In two successive lectures, or two halves of the same lecture, consider treating business growth from two distinct perspectives. First, emphasize how diligence, hard work, attention to detail, and understanding of business organization contributed to the success of major railroad and manufacturing organizations in the last third of the century. In the second lecture, point out how sly practices and dirty tricks, together with cost cutting that squeezed the already too-meager pay packets of American workers, increased the wealth of the already wealthy. See Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (1961); Carl Degler, The Age of Economic Revolution (1977); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (1990); and others in the bibliography at the end of Chapter 18 of the text. Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1910 (1973), has useful comments on the approaches of various historians in its short text and a good bibliographic essay. Instructors may wish, at a later class meeting, to take up the robber-baron issue mentioned in the next section of this guide.

Despite the fact that they are an integral part of American life, labor unions are frequently not well understood by many Americans. Younger college students, especially, tend to adopt their family's view, pro or con, without much further examination. The place to begin is with a history of the labor-union movement in a fully developed lecture focusing on the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the American Railway Union, and some lesser groups in the nineteenth century. Strikes and violence were a characteristic part of the history of the unions and should be included in the lecture both for dramatic effect and for what they reveal about American history and society. The "Place in Time" feature for Chapter 18, Homestead, Pennsylvania, provides a good background for the drama of the Homestead strike. A full treatment can be found in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (1992). The lecture might end with a reference to the failure of the labor movement to help black and unskilled workers and with a foreshadowing of the activities of the Wobblies and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. See Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976), particularly the opening essay. Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920 (third edition; 1996), provides a fine overview and also has a good bibliographic essay.

Ideas have had a profound effect on human history, but students may give them less than their due. This situation can be improved by a lecture that discusses the impact of Charles Darwin, the adaptation of Darwinian thinking to justify the social order, and the response by reform Social Darwinists. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1979), for essays that deal with Darwin and biology. For Social Darwinism see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), and Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (revised edition; 1989).

Just as ideas are important, so is political power. Business leaders often had their way because they were so closely allied with political leaders. A lecture on the subject will make the point clearly, with emphasis on three instances: the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the labor injunction in the railway strike of 1894, and the decision in United States v. E. C. Knight. A general history like Robert L. Heilbroner and Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America, Volume 2, Since 1865 (third edition; 1994), will provide a good overview.