknights this month on American History tv, were featuring the contenders, our series that looks at 14 president ial candidates who lost the election but had a lasting effect on u. S. Politics. Tonight we feature eugene debs politics. Today we feature eugene debs who was a fivetime president ial candidate for the socialist party. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. The competition is on. Be a part of this years cspan competition. Middle School Students make a five to sixminute documentary and explore the issue that you want the president and congress to address in 2021. Be bold with your documentary. Show opposing points of view and include cspan video. Be a winner. Theres 100,000 in total grand prizes including a grand prize of 5,000. The deadline to submit videos is january 2021, youll find competition rule, tips and how to get started on our website, studentcam. Org. Youre watching American History tv, every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Cspan3 created by our Cable Television companies and brought to you by your television provider. Up next, university of North Carolina at chapel hill professor Molly Worthen teaches class about the history and the intellectual underpinnings of protestant fundamentalism in 20th century america. She begins with the 1925 scopes monkey trial which pitted the teaching