History 479B

Devine

Fall 2012

Midterm Study Questions

The midterm will consist of two parts: SEVEN short essay questions and ONE long essay question. I will give you ten short essay questions; you will choose seven to answer. I will give you three long essay questions; you will answer one. The exam questions will be taken from the questions below. There will be no questions on the exam that do not appear below. Since you have the questions ahead of time, it is expected that you will answer with more than just a superficial response. Be sure to include as much specific evidence as possible to explain and support what you assert.

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 the railroads change the daily lives, consumption patterns, and even diets of both rural and urban Americans?
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. In what ways did J. P. Morgan differ from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller? (Sprout article)
11. Why did taking into account social conditions and prejudices as well as environment (and humans’ ability to change these factors) undermine the Social Darwinist doctrine of “survival of the fittest”? (Summers, “Opportunity”)
12. Why was Andrew Carnegie, despite his admiration for Spencer, not really a Social Darwinist?
13. Why did Andrew Carnegie believe concentrations of wealth in certain individuals’ hands have benefited society?
14. How did Henry George’s single tax on land propose to break up or limit large concentrations of wealth?
15. 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?
16. In what ways – philosophy, tactics, organizational structure – did Samuel Gompers’ AFL differ from Terence Powderly’s Knights of Labor? What goals did the AFL share with the Knights?
17. What forces impeded the advance of labor unions and a “working-class consciousness” during the late nineteenth century? Why, according to Summers, did America fail to develop “a working class that saw itself as one”?
18. During the depression of the 1870s, why did workers find more sympathy in small towns (like Braidwood, Illinois) than in large cities? Why did they have more political clout in such towns? (Gutman, “Workers Search for Power”)
19. According to John Turner, what kinds of farmers were more likely to vote for the Populist Party? Why was this the case?
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 protecting democracy, limiting the power of railroads and big corporations, and obtaining easy credit. What specific policies did they advocate to produce more democracy, regulate railroads and big corporations, and improve the situation of debtors in need of credit?
22. 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? What groups wanted an expansion of the currency – through the free coinage of silver – during the 1890s?
23. Why did many businessmen, particularly those in finance and banking, oppose the Spanish-American War?
24. Why was the issue of war with Spain closely linked to the debate over the gold standard and free silver?
25. Why does Jay Mandle (Not Slave, Not Free) believe that implementing a policy of land redistribution (taking land from the planters and giving it to the freedman) would have produced a significantly different economic reality in the South after the Civil War? Despite the Radical Republicans’ desire to “punish” the southern planters, why was such a policy never implemented?
26. Why did the plantation economy persist 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?
27. Why is a “plantation” more than just a large farm that produces output for a market? What characteristics does it have that differentiate it from other means of production?
28. 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 (or to sustain them if they did start them)?
29. Mandle notes that there are three arguments for why blacks did not move north in order to escape the plantation system. What are those arguments and why does he find one to be more persuasive than the other two?
30. One scholar has maintained that the higher the demand for a commodity, the higher the demand for technological advances that would help produce the commodity more efficiently (see p. 52). According to Mandle, why did this formula not apply to cotton production in the postbellum South?
31. According to Mandle, how did lack of education and lack of capital contribute to the slow pace of productivity growth in the South?
32. What was the significance of the great merger wave of 1897 to 1903? How did it help to bring about the shift to a speculation economy and enhance the power of the stock market over industry?
33. Why did states (other than New Jersey) continue to restrict corporations and prohibit corporate mergers? Why did most Americans in the nineteenth century not want corporations to be able to own stock in other corporations?
34. Why were those selling their companies to the new giant corporations willing to take payment in stock rather than cash? Why did promoters have an incentive to put high values on the assets they were buying?
35. What was “overcapitalization” or “watering stock”? Contemporary observers thought that overcapitalization caused what three major problems?
36. Why was overcapitalization seen as an antitrust problem? How did overcapitalization hide monopoly power or precipitate rises in prices to the detriment of the consumer?
37. How was this run on the banks during the Panic of 1907 related to the new speculation economy and the growth of the stock market?
38. Why did Theodore Roosevelt’s desire to be an activist president and his decision to make regulation of the trusts his “crusade” end up undermining reform?
39. What were Woodrow Wilson’s views on competition? On big business? How were these views reflected in his approach to governmental regulation of business?
40. How did stockholders’ expectations change during the early twentieth century? If they had once expected steady income from dividends, what did they now expect from their investments in common stock? How did this change give stockholders leverage over the way businessmen ran their companies?
41. How did the Liberty Loan drives transform the American middle class into the American investing class? Why did this new reality spur new calls for securities regulation?
42. What were the pros and cons of War Collectivism as a way to mobilize the U.S. economy for World War I?
43. Why did the top executives in many companies support close cooperation with the government during World War I? Why did they accept government regulation of production and fixing of prices? In short, what was in it for them?
44. Why did government officials and liberal intellectuals support War Collectivism? What was in it for them?
45. How did the boom in auto manufacturing and construction affect the broader economy during the 1920s? Why would a collapse in either of these sectors have a widespread negative impact on the economy?
46. The 1920s have been called the “prosperity decade.” To what extent this label true?
47. 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”?
48. How did Chicago’s African Americans respond to mass culture? How did “mainstream mass culture” offer them “the ingredients from which to construct a new urban black culture”?
49. 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?
50. 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?
51. 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?