The Turning Point at the Turn of the Century

Changes in America at the Dawn of the American Century

Ever wonder how we became the country we are today? What events put us on our present course? What changed us the most?

Join Russ Gifford for the journey through the massive changes that America experienced in the thirty years from 1894 to 1914. We will meet the people and the personalities who populated these times, as America teetered on the edge of the abyss as the old century ended and the 20th Century began!

The 30 years after the War Between the States saw explosive growth in both the population of America, and in businesses. While still a country of small towns and small farms, everything else in business emphasized BIG. Big factories, big petroleum plants, big packing plants. Railroads spanned the continent, and carried products from the far reaches of the Great Plains and the wild west to the urban factories of the big cities. With the exception of farmers and the small towns that served them, the U.S. had moved away from the single owner business model, at least in the production end of business.

As the century waned, the model now was the conglomerate. Individuals no longer started businesses - yet surprisingly few men controlled much of the business world. Their aim was to dominate an industry and drive out all other competition. These captains of industry created amazingly complex interrelated industries with methods and sweetheart deals for each other to gain a stranglehold on whatever industry they wished to take over. The profits rolled in and allowed them to concentrate their focus on the laws they wanted passed to create even larger profits.

Thanks to a friendly federal government willing to incentivize railroads with land grants and cash or to turn a blind eye to businesses creating sweetheart deals to cheat smaller businesses, profits soared. But while the middle class in America began to expand, the profits reaped by big business were concentrated in the hands of a few.

By the 1880s, corruption in the form of unearned benefits via payoffs, kickbacks or favors to politicians from these businesses rampaged across American government. Abuse of power by arrogant business owners brought a boom-and-bust cycle of massive financial panics and economic depressions that made life hell for individuals and small businesses. Faith in the American system of government fell to an all-time low by the 1880s.

How did that change? We will follow the lives of the many different people who shaped the era, from the Titans Rockefeller and Carnegie to the boy wonder of the Plains William Jennings Bryan. We will meet small town newspaper man W.H. White to newspaper moguls William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer. We will see politician William McKinley and rancher-come-adventurer Teddy Roosevelt.

Part 1: The Dawn of the Progressives

By 1890, the revolution brought by the steam engine was complete. As the rail lines tied the country together, their corrupt practices benefited a few at a cost to others.

But the farmer, still an individual businessman, gained none of the benefits of these deals. Instead, they were a customer to be fleeced, to help pay the profits the railroad gave up in their sweetheart deals with their friends. But from the time of the American Revolution, farmers were never ones to sit by when they felt they were being unjustly served. While Jefferson's ideal of an agrarian nation of small farmers may have been laughed at in the board rooms of big business, a prairie fire of growing indignation was spreading across the Great Plains.

Powerful orators were speaking out from Kansas, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, sowing the seeds that something had gone wrong in America, and the government needed to be fixed. The voices of these 'progressives' spread further than they could travel, as the other revolution of the era, the newspapers sent their ideas out to others. What's the matter with Kansas? If you can't hear Bryan speak, you can still be fired by his ideas when you read a newspaper.

As in the American Revolution, ideas spoke to people across the country, and a new political party forms in Omaha, Nebraska and sweeps the country.

The result will be a battle between rural areas and big cities, between the eastern conglomerates and western ranchers, between titans of industry and their political cronies, and the wave of reformers known as the Progressives.

Part 2: Selling the War, and Embracing Empire: The Spanish American War

But as we will learn over and over, news too, is a commodity that can be sold. While information can shape ideas and change minds, information can also be shaped and used. As two powerful men battle for the New York newspaper market, we will learn the lessons that have been forgotten as we see America return to the battlefield as a President tries to tread a middle ground.

The war with Spain is a popular choice and heralds America's rise as a national power. But there is more to this story, we will watch as Americans grapple with the question never answered before a war: What comes next?

The war with Spain brought us victory not only in Cuba but also in the far-off Philippines. And now the question - are they a territory, with a track to statehood? Or a colony? The answer will mean these tiny islands will be an ongoing battleground for years to come. While the war with Spain is a popular subject in American History books and is said to be a short one, the resulting decade-long clash with the people of the Philippines is largely left out of the history books. It is a moment in American history that asks, "is America now to be an empire?" The answer may surprise you.

Part 3: The Rise of the Muckrakers: From War Correspondent to Wary Watchmen

The Spanish-American war brought many changes with it, not just for the losers. The winners had tough questions to answer. Why were these Captains of Industry unable to supply the food the government had purchased? Why were so many of the tinned beef cans filled with rotting meat? Where was the justice for the people harmed by these events? Why did these companies promise so much, and deliver so little?

The reporters that had brought the news of the war continued to ask tough questions of big business. Many continued to dig, asking uncomfortable questions about the relationship between big business and government, exposing the corrupt deals that allowed these businesses to fail in their mission of support.

As the early days of the 20th century began, these newspapermen would move into the world of magazine writers. Now, they could dig deeper for a longer view of the realities of life today. They focused their lens on the people and the issues that American society was experiencing, looking for the cause of these problems.

To many, the answers were clearly in the monopoly nature of the businesses built by those Titans of Industry. We will see the result of these new self-appointed investigators and meet the people who have shed light on the backroom deals not only in business practices and governments.

Teddy Roosevelt, now President, liked the reporters individually. But he rejected them as a whole, calling them 'muckrakers.' They took the name and wore it as a badge of honor. We will meet them, their leader, and the woman who took on the biggest titan - John D. Rockefeller - and won!