2 - The Second Industrial Revolution at Home and Abroad

Summary

From the 1890s, United States had emerged as the greatest and most competitive player in the global marketplace. In the 1880s, U.S. multinational corporations began to replace the farmers as players of the most important role in the nation's foreign economic policy. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, were making the U.S. the world's leading power while also making such armories necessary. In 1886, Carnegie published Triumphant democracy, which argued that his law of surplus, among other capitalist principles, was as good for democracy as it would become for Russian railroads. The nation's democracy had produced the new Industrial Revolution, and it had provided the wherewithal to reinforce individual freedom. Capitalism produced democracy as well as, and because of, profits. Darwinism was the loose application of Charles Darwin's theories to the socioeconomic world. Carnegie was among the many who found social Darwinism highly congenial.