History 479

Devine

Spring 2007

Midterm Study Questions

The midterm will consist of SEVEN short essay questions and ONE long essay question. I will give you 10 short essay questions, you will answer seven. I will give you three long essay questions, you will answer one. You should allot about 8 minutes to answer each short essay question and about 25 minutes to answer the long essay question.

1. Why did James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad succeed during the late nineteenth century when other railroads failed?
2. What unintended consequences resulted when the federal government subsidized the building of railroads?
3. According to William Cronon, how did the arrival of the railroad alter people’s conceptions of time and space? How did railroads change the way people interacted with the environment (geography, weather, etc.)?
4. How did railroads encourage the development of western natural resources such as cattle, coal, and timber?
5. What were the distinctive characteristics or features of “big businesses”? How did “big businesses” differ from those not considered “big”?
6. How did the rise of big business change the process of marketing and sales?
7. What is vertical integration? What is “integrating forward”? What is integrating “backward”? Why would a company do each of these things? Why did many vertically integrated businesses succeed?
8. What is horizontal integration? How did falling prices and economies of scale spur horizontal integration? Why did some horizontal combinations succeed while others failed? For example, why did the steel and oil trusts succeed while the salt trust failed?
9. How did John D. Rockefeller come to dominate the oil industry?
10. According to Colleen Dunlavy, how did tariffs and railroad-rate regulation help foster the growth of big business?
11. What was the doctrine of Social Darwinism? Why were many of the cultural attitudes and prejudices associated with Social Darwinism attractive to different groups of Americans? (Summers, “Opportunity?”)
12. How did Henry George’s single tax on land propose to break up or limit large concentrations of wealth?
13. According to Pamela Walker Laird, how did late Victorian era business men measure “success”? How did they (and nearly all other Americans) define “progress”?
14. Both the AFL and the Knights of Labor were dedicated to improving the lives of workers. How did their strategies for doing so differ?
15. Why were unions limited in their ability to exact concessions from large employers?
16. How did various factors such as skill level, race, ethnicity, region, and union membership affect a worker’s economic status during the late nineteenth century?
17. Why is Richard Hofstadter critical of the populists? How might the context in which he was writing (just after World War II) have affected his assessment of the populists?
18. Why does Lawrence Goodwyn see the populists as constituting a “democratic movement culture”? What did the populists offer as an alternative to corporate capitalist society?
19. According to John Turner, why was a farmer who lived in an isolated area and did not have many social contacts more likely to vote for the Populist party?
20. According to Anne Mayhew, what is the difference between farmers who produce for the market and commercial farmers? Why did populists feel uncomfortable about becoming commercial farmers?
21. The Populists were concerned with democracy, public power, and easy credit. What specific policies did they advocate to produce more democracy, enhance public power, and improve the situation of debtors in need of credit?
22. Why have some historians seen the “Wizard of Oz” as an allegory for the populist movement?
23. If more currency is in circulation, do prices go up or down? Why? If you are in debt, do you want there to be more currency in circulation or less? Why?
24. What groups would have supported the coining of “free silver” during the 1890s? What groups would have opposed it? Why would they have taken their respective positions?
25. Who (or what groups) would be likely to support a high tariff? Why? Who (or what groups) would be likely to support a low tariff? Why?
26. According to Jay Mandle (Not Slave, Not Free), despite the Radical Republicans’ desire to “punish” the southern planters, a policy of land redistribution in the south was never implemented. Why not?
27. Why did a system of plantation tenantry emerge in the South after the Civil War? How did this system impede the economic advancement of both African Americans as a group and southern economic development in general?
28. What factors kept black labor in the South from being “free”? Why was it hard for blacks to escape plantation labor? Why didn’t they find work elsewhere doing other things? Why was it hard for them to start their own businesses?
29. With regard to improving productivity by experimenting with new technological innovations, how did southern plantation agriculture differ from the family farm system of the North? Why did northern family farmers actively embrace new labor-saving technologies while southern planters largely ignored them?
30. What factors – “push” and “pull” – account for the African American migration from the South in the years after World War I? What two major shortcomings were associated with migration to the North? How did each limit the potential for African American economic advancement?
31. What distinguished an “anticorporate” position from a “procorporate” position? Did being “procorporate” imply that you wanted big business to be more powerful than government? What were the goals of the “anticorporate” faction?
32. How were concerns about concentrations of wealth and concerns about the health of American democracy related? How did the increase in one threaten the survival of the other?
33. How did Theodore Roosevelt think the government should deal with large corporations? How about Wilson? Taft? Debs?
34. What did Taft think of Roosevelt’s attitude toward the courts? What aspect of Roosevelt’s reform program for the courts did Taft oppose? Why did he oppose it?
35. Why did some progressives believe that U.S. participation in the World War I would aid the cause of reform at home? How would wartime necessities allow them to pursue their agenda of social engineering?
36. What problems did the progressives encounter as they tried to “remake” Americans both at home and on the front lines of the war?
37. What does the term “War Collectivism” mean? (Murray Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I”) What were the arguments for and against this approach to wartime mobilization?
38. Why did the top executives in many companies support close cooperation with the government? Why did they accept government regulation of production and fixing of prices? In short, what was in it for them?
39. According to international bankers like Thomas Lamont, why would U.S. cancellation of European debts after World War I and a reduction of the U.S. tariff have benefited American businesses and workers? Why was it politically impossible to have such policies enacted?
40. After the war, why did European nations need American dollars? In what ways did Americans help to get these dollars into European hands? In what ways did United States make it difficult for Europeans to get these dollars?
41. During the 1920s, the U.S. was the leading importer and consumer of raw materials. The European powers often controlled the sources of these raw materials. How did they use this leverage to exact concessions from the U.S.? What concessions did they want?
42. Why was the whole international economic system of the 1920s dependent on the outflow of long-term loans from the United States? How were German reparations, French war debts, and American loans all related? Why was this an unstable system?
43. What “two needs” did General Motors have in 1922 that Bruce Barton was hired to address? How did Barton’s concept of the “family” speak to both needs?
44. To what extent was “institutional advertising” a success in tackling GM’s and GE’s “legitimacy problems”? What evidence is there to demonstrate that Barton succeeded in giving these corporations a “soul”?
45. What evidence does Lizabeth Cohen cite to show that workers who bought phonographs, went to the movies, and listened to the radio were not necessarily abandoning their ethnic cultures and “becoming middle class”?
46. According to Cohen, what were some of the features of the “black economy”? Why was the black economy only moderately successful?
47. How did the boom in auto manufacturing and construction during the 1920s affect the broader economy? Why would a collapse in either of these sectors have a widespread negative impact on the economy?
48. What was the economic impact of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? How and why did such a bill get passed?
49. Why did Hoover put tax increases at the center of his fiscal policy? What is the difference between an income, an excise, and a sales tax? Why did the tax increases not produce the intended result?
50. According to William Leuchtenburg (Perils of Prosperity), how did the public mood contribute in part to the circumstances that produced the stock market crash?
51. What are some of the explanations that historians have given for the causes of the Great Depression? Which explanations tend to be more compelling? Why hasn’t one single, definitive explanation emerged?