APUSH 2025 Set 2 DBQ: Economic Change Influence on US Society

Document 1

Source: Francis Vinton, minister, sermon delivered in 1869

“This [completion of the transcontinental railroad] is indeed a great event of the world.... It is a triumph of commerce—a triumph indicating free trade as a future law of the nation.... When we contemplate this achievement we can hardly realize its magnitude. Three thousand two hundred and eighty-five miles of continuous railway.... It begun when the nation was agitated by war, and is finished now when we enjoy a reign of peace.... It will populate our vast territory and be the great highway of the nations.... But there is another aspect in which we view it as a blessing, and in connection with which we esteem it of still greater importance. It will preserve the Union of these States.... [It] binds the States of the Atlantic and Pacific into one nation.”

Document 2

Source: Henry George, journalist and politician, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, 1879

“The enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate1 poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil....

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma2 of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations.... So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.”

Document 3

Source: Lucy Parsons, formerly enslaved woman and industrial activist, interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a newspaper published in Missouri, 1886

“The great monopolies and corporations and syndicates...are now rapidly extinguishing the middle classes, which we regard as the great bulwark between the monopoly and the great producing or working classes. There will come a time when there will be in this world ONLY TWO CLASSES, the possessing class and the non-possessing class, the middle classes having been forced into the wage class owing to the enormous capital now needed to remain in the field of production. These two classes will therefore find themselves arrayed against each other; a struggle in the revolutionary stage will come, and the order of things in the world will be changed by the people themselves....

Witness the strikes without number that have swept up and down this broad land like a great cyclone.... The wage system in this country has now reached its full development. It no longer satisfies the needs and wants of the people; facts which are illustrated by the poverty and starvation to be met with in the midst of plenty.”

Document 4

Source: Benjamin Harrison, former Republican president of the United States, speech in New York City supporting Republican candidates for election to the House of Representatives, 1894

“The trouble with the Democratic party now is that it is an incoherent party. Who could tell what it was going to do?...

I have wondered why our Democratic leaders should hate [American factories].... They have in these campaigns described the American manufacturer as a thieving robber-baron.... I never could see why this could be so—why it was an offense against society or country for a man to build a [factory] and give employment to men and women at decent wages inside of it. But these appeals have been made, and the minds of the workingmen were inflamed against their employers. They were made to believe that...they must assume toward [employers] the attitude of hostility....

Let us put bitterness out of [our hearts]. Let us stop these [class] envyings and these jealousies.... Let us stop this war on American industry and American homes.”

Document 5

Source: M. E. J. Kelley, female labor reformer, “The Union Label,” North American Review, 1897

“The union label is a distinctively American product.... Men [first in California] were urged... to buy the products of well-paid white citizens employed at living wages in decent shops. To distinguish [goods] made by white workmen...the local [trade] union issued a label [applied to the packaging].... The union label is usually considered a guarantee that the article on which it appears was made in a factory complying with the factory laws, and not in a sweatshop....

The effect of the use of the label upon consumption will be to bring an ethical element into economic transactions.... Whether goods shall be made under sweat-shop conditions, under conditions which mean the brutalization of the great mass of humanity, or under conditions which permit the development of all that is best in the workers, and which are the best conditions for the interests of society as a whole, depends upon the consumers and not upon the producers. When the ethical sense of the community is so highly developed that no one will wear a garment for which just wages have not been paid, the sweatshop will disappear.”

Document 6

Source: “Industrial Leadership,” article in the New York Times, 1900

“The hero of the future is the Captain of industry, not the Captain of armies. The struggle is to produce the most, and most cheaply—not to destroy the most and the most quickly. The strong nation is the one whose manufactures and whose merchant marine reach furthest in supplying the needs of the peoples, and return best laden with the needed goods of other lands. The keynote of success, the secret of power, is economy—economy in production, in methods, in management.... Before engineers and managers lie the duty of meeting the conditions—and the other great duty of using their influence and their power in the affairs of the nation, so that justice and wisdom may govern the State at home and abroad. The task is a responsible one, but home and foreign politics have proved...the triumphant success which follows when the industry and commerce of the country speak clearly to its rulers.”