AP American History DBQ

AP American History DBQ

Directions: The following question requires you to construct an essay that integrates your interpretation of Documents A-T and your knowledge of the period. Strive to support your assertions both by citing key pieces of evidence from the documents and by drawing on your knowledge of the period.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the middle of the 18th Century and by 1860, Great Britain was the primary manufacturing nation in the world. By 1900, in a little over a generation, the United States had taken over first place and was producing almost twice as much as second place Britain. What were the key factors that sparked this rapid change?

Document A

Document B

“After Bell's success a large number of experimenters entered the field, and an almost endless variety of modifications have been described. But few possess any real merit, and almost none have any essentially new principles. A telephone transmitter and a receiver on a novel plan were patented in July, 1877, by Edison, shortly after the introduction of Bell's instruments. The receiver was based on the change of friction produced by the passage of an electric current through the point of contact of certain substances in relative motion.” Encyclopedia Britannica, “The Invention of the Telephone” Vol.10, Pg.8.

Document C

“. . . . . Edison immediately went back to carbon, which from the first he had conceived of as the ideal substance for a burner. His next step proved conclusively the correctness of his old deductions. On October 21, 1879, after many patient trials, he carbonized a piece of cotton sewing-thread bent into a loop or horseshoe form, and had it sealed into a glass globe from which he exhausted the air until a vacuum up to one-millionth of an atmosphere was produced. This lamp, when put on the circuit, lighted up brightly to incandescence and maintained its integrity for over forty hours, and lo! the practical incandescent lamp was born. . . .” Frank L. Martin, “Edison's Electric Light Invention,” America, Vol.9, Pg.229 - Pg.230.

Document D

View of Brooklyn Bridge under construction, circa 1880

Document E

The Reverend Russell H. Conwell was a Baptist preacher who delivered his famous lecture, ‘Acres of Diamonds,’ more than six thousand times.

“You have no right to be poor. It is your duty to be rich. Oh, I know well that there are some things higher, sublimer than money! Ah, yes, there are some things sweeter, holier than gold! Yet I also know that there is not one of those things but is greatly enhanced by the use of money.

Money is power, and it ought to be in the hands of good men. It would be in the hands of good men if we comply with the Scripture teachings, where God promises prosperity to the righteous man. . . . You should be a righteous man. If you were, you would be rich. . . . No man has a right to go into business and not make money. It is a crime to go into business and lose money, because it is a curse to the rest of the community. No man has a moral right to transact business unless he makes something out of it. . . . .

It is cruel to slander the rich because they have been successful. It is a shame to "look down" upon the rich the way we do. They are not scoundrels because they have gotten money. They have blessed the world. They have gone into great enterprises that have enriched the nation and the nation has enriched them. It is all wrong for us to accuse a rich man of dishonesty simply because he secured money. Go through this city and your very best people are among your richest people. Owners of property are always the best citizens.” R. H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (1901), pp. 145-147, 151.

Document F

Document G

Document H

Document I

"The manufacturers judge that the movement [to mechanize] has been advantageous to workmen, as sellers of labor, because the level of salaries has been raised, as consumers of products, because they purchase more with the same sum, and as laborers, because their task has become less onerous, the machine doing nearly everything which requires great strength; the workman, instead of bringing his muscles into play, has become an inspector, using his intelligence. The laboring classes do not share this optimism. . . . They reproach it with diminishing the number of skilled laborers, permitting in many cases the substitution of unskilled workers and lowering the average level of wages. They reproach it with depriving, momentarily at least, every time that an invention modifies the work of the factory, a certain number of workmen of their means of subsistence, thus rendering the condition of all uncertain. They reproach it, finally, with reducing absolutely and permanently the number of persons employed for wages, and thus being indirectly injurious to all wage-earners who make among themselves a more disastrous competition, the more the opportunities for labor are restricted.

The census of the United States shows that . . . . from 1860 to 1890, while the population of the United States doubled, the number of persons employed in industry increased nearly threefold.” Levasseur, "The Concentration of Industry, and Machinery in the United States," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9, no. 2 (March 1897): 12-14, 18-19, 21-24.

Document J

Document K

“The business organization of most big factories is simple enough. Almost all cotton-mill properties are managed by a board of directors elected by the stockholders. These directors appoint officers, among whom the treasurer and the agent are the important personages, the first having charge of the finances, the buying of supplies, payment of expenses, and selling of goods; the second having the actual manufacture of the goods wider his control . . . . The treasurer of most New England manufacturing corporations lives in Boston, where the goods are sold, and the agent lives near the mills . . . .” D.A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes [New York,1889] p. 57.

Document L

“To say, indeed, what the world did not have half a century ago is almost equivalent to enumerating all those things which in the. . . . world now regards as constituting the dividing lines between civilization and barbarism. Thus, fifty years ago the railroad and the locomotive were practically unknown. The ocean steam marine dates from 1838, when the Sirius and Great Western, the two pioneer vessels, crossed the Atlantic to New York. Electricity had then hardly got beyond the stage of an elegant amusement," and the telegraph was not really brought into practical use before 1844. . . . the mechanical reapers, mowing and seeding machines, the steam-plow and most other eminently labor-saving agricultural devices; the Bessemer process and the steel rail (1857); the submarine and transoceanic telegraph cables (1866); photography. . . . electroplating and the electro- type; the steam-hammer, repeating and breech loading fire-arms, and rifled and steel cannon; gun-cotton and dynamite; and the industrial use of India-rubber. . . .” D.A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes [New York,1889] p. 27.

Document M

“Several people spoke at that meeting on May 2, and many in the audience began to grow restless and antagonistic. Finally, 29-year-old Rose Schneiderman stepped up to the podium. In a whisper barely audible, she began to address the crowd.

“I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies, if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the fire-proof structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 14 olds are burned to death.. . . . Too much blood has been spilled. . . . The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working class movement.” Bonnie Mitelman, Rose Schneiderman and the Triangle Fire, American History Illustrated [July, 1981] 38-47.

Document N

Indians Have No True Title to the Land

“Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, when he hears that the whites have settled on Indian lands, cannot realize that the act has no resemblance whatever to the forcible occupation of land already cultivated. The white settler has merely moved' into an uninhabited waste; he does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows perfectly well that the land is really owned by no one. It is never even visited, except perhaps for a week or two every year, and then the visitors are likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts no one from the land; if he did not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a building, and clear the ground for tillage no one else would do so. The truth is, the Indians never had any real tide to the soil. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian nations the whites often acted as a protection, or; at least, they deferred instead of hastening their fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is probable that the Iroquois would have exterminated every Algonquin tribe before the end of the eighteenth century; exactly as in recent time the Crows and Pawnees would have been destroyed by the Sioux, had it not been for the wars we have waged against the latter.” Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, New York 1889, p. 76.

Document O

Q. “Can you give us some instances of the obnoxious rules of which you speak?”

A. “Yes; one instance was on the part of a large firm of carriage manufacturers at Rochester; Just a year ago this month their men rebelled against certain rules that they had established in their works-rules degrading to human nature. For instance, the faucets in the water sinks were locked up, and when an employee wanted a drink of water he had to go to the foreman of his department and ask for a drink; the foreman went and unlocked the faucet and gave him a cupful of water; and whether that was enough to satisfy his thirst or not, it was all he got . . . . Another obnoxious rule was that if a man was half or even a quarter of a minute late he was shut out. They had a gate and it would be shut down upon a man even when he was going in, sometimes so quickly that he would hardly have time to draw his foot back to keep it from being crushed by the gate, and that man would be kept out until nine o'clock, so that he would make only three-quarters of a day's work. The rule was that the men had to be in the works before the whistle blew.” Robert Layton, U.S. Congress, February 6, 1883, Report of the Committee of the Senate Upon Relations between Labor and Capital, Vol I, pp. 8-10.

Document P

Advertisement in Harper’s Weekly,1877

Document Q

“At one time, an industrialist remembered, "I knew every man . . . I could call him by name and shake hands with him . . and the [office] door was always open. When I left the active management... we had some thirty thousand employees, and the men who worked. . . would have stood just about as much chance to get in to see any one with his grievance as he would to get into the Kingdom of Heaven." David Brody, Workers in Industrial America, [Oxford University Press] p. 20.

Document R

"Despite the evidence of extensive transience in the workplace and sudden unemployment as the economy veered between boom and bust, the American economic system seems to have delivered sufficient rewards and opportunity that workers were not inclined to repudiate it. Furthermore, they seemed unwilling to identify themselves too fully with a fixed proletarian status because they anticipated being able to enjoy some degree of social mobility. This reluctance to think of themselves as members of a working class also may have come from immigrant workers sense of cultural identity. Each ethnic group was well aware of the differences between their interests and values and those of their American co-laborers or workers from other European countries. The political process also played a part. Because all propertyless male workers could vote, and the mainstream parties appealed for votes from all social groups, workers did not feel compelled to create their own political organizations in the form of labor or socialist parties." Michael Perman, Perspectives on the Past, [D.C. Heath Co, 1996] p.77.

Document S

“Men, women and children work together seven days in the week in these cheerless tenements to make a living for the family, from the break of day till far into the night. Often the wife is the original cigarmaker from the old home, the husband having adopted her trade here as a matter of necessity, because, knowing no word of English, he could get no other work. . . . . all sorts of frightful stories were told of the shocking conditions under which people lived and worked in these tenements, from a sanitary point of view especially, and a general impression survives to this day that they are particularly desperate.” Michael Perman, Perspectives on the Past, [D.C. Heath Co, 1996] p.97.

Document T