Robber Barons And Rebels Chapter Summary

C. Thesis Statement:
In Chapter 11, Robber Barons and Rebels, Zinn uses primary sources and evidence to explain how behind the great achievements in America in the early 1900s, there was usually a man of great wealth with a vision as well as millions of others doing the back-breaking work in order to fulfill the capitalists’ dreams.
D. Evidence used:
1. To accomplish the growth in production of goods such as cloth, coal, steel, and copper, ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of new corporations, a country with land and minerals, and a large supply of human beings to do the back-breaking, unhealthful, and dangerous work were required. Immigrants came from Europe and China to make the

new labor force. Farmers unable to buy the new machinery or pay the new railroad rates would move to the cities. Between the years 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to 4 million, Chicago from 110,000 to 2 million, and Philadelphia grew from 650,000 to 1 1/2 million.
2. In some cases, the inventor himself became the organizer of businesses, such as Thomas Edison; inventor of electrical devices. He created companies is the automobile, battery, cement, lighting, mining, and motion pictures industries. He was a successful inventor and visionary, and had many people working for him in order to become prosperous.
3.

In the 1890s, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learned obedience to authority and responsibility. A journalist observer of the schools wrote, "The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly." The children were not being educated for the purpose of creating sense of wonder, to increase their knowledge, or even to learn; they were being educated simply so that they could work more

effectively.
4. Immigrants often became laborers, housepainters, stonecutters, or ditch-diggers. One Italian man was told he was going to Connecticut to work on the railroad, but instead was taken to work sulfate mines in the South where he and others were watched over by armed guards in their barracks and in the mines. They were given only enough money to pay for their railroad fare and tools, and very little to eat in exchange for their tiring and dangerous work.
5.

The significance of Populist belief was shown in one of its most important leaders in, Charles Macune, who was a radical in economics, a conservative in politics, and a racist. He came up with a plan that would become central to the Populist platform; the sub-Treasury plan. The government would have its own warehouses where farmers could store produce and get certificates from the sub-Treasury. These would be greenbacks, and thus much more currency would be made available; not dependent on gold or silver, but based on the amount of farm produce. At this time, farmers were struggling to make money off of their grain. Their land, machines, the railroad for transportation, the grain merchant for handling their grain, and the storage elevator for storing it all costed money. Farmers soon found the prices for their produce going down, and the prices of transportation and loans going up. They dealt with the financial stress and did the work while Macune reaped the

benefit.
C. Important sources and analysis:
1. a) This lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” was given by a man named Russel Conwell in the years after the Civil War more than 5,000 times to audiences across the country.
b) In this lecture, Conwell tries to convince his audience that being rich makes you an honest man, and that poor people live in poverty because God has punished them. He explains how he sympathizes with the poor and talks about them as if they were subordinate to him and altogether insignificant.
c) An additional source similar to this one would be from the perspective of someone in the audience listening to this lecture. Their insights would show how the lecture was received and how others felt about the poor workers.
2. a) This source is a report given to the Chattanooga Federation of Trades from an observer of armed miners taking control of a mine area on the night of October 31, 1891. On that night, five hundred convicts were set free and the companies surrendered, agreeing not to use convicts.
b) This source shows how using a large number of people as a work force to accomplish a large project became difficult due to uprisings and revolts such as this one.
c) A convict’s perspective would have been an additional helpful source. This would have shown how a worker felt, and perhaps why well-paid workers would have done a better job due to having no criminal background.
D. Observations/Questions:
1. The word ‘pay’ is used 24 times in Chapter 11, and is almost always used in the context of the poor paying the rich, whether through taxes, because of interest, for supplies needed for them to work, transportation, or other obligations. It was hard enough for the poor farmers and workers to make money to feed and take care of themselves, let alone pay the wealthy out of the little they had. The poem, “The Farmer is the Man” that came out of the Patriot movement describes the farmer’s debt and mortgage, and how they wear tattered pants. His condition is described as sinful, when in fact he worked as hard as he could to survive and there was little he can do to change his situation.
2. The Texas People's Party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891. It was interracial and radical. There was blunt and forceful debate between whites and blacks. One black delegate dissatisfied with vague statements about equality discusses in his argument how black and white horses coincide living in the same field. He uses this analogy to say that by nature, we are all the same and thus should have equal rights. The horses don’t care what color they are, so why should we?