Transforming America
Final Script

TITLE:Lesson 1: The Gilded Age

PREPARED FOR:Dallas TeleLearning

WRITER:Gretchen Dyer

PRODUCER:Julia Dyer

DRAFT:FINAL

DATE:February 11, 2005

Transforming America · TA101 – FINAL · “The Gilded Age”  2/11/05  1

VisualAudio

FADE IN:

INTRODUCTION / Series Opening (2:42) / Music up
  1. RICHARD WHITE on camera
Super: Richard White, StanfordUniversity
  1. Intercut throughout with still pics of Americans
/ RICHARD WHITE (5:05:03): For me, the key question about the United States emerging from the Civil War is how a country so utterly transforms itself.
  1. ALBERT CAMARILLO on camera
Super: Albert Camarillo, StanfordUniversity / ALBERT CAMARILLO: How have the lives of Americans changed, dramatically so?
  1. DAVID LEVERING LEWIS on camera
Super: David Levering Lewis, New York University / DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (8:02:41): What are we becoming? What do we want to be? What can we be?
  1. SUSAN STRASSER on camera
Super: Susan Strasser, University of Delaware / SUSAN STRASSER (9335, 5:00:57): If we looked at the United States at the end of the Civil War now, we would think of it as what we call an underdeveloped country. And the real question is how we got from there to here.
  1. SUSAN HARTMANN on camera
Super: Susan Hartmann, OhioStateUniversity / SUSAN HARTMANN (9:00:57): We need to understand how our economy grew to be the biggest and most productive and prosperous in the world…
  1. Michael McGerr on camera
Super: Michael McGerr, IndianaUniversity / MICHAEL McGERR (15:01:06): …the way in which industrial capitalism has unfolded…
  1. Julianne Malveaux on camera
Super: Julianne Malveaux, Economist and Author / JULIANNE MALVEAUX (9362, 15:01:51): ...how we decided to divide the pie, what kinds of decisions we made about capitalism, about distribution, about the rights of labor…
  1. Michael Kazin on camera
Super: Michael Kazin, GeorgetownUniversity / MICHAEL KAZIN (3:01:10): …who had power in the society…economic power, political power, cultural power?
  1. Lisa McGirr on camera
Super: Lisa McGirr, HarvardUniversity / LISA McGIRR (9:01:20): …and the way that power has been challenged by other social groups that have been more excluded from power…
  1. Julian Bond on camera
Super: Julian Bond, NAACP Board of Directors / JULIAN BOND (22:00:52): …how people of the past struggled to make things at least as good as they are today…
  1. Eric Arnesen on camera
Super: Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at Chicago / ERIC ARNESEN (3:09:42): ...struggled to become included and in the process have changed the nation.
  1. Steven Hahn on camera
Super: Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania / STEVEN HAHN (9:01:06): All of American society, white and black, different ethnic groups, different social classes, were going to have to struggle over what the meaning of freedom was.
  1. Kevin Boyle on camera
Super: Kevin Boyle, OhioStateUniversity / KEVIN BOYLE (6:00:50): That, in some ways, turns into a question about who gets to be defined as an American and who doesn’t…and who does the defining.
  1. Ken Alfers on camera
Super: Ken Alfers, Mountain ViewCollege / KEN ALFERS: Who are Americans? What does it mean to be an American?
  1. MICHAEL BERNSTEIN on camera
Super: Michael Bernstein, UC San Diego / MICHAEL BERNSTEIN (14:01:34): I think a major theme is the evolution of America’s relationship with the wider world.
  1. H.W. Brands on camera
Super: H.W. Brands, University of Texas / H.W. BRANDS (19:00:49): How does the United States become this global power?
  1. Judy Wu on camera
Super: Judy Wu, OhioStateUniversity / JUDY WU (12:02:26): And how does that affect our sense of what it means to be an American?
  1. Joan Hoff on camera
Super: Joan Hoff, MontanaStateUniversity / JOAN HOFF (7:02:48): Maybe one would want to look at our notion of our own exceptionalism.
  1. DAVID LEVERING LEWIS on camera
/ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (8:02:02): This idea that we are a special people who formed ourselves on a city on a hilh – it seems presumptuous. And yet there’s much good in that notion of a people who are making history rather than being imprisoned in it.
  1. PATRICIA LIMERICK on camera
Super: Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado / PATRICIA LIMERICK (18:01:27): I would like to have questions about why this matters, why historical understanding matters.
  1. Bruce Schulman on camera
Super: Bruce Schulman, BostonUniversity / BRUCE SCHULMAN (3:00:49): If we had to distill it to one thing, it’s to remember the very vital presence of the past in contemporary American life – how it shapes the decisions we make and the options that present themselves to us. I think that’s the central lesson we want to look at.
SEGMENT #1 / Unit I Open: America at the Crossroads (5:40)
Learning objective: Place post-Civil War America in context and connect it to the course themes of identity, freedom and equality.
  1. Civil War images : soldiers, battlefields strewn with dead, Lincoln, Lee’s surrender, freed slaves, etc.
  1. Footage from Civil War reenactments (Shaping America: Gettysburg and Vicksburg)
/ Music Up
(Actor as ABRAHAM LINCOLN): Wehere highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
  1. archival photos of freed slaves
/ NARRATOR: The end of the Civil War set the stage for a new era in American history.
  1. Actor silhouettes
  2. ECU’s on illustrated copies of 14th and 15th amendments highlighting significant text…
/ Actor (reading key phrases from the 14th and 15th amendments): The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
  1. Images of northern industrial capitalism: railroads, oil wells, factories
/ NARRATOR: The triumph of northern industrial capitalism over the rural, agricultural South unleashed a period of unprecedented economic growth that would forever alter the way Americans lived and saw the world.
  1. Blacks under Reconstruction
  2. Ships carrying immigrants to Ellis Island or AngelIsland
/ Nearly four million new citizens, formerly slaves, now struggled for a foothold in a society still largely closed to them. Meanwhile, an ever-increasing flood of immigrants exerted new pressures on a nation that both welcomed and excluded them.
  1. Statue of Liberty or other American icon
/ “The Grand Experiment”, as some referred to American democracy, continued to challenge and enlarge Americans’ notions of freedom, equality, and identity.
  1. DAVID GUTIERREZ on camera
Super: David Gutierrez, UC San Diego / DAVID GUTIERREZ (9373, 03:02): From the founding, pretty much, we had a huge population of very different people – different interests, different regional interests, different class interests, and obviously very deep divides based on race and national origin. So to talk about American identity, it’s much more accurate I think to talk about American identities, plural.
  1. PATRICIA LIMERICK on camera
Super: Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado / PATRICIA LIMERICK (18:02:29): The question of what American identity was in 1876, what America stood for,has very different answersdepending on if you are an Indian person undergoing the conquest in the West, if you’re a Mexican-originating person whose status, or family status, was changed to Mexican-American and resident of the United States in 1848, whether you are a freedman hoping for rights in…even hoping for land and economic opportunity and in only very rare cases getting that.
  1. ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS on camera
Super: Alice Kessler-Harris, ColumbiaUniversity / ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS (9325, 18:02): Of course regional identity exists in great measure. The war is still a very painful memory for many people and the consequences of adjusting to the economic transformation that the war brought created enormous subjective differences among people in different parts of the United States.
  1. relevant visuals
/ NARRATOR: For Americans of all races and regions, freedom was a cherished ideal. But, freedom meant different things to different people.
  1. ERIC FONER on camera
Super: Eric Foner, ColumbiaUniversity / ERIC FONER (03:04): There are always more than one definition of freedom in existence at any time and competing with each other. In 1876, freedom had, because of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, freedom had been exalted as the national…the key national principal of American life. And with freedom came this new conception of the rights of American citizenship and of a national government empowered to protect the rights of citizens over and above violations by the states.
  1. ERIC FONER on camera
  2. images of poor children and families juxtaposed with images of opulence circa late 1800s (newspaper cartoons illustrating ironies of social Darwinism?)
/ ERIC FONER (03:05): At the same time a very different vision of freedom is growing in importance among many thinkers who argue that freedom really means that you let nature take its course and those who get ahead are the fittest and those who fall behind, that’s their own fault.
  1. Alice Kessler-Harris on camera
/ ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS (9325, 18:11:23): The relationship between freedom and equality has always been one in which people have argued you have to give up a little of one to get the other. And, in some sense, that relationship has been a creative relationship, a relationship filled with creative tension.
  1. CLAYBORNE CARSON on camera
Super: Clayborne Carson, StanfordUniversity / CLAYBORNE CARSON (07:06:45): Freedom and equality sometimes work together and sometimes work at odd purposes. We think of freedom in some respects as equally shared but clearly it’s not and the dominant groups in the society have a great deal more freedom. And one of the ways in which that expresses itself is a resistance to equality.
  1. ERIC FONER on camera
/ ERIC FONER (03:08): If you think freedom means the right of people to act without outside constraint, well, that often produces lack of equality. And often people feel that if you want to promote equality you have to limit freedom. You have to limit the freedom of entrepreneurs to exploit their workers. You have to limit their freedom to simply despoil the environment. So there is a tension between freedom and equality.
  1. Alice Kessler-Harris on camera
/ ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS (18:09): One might want to say that this is a period of giant hopes for equality but of much less realization of those hopes.
SEGMENT #2: The Rush of the Express (9:53)
Learning objective: Explain the reasons for large-scale industrialization of the United States in the late 19th century.
  1. Pix of Vanderbilt townhouse on Washington Place; layer with pix of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Frankie Vanderbilt
/ Music Up
NARRATOR: One morning in May 1876, reporters gathered outside the Vanderbilt home in New York City, waiting for a sign that railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt had passed away. Rumors ran rampant – the Commodore was dead! The stock market plunged. The Commodore was still alive! Wall Street rallied. Finally Mrs. Vanderbilt invited the reporters into the parlor. From upstairs came the unmistakable voice of the old man himself:
  1. Pix of Cornelius Vanderbilt
/ Actor as CORNELIUS VANDERBILT: I am not dying!
  1. Bill Cecil on camera
Super: Bill Cecil, Jr. / BILL CECIL (9349, 2:01:08): My great-great grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt,from what I know about him, he must’ve been a pretty tough sort of period person of that time and that character, ‘cause they were very tough-minded business people.
  1. Arthur Vanderbilt on camera
Super: Arthur Vanderbilt II
  1. pix of Cornelius Vanderbilt as a child, young man
  2. pix of Staten Island Ferry
/ ARTHUR VANDERBILT (05:04:53): The Commodore was definitely an American original. He was a very rough hewn character. He grew up on a small farm in Staten Island off of Manhattan and his family was very poor. When he was 15 he went out and bought this old scow,an old wooden boat with one sail that could also be rowed, and he started taking passengers back and forth to Manhattan five miles across New York harbor for 18 cents a trip.
  1. Bill Cecil on camera
/ BILL CECIL (2:01:08): It took about 8 or 10 hours to be able to get produce from the farmland around to Manhattan and by taking his ferry straight across the inlet there he was able to cut the time down and make four, five, six trips a day. He definitely knew his business. He understood competitive advantage.
  1. pix of Vanderbilt’s steamship line
/ ARTHUR VANDERBILT (05:09): Eventually he was able to build up a fleet of steamships and by the time he was in his mid-40s he had made about 10 or 11 million dollars.
  1. Arthur Vanderbilt on camera
  2. pix of Cornelius Vanderbilt as an old, wealthy man
/ ARTHUR VANDERBILT(05:19:40): When the Commodore died, he died at the age of 83, he was the wealthiest man in the country. In fact, he had more money than there was in the United States Treasury.
  1. Actor in silhouette
  2. photos/footage of factories, railroads, various agricultural, mining and industrial processes in late 1800s
/ ACTOR: There has never been, in the history of civilization, a period or a section of the earth in which science and invention have created such opportunity for material welfare as in these United States in the period since the end of the Civil War.
  1. RICHARD WHITE on camera
  2. photos of cotton and wheat farms, farm workers, produce being shipped to market
Super: Richard White, StanfordUniversity / RICHARD WHITE (05:06:08): The United States has a series of advantages that allow it to undergo tremendous growth at the end of the Civil War. And first of all – it’s the most obvious one but it’s often neglected, and that’s agriculture. The South producing, I think, five times as much cotton in 1900 as it was in 1860 before the Civil War. The wheat production in the north quadruples.
  1. MICHAEL BERNSTEIN on camera
Super: Michael Bernstein, UC San Diego
  1. Montage of relevant visuals, including machinery, telephones, typewriters, factories, advertisements, timber, grain fields and elevators, cattle drives, money, businessmen.
/ MICHAEL BERNSTEIN (14:05): The United States, by the late 1800s, is a continental nation, spanning from sea to sea – large amounts of arable land of high quality in the interior for agricultural development, large amounts of water resources, lumber, coal, and other fuels.And in addition, a climate and a topography, a landscape, that allows not only for rapid agricultural development but for rapid urbanization, articulation of transportation and communication networks. All of these things make for rapid industrial development and economic growth.
  1. RICHARD WHITE on camera
  2. photos/footage of immigrant laborers, farm laborers, factory workers, mine workers, etc.
/ RICHARD WHITE (05:07): Another component, and a very basic one, is the tremendous growth in population. The population of the United States nearly doubles between 1870 and 1900 and what this allows is this new labor force which is overwhelmingly young. It’s not as if American workers are that much more productive, though they are especially in agriculture, but there’s so many more of them and there’s also so many more consumers that come in at the same time.
  1. SFX: freight train over archival photos of trains circa late 1800’s
/ Actor as ANDREW CARNEGIE: The old nations of the earth creep at a snail’s pace. The Republic thunders past with the rush of the express.
  1. SARAH STAGE on camera
Super: Sarah Stage, ArizonaStateUniversity West
  1. visuals of trains, railroads, railroad workers;
  2. telegraph poles, telegraph operators
/ SARAH STAGE (02:02): The railroad is really America’s first big business and as the railroad pushes west we see settlement going up along the tracks. We see the development of the iron and steel industry. We see the development of the communications industry. The telegraph is the important communications industry at this point and telegraph wires march right next to the railroad tracks across the United States.
  1. PAMELA LAIRD on camera
Super: Pamela Laird, University of Colorado at Denver
  1. railroad stations in cities, country
  1. Sears and Roebuck catalog
/ PAMELA LAIRD (14:08): What the railroads did, in very short summary, was to bring raw materials to where they might be developed or processed, to take processed goods to customers, to take people into farmlands. So you have foodstuffs traveling one direction and materials traveling the other direction.
  1. Actor in silhouette
/ Actor as PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD: The railway is the greatest centralizing force of modern times.
  1. GRAPHIC: map showing railroad construction or routes in late 1800s
  2. archival photos of, slaughterhouses, meatpackers, forestry workers, miners, factory workers, grain fields, telephone, typewriter, bankers, oil wells and refineries
/ NARRATOR: Between 1869 and 1894, 100,000 miles of railroad track were laid, the infrastructure for an industrial society, financed by eastern bankers and lubricated by the brand new industry of refined petroleum.
  1. images of Rockefeller and Standard Oil
/ Oil was the fuel of the future and John D. Rockefeller was its leading producer.
  1. MICHAEL BERNSTEIN on camera
/ MICHAEL BERNSTEIN (14:10): Rockefeller understood, like many of the leading industrialists of his age,that large scale production would generate returns and efficiencies that the small scale investment simply could not.
  1. RICHARD WHITE on camera
/ RICHARD WHITE (05:11): The major goal that Standard Oil has is to eliminate competition, to ruthlessly streamline production and to make it as efficient as possible. Basically you have a choice with Standard Oil – you join them or you die.
  1. PAMELA LAIRD on camera
  2. intercut with archival photos or footage of Rockefeller & Standard Oil
/ PAMELA LAIRD (14:12): One of the advantages that he brought to the oil market was order, structure, pricing, efficiencies and so on. Of course, the disadvantage was that once he created a monopoly through his efficient and orderly business practices, then he could do anything he wanted with the prices.
  1. images of Carnegie, Vanderbilt
/ NARRATOR: Rockefeller wasn’t the only industrialist who understood the advantages of monopoly.