The Civil War had consumed 630,000 lives. ibid.
On the evening of April 13th 1865 John Wilkes Booth initiates his plan not only to kill Abraham Lincoln but to decapitate the government of the United States. Killing Lincoln, National Geographic 2013
John Wilkes Booth is also a southern zealot – his hatred of Abraham Lincoln is nothing less than fanatical. ibid.
14th April 1865 Ford’s Theatre: no two accounts match. ibid.
April 14th 1865: Booth is a man who wants to see his name writ up not just in lights but in the annals of history. Days that Shook the World: Terror s2e8: Made in America, BBC 2004
A passionate and committed defender of the South. ibid.
Lincoln has always refused any formal protection. ibid.
April 14th 1865: At the end of the American Civil War president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The Men Who Built America I: Vanderbilt, History 2012
A new era had dawned: the nation was entering an age of advancement ... A new breed of leader would emerge. ibid.
At age sixteen Cornelius Vanderbilt bought a small ferry boat with a hundred dollar loan. His single ferry soon became a fleet of boats. ibid.
He sold his ships and invested everything he had in railroads. ibid.
Kerosene was a phenomenon that would change the world. ibid.
A new force was on the rise: Rockefeller. ibid.
By the late 1860s Cornelius Vanderbilt was the richest and most powerful man in the United States. The Men Who Built America II: Oil Strike
John D Rockefeller would turn American business upside down. Rockefeller had got the rate he was looking for. But in return he’d agreed to provide Vanderbilt with over sixty train wagons full of oil every day. ibid.
Rockefeller realised that oil had the potential to change the world, and make him rich in the process. ibid.
With the railroads in his pocket, Rockefeller could supply every home in America with Standard Oil Kerosene. ibid.
He [Rockefeller] wanted to own every refinery in the country. ibid.
If Rockefeller could build a pipeline long enough he’d be able to cut the railroads out of the oil business for good. ibid.
Rockefeller had created the largest corporate empire in America. ibid.
The age of oil was dawning. The Men Who Built America III: A Rivalry is Born
Carnegie understood the value of the new [steel] technology and began to adapt it. ibid.
Over the next few years over 100,000 new buildings were erected in Chicago alone ... built with Carnegie’s steel. ibid.
[Henry] Frick’s first job was to get Carnegie’s steel working more efficiently. ibid.
Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick: Together they have driven Carnegie Steel to massive profits. The Men Who Built America IV: Blood is Spilt
When the waters stopped more than two thousand people had died. ibid.
John D Rockefeller was worth three times as much as Carnegie. ibid.
Unions were relatively new in America, and Frick wasn’t about to let them take root on his watch. ibid.
Two-thousand steel workers barricaded the front of the plant to prevent Frick bringing in replacements. ibid.
The public’s outrage was escalating. ibid.
Carnegie: his company and his reputation were under threat. The Men Who Built America V: A New Rival Emerges
J P Morgan was a banker who’d made a fortune consolidating broken industries. ibid.
An invention caught Morgan's eye – the light-bulb. ibid.
Tesla was working with a new form of electricity known as Alternating Current. ibid.
Funding Edison was a huge risk for Morgan. ibid.
The inventor Nikola Tesla was inventing a new way to transmit electricity, and his technology was threatening to destroy everything J P Morgan and Thomas Edison had built. The Men Who Built America VI: Owning It All
A battle had broken out pitching J P Morgan and Thomas Edison against George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla in a fight for control of the world’s largest power plant – at Niagara Falls. ibid.
[J P] Morgan ... was going to streamline the company, and his first step was to get rid of Thomas Edison. ibid.
Morgan's new company – General Electric – immediately became one the most powerful corporations in the world. ibid.
Morgan put together a loan worth over $100 million – almost $3 billion today – and bailed out the Federal government. This saved the American economy from complete collapse. ibid.
Rockefeller realised that petrol could be even bigger than Kerosene. ibid.
Conditions for workers across the country became almost unbearable. ibid.
[William Jennings] Bryan’s promise of change was bad news for American business leaders. ibid.
Soon, America’s leaders of industry would have no choice but to unite. ibid.
J P Morgan was now the most powerful man in America. The Men Who Built America VII: Taking the White House
One out of every eleven steel workers would die while on the job. ibid.
The emergence of [William Jennings] Bryan was the biggest threat the Titans had ever faced ... The country remained in their control. ibid.
The deal gave Carnegie a personal net worth of over £310 billion in today’s money. ibid.
Roosevelt: the first government anti-trust case filed against a major corporation. ibid.
John Rockefeller and J P Morgan had the freedom to expand their empires to unprecedented heights. The Men Who Built America VIII: The New Machine
Henry Ford had created a new kind of car ... The assembly line completely changed manufacturing for ever. ibid.
The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease, and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives, and at risk of all they hold dear, then bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Teddy Roosevelt, 1899
‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.’ Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA I: Divide and Rule, Jay Gould, 19th century American railroad developer, 2015
Each mining town was a feudal dominion with the company acting as lord and master … The laws were the company’s rules. ibid.
1907: The most deadly mine disaster in US history occurred when an explosion killed 361 men and boys in a West Virginia coal mine. ibid.
Accidents in American mines were double that of Germany, three times more than England. ibid.
‘Freedom from industrial feudalism … freedom from the terrorism inflicted by hired gunmen … and the struggle for liberties promised in the Bill of Rights.’ ibid. 2003 American Labor History Theme Study
In 1912 coal miners in Kanawha Country in West Virginia issued a list of demands including a shorter workday, the right to organise, recognition of a worker’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, an end to the blacklisting of union organisers, and alternatives to company stores. The requested pay raise would have cost the company fifteen cents per miner per day. Instead of negotiating, the company hired a private militia to break the strike. ibid.
[Mother] Jones had been declared the Most Dangerous Woman in America. ibid.
Union organisers were blacklisted and beaten. ibid.
The West Virginian mine wars were part of a broader conflict between the forces of labor and the forces of capital. A struggle that claimed the lives of thousands of American workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thousands more were beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and sent to early graves due to poor working conditions and dismal safety standards. ibid.