Industrialization and Urbanization

Today we're gonna be talking about these kind of twin processes of industrialization and urbanization. After the Civil War, I think this period often gets overlooked as this period of industrialization. The latter 1800s, was one of the most rapid and profound economic revolutions that any country has ever experienced in the history of humanity. This is when the US would really blow up economically and start producing more things, than they knew what to do with by 1900. This is when the United States begins to export or sell abroad, you know, more manufactured goods than any country in the world.

There were a lot of reasons for this. The United States had abundant natural resources. It was a large country with lots of raw materials. There was a growing supply of labor in the form of immigration that we'll talk about later, and there was kind of an expanded market for manufactured goods. A lot of new things that would be developed and created in the latter 1800s, would be available to sell, not just to Americans, but eventually to others around the world.

Just so we're kind of on the same page here, I’ll kind of provide a cookie cutter definition of industrialization. So industrialization refers to the rapid expansion of factory production, mining and railroad construction that would produce an unprecedented amounts of goods and wealth. Again, just to kind of reiterate, talking about this period in the latter 1800s, kind of 1850 to early 1900s, I'm not talking about the first industrial revolution which involved the development of steam power and the cotton gin. In 1793, kind of the 16 and 1700s, this is kind of 1850 to 1900 or so.

This time period has also been often referred to as the Gilded Age, which got its name from the novelist, Mark Twain, who wrote a novel in 1873 called the Gilded Age. If you're unfamiliar with that term, gilding means to kind of cover something in a thin layer. So, for example, if you have a, just a normal rock that is gilded with gold, it would be covered with gold in this kind of thin layer on the outside, so that it looks really shiny on the outside, but it's really just a rock with a thin layer of gold around it. He's referring to this time period in such a way, Mark Twain is by talking about it in terms of this was yes, a time when people were making lots of money, but maybe it was also masking serious social problems and growing inequalities, growing poverty that went alongside this mass explosion of wealth.

This kind of massive explosion of wealth and production was facilitated and really made possible by some new kind of key technological advancements. In this time period, late 1800s, for example, we have an explosion in the amount of railroad track put down throughout the United States. Just to kinda give you some numbers, in 1870, there was 53,000 miles of track, and just 30 years later, this would quadruple by 1900. There was 258,000 miles of track. That number would almost double again in another 20 years. By 1920, there was 407,000 miles of track, and this created a whole new markets. Now city of Chicago could trade with New York or somewhere in Houston can trade with the upper Midwest. This kind of connected the United States and connected markets in ways that was not possible with horse and buggy.

Somewhat similarly, you have the refrigerator car that was developed in 1867. Um, it's fairly self-explanatory. It is a railroad car that is refrigerated. You might think, well, who gives a crap? It's a cold car. No one cares. But this was massively influential. I mean, this allowed whole new industries and cities to flourish. Again, for example, the city of Chicago became this meat packing center in the center of the country. Before you couldn't ship beef from, you know, very far, it has to go on a horse and buggy. If it can't keep cold, it's gonna spoil. Nobody wants that. But now with a refrigerator car, you, this whole meat packing industry would blow up in the city of Chicago. It allowed the city to grow faster and faster as it kind of created this whole new industry. Now, you could ship beef from Chicago to New York or anywhere else across the United States, all connected via these railroad lines.

You also have in 1844, the, the development of the telegraph by Samuel Morse. You could think of this really simply as kind of like the internet, in the sense that people could now instantaneously communicate. This wasn't kind of, everyone had a telegraph in their home, but certainly for business, this was massive. Instead of trying to coordinate via sending letters sent by horse across the country, that might take a day or two or three or a couple weeks. Now, you could send somebody a message, kind of like a early form of texting. You could send somebody a quick message and they would get it within a few seconds or a couple minutes. So this was greatly helpful in facilitating trade.

You also have the opening of the Atlantic cable in 1866, where they basically ran a telegraph line under the ocean from New York to London, which cut down as that kind of quote says in the PowerPoint, this cut down the time it took for information to travel from New York to London from two weeks to two minutes. So prior to this, you know, the fastest ship could send a letter from New York, from New York to London in two weeks and be kind of like the fastest ship that there was at this time. But now with the telegraph, this takes two minutes. And you could think of how this would also transform kind of public news consumption. If some war broke out over in Europe, the Americans public wouldn't find out about this, or not just American public. Any American wouldn't find out about this for two weeks. And then by the time you're hearing about some war breaking out over in Europe or something like that, it already happened two weeks ago. You don't know what's happened in the inner beating time period. But now you can just find out what happened in London on that day. Similarly, across the United States, instead of information taking days or maybe weeks to travel by horse and buggy across the United States, people could find out instantaneously what happened that day in Washington or what happened that day in any city across America.

So this kind of exploded the amount of newspapers that were across the United States as now people had a kind of want for news prior to this. Most, um, most newspapers would release a paper every Sunday, you know, may maybe once, maybe twice a week. Now, newspapers are starting to be released every day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, maybe taking Saturday off or something. But this is because now people have the ability to know what is happening yesterday or what happened today. They want to know, they want to be up to date, wanna know what is going on across the United States. So people wanted to know more.

You also have that railroads and telegraph combined would really change conceptions of time and space itself. What I mean by this is, for example, you look at time zones. You know, you know, think about Central Pacific, Eastern time, all of that. That started with railroad companies because once railroads went all across the United States and people were trying to coordinate all of these different kind of shipping of manufactured goods, it was very difficult to do because prior to the development of time zones, every single country, or I mean sorry, every single city was telling their time according to high noon, whenever the sun was at the high point in the sky, that was noon, which made it that each individual city as you moved east or west had a slightly different noon. You know, it was a, you know, a minute or two off here, an hour there, two hours there. But it was very difficult to coordinate shipping across all of these different gradations in time. So there's actually railroad companies that came up with this idea of let's just create big block time zones. You know, it's four o'clock here, five o'clock here, six o'clock here, you know, so on and so, you know, so on and so forth. The federal government thought that was a good idea and eventually adopted that thinking, yes, this makes things a lot more efficient and easier to facilitate trade across the country. And that became kind of the standard that we still have today.

Also, very, very impactful was the development of widespread electricity. This was kind of being implemented in the United States. It was developed by Thomas Edison in 1878. I'm not gonna get into the whole Edison versus Tesla debate, but nonetheless, this is in 1878 onward is when the US starts having electricity. So no longer are you using lanterns, you know, using kind of whale oil or blubber or anything like that to power that you could see at night. You now can have things on all the time. You can have whole industries that will now be created. You can't have factories without electricity. You now can have people working 24 hours a day. You can have a night shift. Prior to this, it wasn't really possible. You couldn't have people working in the dark in these kind of dangerous factory conditions. But now with electricity, you can have people working nonstop all the time. And as well as this also kind of created a whole new nightlife. Now there's restaurants that can be open late. Now people will go out in the streets with night, you know, kind of lights on out in, in the streets and feel a little bit more safe. This allowed the development of elevators, street cars, whole groups of kind of machinery powered by electricity that made people more and more efficient in terms of producing. So this really allowed for kind of a massive explosion of wealth, so people can work 24/7. There's whole new markets to ship manufactured goods to more stuff is being produced at a consistent rate going forward. And this would allow people to make a crazy amount of money that the world has not yet seen before.

So a lot of these new technological advancements also led to massive wealth concentrations in the United States where people were now able to make more money than humans had ever seen before. Just to kind of give you a comparison or an idea, in 1776, during the American Revolution. The richest kind of 1% of Americans owned 8.5% of all goods and wealth produced in the United States. By 1890, the rich, the richest 1% of Americans owned 25% of all the nation's good and goods and wealth. And by 1900, the richest 10% of Americans controlled nearly 90% of everything produced in America, of all the nation's wealth. And this was unprecedented for this time period. Again, a lot of these new technological developments helped people create and produce way more things than people ever could have before, and allowed the kind of explosion of wealth generation within individuals, that the world had never seen. And this is kind of when all of these debates start about how much can people have or how much wealth is too much and all of that. That still goes on to this day, but this all kind of starts back then.

Couple of the kind of main players I'm sure you've heard of from this time period are John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie owned Carnegie Steel. John D. Rockefeller owned Standard Oil. At his peak by 1900, John D. Rockefeller, controlled 90% of all oil in the United States. It's kind of how he made his wealth. He bought out all of the competing oil refineries so that he could control all of the oil in the US or 90% of it. You can see the picture shown there as kind of a cartoon from the time period showing how Standard Oil, the company was starting to have so much power and influence with all the wealth that it had taking control of the White House and the labor movement, and Congress was kind of having its tentacles as that picture shows spread everywhere.

You also have in this time period the development of trust and pools. This is essentially the first corporations that exist as they were referred to at the time as trusts and pools. JP Morgan had created US Steel in 1901 alongside Andrew Carnegie to create this giant steel conglomerate. This combined eight different companies into one that then controlled 65% of all steel production in the United States.

Many, company owners especially, but many other Americans as well, began to kind of subscribe to this idea of social Darwinism as it's been called. This was originally kind of derived from Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species in which he was arguing that this idea of evolution was occurring amongst animals that, you know, for example, birds in the Galapagos Islands, you know, ones that had, you know, more nuts available to eat, kind of had more blunt beaks, ones that were looking for worms had kind of more, you know, pointed beaks and that this evolved over hundreds and thousands of years. And there was a British sociologist named Herbert Spencer that began applying Darwin's ideas to humans and societies. And he's the one, this British sociologist, Herbert Spencer, that popularized the phrase survival of the fittest. The fittest Spencer had said would demonstrate their superiority through economic success while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration, the kind of collapse of society, and it would encourage survival of the weak if the government were to intervene. A journalist at the time, HL Menkin had kind of concurred with this idea in the Baltimore Sun he had written in 1907, that “There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vein task of trying to uplift the weak.”

So to many this kind of justified their accumulation of we saying that they were fitter humans, they were better able to generate wealth, and they were, you know, the better among us of all people, and that they ought to be able to continue to generate so much wealth, and that this should be not merely tolerated, but celebrated and encouraged. It signified the progress of the species and societies. So this led many people to kind of go back and forth whether people were captains of industry, people that should be admired, and whose energy and vision pushed the economy forward, or whether they should be people looked at as robber barons, people who wielded power without any accountability in an unregulated marketplace. Again, these are all still kind of debates that go on in some way, shape, or form to this day. And, but this all starts back then.

So this also kind of created whole new markets, as American companies could now expand their business abroad, because you have all of these new factories that are producing so much stuff that Americans cannot possibly buy everything they now can ship things abroad to other countries. They can overproduce and potentially ship this to new markets around the world. And this would, uh, this time period would also spawn a kind of revolution in consumer items and sewing machines and irons later on, refrigerators in the home, things like that. All new things for Americans to buy that then would kind of push the economy forward more and more. As more people were buying things, more people were making things, and these kind of just kept going and snowballing.

For example, you can kind of see here you also have the advent of mail order catalogs and that picture to the right, kind of a Sears Robuck catalog where you could, now with the new railway system, you'd get this, you kind of think of the Sears Robuck catalog as Amazon, back in the day. ] You'd get this catalog, you'd flip through it, and if you want to buy it, you could send a letter with some cash and they would send you items to your home. Again, all normal today, new back then. For example, as that picture shows, you could buy a double-barrel hammerless shotgun for $17.75, have it shipped to have it shipped to your house, or, you know, using the railroads.

You also see a change that this is the kind of growth of advertising because with now the ability to make so much more stuff, people have to want to buy the new stuff. And how are you going to stand out? How are you going to market your items or kind of sell your items to other people, especially if there's kind of new items that maybe people don't need, but you want to kind of convince them that they need things. This whole advertising industry started to grow and the late 1800s and would kind of keep growing throughout the early 1900s. If you look at kind of advertising before the late 1880s kind of visual advertising or advertising using pictures was often kind of looked down on as like hokey, um, kind of, um, not to be trusted. Newspapers and magazines in fact offered kind of little or no advertising. What they did print was kind of small scale, small type visually unappealing words jammed together into kind of single columns. You can kind of see an example of that in the picture down in the bottom left, this was kind of a 1850 advertisement. You know, if you just read it, George Drewry, Portrait Painter can be founded as studio in Freeman's near the bank, blah, blah, blah. From this time to this time. It's like, that's just kind of a not very visually appealing advertisement. Compare that to the Sears Row book one on the right, where you've got kind of a woman out front who's kind of holding up the latest thing to buy. It's all in color, which again, no one cares about color today, but back then this was something new—color on paper, especially in the form of advertisements, was not very widespread, but this was growing as ways to catch people's eyes to kind of catch their attention.

So by the late 1890s kind of eye appeal kind of catching people's eyes had become, had begun to be more and more prominent. A billboard advertiser back in that time, put it this way, he said, “It's hard to get mental activity withhold type, but you feel a picture.” Kind of, it makes people, you know, instinctively think differently about things. Outdoor advertising would grow as well. More billboards, posters, electric images now with electricity and neon signs began appearing in the US kind of overwhelmingly from 1890 to 1915. A commercial light broker at the time named OJ Gude had said that electric signs quote, “literally forced their announcements on the vision of the uninterested, as well as the interested passerby.” Essentially, Zane, you can't not look at these new advertisements. He also echoed verbatim what another advertiser from the time period, Emily Fog Mead had argued in 1901, that this kind of intrusiveness will was, was necessary, quote, “if new habits were to be opened.” It's like, if we're gonna get people to buy new things and things that they never thought that they needed, we need to try to convince them. We need to try to, um, make things interesting and appealing to people. The creation of desire for new products advertise as necessities with eye catching and colorful new advertising techniques peaked people's interest and opened the pocketbooks of American consumers.

You can see here an example of kind of the creation of Times Square. On the left, you can see that this was kind of, uh, that that was an early picture of Times Square as billboards began to flood the, the city, which of course now today we know of Times Square with all of the giant televisions and neon signs and all of that. See on the right is the first neon sign in New York, for Heinz, um, pickle company, and also obviously ketchup. But that was the kind of the first neon sign in New York is this grew in popularity and then expanded across the country.

So kind of in tandem with this process of industrialization. And also, because of it, you have a massive explosion of immigrants coming to the country in these kind of latter 1800s. Between 1870 and 1920, over 25 million immigrants arrive in the United States. Many were coming from Europe, also many from Russia, many Chinese, uh, went to California. As there are kind of a new job opportunities popping up that many immigrants can do, there's this kind of massive explosion of immigration throughout the United States.

This is often kind of referred to in terms of kind of push and pull factors of kind of answering why did people come to the United States at this time, some push factors, things that kind of push people out of their country, and some pull factors like why specifically come to the United States. For example, some push factors, religious persecution, for example, many Jews were facing, uh, problems in Russia and in Eastern Europe, kind of being blamed for all sorts of problems. So many of them were coming to the United States as they were being kind of killed or harassed throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. So they'd go to the country that has the kind of freedom of religion that the United States has. Or crop failure and starvation, for example, the kind of Irish potato famine took place from 1845 to 1852, um, where millions of Irish people died, and they essentially didn't have anything to eat. So many of them came to the United States, which was a place abundant in food and food production. You also had political instability. For example, there was a civil war in China called the Taiping Rebellion from 1852 to 1864. That, and so by 1880, over 300,000 arrived in California. Just, you know, many of them didn't care. They didn't care about taking part in this civil war. They wanted peace, they wanted to raise a family. So they come to a place where they didn't have to deal with a civil war.

Pull factors—kind of what are some reasons that people come specifically to the United States outside of being pushed outside of their country from outside kind of forces. The biggest one by far, that's why it's underlined, is jobs. With industrialization, you have all of these new jobs that are available, all of these new factory jobs, and in many cases, these were very simple jobs. You didn't have to know English. You would maybe go on some assembly line and just do the same thing over and over again. You know, you're going to, you know, turn this lever or pull the crank, whatever. You're gonna do the same thing over and over again for hours and hours and hours on end. And that's all you do, is kind of this new idea of an assembly line. Like, why have somebody make something from scratch? Why have some, somebody that is a shoemaker, for example, that spends their whole life learning how to make the perfect shoe when you could have it be done on this giant assembly line. And people just kind of do one little thing at a time, one little tiny bit, and that's all they have to know. They don't have to know the whole process. They just have to know how to do one little tiny bit. So this made it so that immigrants could work in American jobs and American manufacturers advertise all around the world to all of these other countries, Hey, come over to the United States, come work in our factories. Come work in our jobs. We have so many jobs, we need people to come work. So many did by the millions came to the United States during this time period.

Of course, this would also lead to a lot of discrimination or a lot of kind of harassment. Many Americans were kind of upset about all of these new immigrants and new cultures and new belief systems that were kind of migrating to the United States. This caused a lot of panic at the time period. Another reason that people would come to the United States is family. For example, let's say, you know, one gentleman in Italy moves to the United States, begins to kind of work his way through factories or kind of begin to make a little money, has a small apartment for himself. Then he might write back to Italy and have the rest of the family come over saying, Hey, I've made it. You guys can all start to come over now. Let's, you know, I've found that I can have a great life here in America. Land was another reason that brought people over. European countries especially we're much smaller. Everything was already bought up. There wasn't as many opportunities for people to purchase a home or buy their own land. Most people were renting. So, you know, this is another reason that brought people over.

So the kind of net result of this is that cities begin to blow up across the United States, immigration factories and transportation innovations and, and now skyscrapers, buildings that are able to be built taller and taller, facilitated rapid urbanization or cities just blowing up and being, you know, having more people living in them than have has ever been done before. So again, it was primarily in the Northeast and in the Midwest. The South remained largely rural, still kind of dominated by a lot of agricultural industries, whereas cities like Chicago and New York and Boston and the Northeast were kind of having all of these massive factory jobs that were attracting so many people. And by 1920, the majority of Americans are living in urban areas, which is kind of remarkable in the sense that all the way up until 1920, the majority of Americans, people living in America were, you know, living in rural places. But by 1920, and obviously ever since then, the majority of Americans have lived in cities. That's where all of the jobs were, that's where everybody was moving to.

This would also, as you can imagine, create some problems. This mass migration to cities created a housing crisis in greater health and safety standards. Tt was popular for many immigrants to live in what was kind of called at the time, tenement housing. These were very kind of hastily constructed apartment buildings, just to try to deal with all of the, you know, thousands and later millions of people all moving into the city at once. And these things were not well ventilated. So disease would spread pretty easily. Many did not have windows. The majority up to two thirds of all places in New York did not have plumbing. So you can imagine this would be pretty gross. If you had to use the restroom, had to go to the bathroom a lot of times, you know, people would go in their apartment, go in buckets or things like that, and what do you do with it? You just throw it outside. You find the one window that's maybe in the, in the kind of hallway or something and chuck it outside. And initially New York didn't know how to deal with this. So what they tried at first was having pigs go around the city and just eat everyone's crap. So they were kind of like living Roombas, moving around the city, just eating waste. And then the pigs would get sick and people would eat the sick pigs. It just kind of was a bad thing all around. And it wasn't until kind of 1900 or so that New York City started to develop kind of its own, um, waste collection system to deal with this problem.

Um, but some in ways that people tried to deal with this, this kind of disease, poverty, a lot of people kind of living in terrible housing conditions. You had people like Jane Addams that developed settlement houses that were kind of like halfway houses for immigrants or people that were injured in a job to go live at for free. Jane Addams was one of the kind of the most prominent people that started a settlement house in Chicago. Or you had the journalist Jacob Riis, that kind of created this collection of photographs called How The Other Half Lives kind of showing all of these squalid conditions that people were living in or homeless people. These are some kind of photographs from Jacob Reese showing tenement housing or showing children that are kind of living homeless out in alleyways and kind of showing that, you know, yes, people are generating all this wealth, but this is kind of how the rest of people are living. Things are not going as well for them.

So how about in the farms? How about in kind of more rural areas? Industrialization would increase farming efficiency, but decrease crop prices. Again, you have things like the McCormick Reaper is developed at this time that allows people to kind of farm stuff faster. You have all of the railways that allows people to kind of sell more grain or wheat or corn or whatever to other places across the country. But at the same time, farmers are now reliant on more middlemen. Farmers are reliant on railroads to ship their goods across the country. They're reliant on bankers maybe to provide them loans to expand their farms. And a lot of people kind of felt like they were being screwed over a little bit, especially with railroads. Railroads at this time could really charge whatever they want. They could arbitrarily change their prices at any time. So a lot of farmers would fall into debt. Many were forced to sell their farms or go work into factories. Many grew angry at this system that they feel like enriched bankers and industrial monopolists at the expense of laboring farmers. One kind of, uh, famous, um, Farmer's Alliance leader I'll talk about in a moment was Mary Elizabeth Lease, who had said at the time that quote, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street by Wall Street and for Wall Street.”

So many farmers began to organize after kind of years of feeling exploited. And they thought, you know, well, if big business relied on their numerical strength to exert their economic will, why shouldn't farmers unite to counter that power as well? They could share machinery instead of having to take out loans to buy new tractors or reapers, they could pool their resources to negotiate higher prices for their crops. And one of the kind of most prominent groups of this time period was the Farmer's Alliance starting in Texas in 1877. They were the ones kind of advocating for a lot of this, a lot of this. Farmers' cooperatives, things of, um, you know, programs that allowed farmers to negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased. Essentially farmers pooling their resources and trying to negotiate, saying that we know we're not going to sell unless you, reduce your railroad rates where you give us better loan deals. And this kind of really started in Texas in 1877. Eventually this popularity would spread across the country and they would kind of morph into the Populist Party as they came to be known by the 1890s. And this Populist party began to really challenge the kind of big prominent Democrat and Republican parties at this time period, I should say before talking about this Populist challenge thing, Democrats and Republicans, late 1800s were very different than they are today. Democrats in this time period were basically kind of the state's rights party. Democrats in this time period, late 1800s, were primarily southerners, southerners that were advocating for states rights. The Republicans were primarily in the Northeast. And they were kind of advocating more for free trade, for kind of trading around, um, the world, kind of trying to increase the amount of money that industrialists could make. So they were very different. And we'll kind of talk about through this class when and how that starts to change. But now these Populists are on the scene by the late 1890s, and they attracted many industrial workers, miners as well as cotton and wheat farmers, both in the south and in the west and mid, uh, Midwest. And the Populists sought to counter monopolies using the federal government. They thought, you know, yeah, these settlement houses are great, but they're just kind of putting a small dent, they're kind of, it's like putting a bandaid over a wound. We're not solving any of these larger problems. We ought to use the federal government to try to reign in these, you know, massive monopolists, especially somebody like Rockefeller who owned 90% of all oil in the country. So they advocated nationalizing the country's railroad and telegraph systems. Nationalizing means essentially have the government take it over. They thought, well, if the railroad companies are gonna charge us whatever they want and change their rates, and we are reliant on this to make money, why not have the government force them to charge a standard rate? Same with the telegraph systems. If this is required for us to use these things in order to facilitate trade, why are we kind of reliant on their whims of whatever they want to charge? And if we have access, this should be something that everybody has. They also advocated establishing sub treasure, sub treasuries, loans to farmers while they wait for prices to stabilize. Essentially saying, well, if the price of wheat has crashed and I'm gonna lose all my money selling wheat, the government ought to give us loans while we wait for the price to stabilize so we could actually be profitable when we sell our, um, our, you know, wheat or whatever. And this started to make a dent. This was spreading across the country by 1892. And during the presidential election of 1892, Populists kind of won the legislature of five Western states, you know, meaning they kind of won the majority of the seats in kind of that, those states Congresses or kind of individual states legislatures, rather. They elected three governors and 14 members to the National Congress. So they were beginning to have success across America.

So this kind of peak of Populist power would come with the kind of election of 1898. The Democrats, again, who at this time were mostly Southerners and farmers began to, see how popular the Populists were. So they began to, kind of rally around them and they endorsed a Populist leader by the name of William Jennings Bryan. He became the kind of, uh, the Democratic nominee in the upcoming election. But the Republican nominee was William McKinley, and he was backed by big businesses and bankers, um, gentlemen like John d Rockefeller were supporting William McKinley instead. This election is sometimes called the kind of first modern presidential election because of the amount of money spent with so much money being generated. And big businesses we're really freaked out by William Jennings Bryan, and this Populist Party, because they're talking about taking over the railroads, taking over, having the government take over the telegraph lines. The kind of big business had flooded William McKinley with tons of money. So, for example, William Jennings. Bryan went around the country kind of giving all these fiery speeches. He was known as a good orator, and he's giving speeches all across the country, traveling all over the place. William McKinley just sat in his front porch. He never went on a campaign trail. He just kind of hung out at his house. And the comparison of the amount of money raised is William Jennings Bryan raised around $300,000 across the United States, in his travels, William McKinley just hanging out at his house, raised $10 million. So three, you know, 300,000 compared to 10 million. You know, big business was really freaked out by William Jennings Bryan. And they flooded all of their money and support into this kind of political machine that was William McKinley.

So what was the kind of result? As you can see here, Bryan carried the South and the West, but McKinley won the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and the Midwest. Industrial America would now, from financiers and managers to workers now would vote solidly Republican. A loyalty reinforced, as the country grew more and more prosperous. So William McKinley wins this election, and this would usher in kind of a long era of Republican rule. Democrats would not, become the nation's majority a party again for over another 30 years until 1932. You're gonna have pretty much all Republicans up until the 1930s with a brief exception of Woodrow Wilson we'll talk about later. So yeah, this is kind of this time period of industrialization and urbanization where the economy was transformed. A lot of kind of business, politics, culture, all of these things were vastly transformed during this time period and would have ripple effects moving into the further decades.