Free AP US History Tests
AP US History Free Response: DBQ
The following is an APUSH DBQ practice question, which is part of our online AP US History Practice Test. This Document-Based Question is designed to be similar to those found on the official exam.
Directions: This APUSH DBQ is based on the accompanying documents. The documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.
In your response, you should do the following.
- Respond to the prompt with a historically defensible thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning.
- Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt.
- Support an argument in response to the prompt using at least four documents.
- Use at least one additional piece of specific historical evidence (beyond that found in the documents) relevant to an argument about the prompt.
- For at least two documents, explain how or why the document’s point of view, purpose, historical situation, and/or audience is relevant to an argument.
- Demonstrate a complex understanding of a historical development related to the prompt through sophisticated argumentation and/or effective use of evidence.
Evaluate the extent to which the rise of industrial capitalism contributed to the increase in labor unrest in the United States from 1865 to 1900.
Document 1
Source: John D. Rockefeller quoted in B.C. Forbes, Men Who Are Making America (New York: B.C. Forbes Publishing, 1917), pp. 296–301.
Only a company owning properties in different parts of the country could withstand the risks incidental to the oil business, since fire would wipe out a whole plant in a few hours or the flow at any one point could stop without notice. Only a large company could afford to spend millions in improving facilities, in constantly opening up new territory, and in reducing costs. Only a company such as the Standard Oil could afford to build thousands of miles of pipelines to do away with costly processes of shipping the fluid in barrels. Only such a company could afford to erect huge refineries which might have to be discarded at any moment.
Only such a company could afford to design and build expensive tank steamers for export trade and tank cars for domestic transportation. Only such a company could afford to send agents into every country of the world to create new markets, often against bitter opposition. Only such a company could undertake to supply large quantities with unerring regularity, notwithstanding the sudden disasters to which any and every oil property was liable. Only such a mammoth concern could cover the country with facilities to supply oil direct from the producer to the millions of small consumers.
Document 2
Source: Henry Clews discussing J.P. Morgan in Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street (New York: Irving Pub. Co., 1888), pp. 680–682.
Large-scale industrial production—accompanied by massive technological change, expanding international communication networks, pro-growth government policies—generated rapid economic development and business consolidation. Businesses made use of redesigned financial and management structures, advances in marketing, and a growing labor force to dramatically increase the production of goods. Many business leaders sought increased profits by consolidating corporations into large trusts and holding companies, which further concentrated wealth. Businesses increasingly looked outside U.S. borders in an effort to gain greater influence and control over markets and natural resources in the Pacific Rim, Asia, and Latin America.
Document 3
Source: Richard Olney [U.S. Attorney General], letter to Charles Elliott Perkins [president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad], December 28, 1892, in Regulating Business by Independent Commission, Marver H. Bernstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 265.
“My impressions would be that, looking at the matter from a railroad point of view exclusively, [repeal of the Interstate Commerce Act] would not be a wise thing to undertake…. The attempt would not be likely to succeed; if it did not succeed, and were made on the ground of the inefficiency and uselessness of the Commission, the result would very probably be giving it the power it now lacks. The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things…. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.”
Document 4
Source: United States v. E. C. Knight Company, 156 U.S. 1 (1895).
The bill then alleged that in order that the American Sugar Refining Company might obtain complete control of the price of sugar in the United States, that company, and John E. Searles, Jr., acting for it, entered into an unlawful and fraudulent scheme to purchase the stock, machinery, and real estate of the other four corporations defendant, by which they attempted to control all the sugar refineries for the purpose of restraining the trade thereof with other states as theretofore carried on independently by said defendants; that in pursuance of this scheme, on or about March 4, 1892, Searles entered into a contract with the defendant Knight Company and individual stockholders named for the purchase of all the stock of that company, and subsequently delivered to the defendants therefor in exchange shares of the American Sugar Refining Company; that on or about the same date, Searles entered into a similar contract with the Spreckels Company and individual stockholders, and with the Franklin Company and stockholders, and with the Delaware Sugar House and stockholders.
It was further averred that the American Sugar Refining Company monopolized the manufacture and sale of refined sugar in the United States, and controlled the price of sugar; that in making the contracts, Searles and the American Sugar Refining Company combined and conspired with the other defendants to restrain trade and commerce in refined sugar among the several states and foreign nations, and that the said contracts were made with the intent to enable the American Sugar Refining Company to restrain the sale of refined sugar in Pennsylvania and among the several states, and to increase the regular price at which refined sugar was sold, and thereby to exact and secure large sums of money from the State of Pennsylvania, and from the other states of the United States, and from all other purchasers, and that the same was unlawful, and contrary to the said act. …
The circuit court declined, upon the pleadings and proofs, to grant the relief prayed, and dismissed the bill, and we are of opinion that the circuit court of appeals did not err in affirming that decree.
Document 5
Source: “Some Lessons of the Great Strike,” Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1894, vol. 38, no. 1961, p. 674.
That the disturbances created by the criminal recklessness of such a leader [Eugene V. Debs] and such followers are always sure finally to be suppressed by the public authority, especially when the national government is presided over by so faithful and courageous a Chief Magistrate as Mr. [Grover] Cleveland, is true enough. But society owes it to itself not only to suppress them when they are going on; it ought to prevent them. To this end a rigid enforcement of existing laws, inflicting severe penalties upon the conspirators to make warning examples of them, as well as suitable additions to the laws to increase their effectiveness, will no doubt be of service. But this does not suffice.
All railroad and telegraph corporations upon which the country has to depend for the transportation of persons and goods and the transmission of intelligence—things as indispensable to our existence as a people as the circulation of the blood is to the human body—should adopt, and engage themselves inflexibly to adhere to, the rule never to employ a man who will not bind himself by contract in the most effective way absolutely to abstain from participation in any sympathetic strike. It is the sympathetic strike that does the mischief on a great scale—the strike that will throw the railway traffic or the telegraph system of the whole continent into chaos, and inflict incalculable loss and suffering upon millions of people, on the ground that some railroad uses cars from some car-shop, or rails from some rolling-mill, or that the telegraph companies use wires from some wire-factory, the operatives of which have some quarrel with their employers, or on grounds even still, the sympathetic strike of this kind more remote is a danger to which society cannot afford to be exposed, and the transportation and telegraph companies owe to the people adequate protection against this danger, as far as they are able to give it. It is therefore their duty inflexibly to refuse employment to all persons who will not furnish every possible guarantee that they will never aid in bringing on that danger.
Document 6
Source: Henry Clews, “The Folly of Organized Labor,” North American Review, June 1886.
There have been numerous vacancies created by the strikers voluntarily resigning. There have been no difficulty in filling these vacancies by those that are equally capable, if not more so, from other countries flocking to our shores. The steam ferry which connects this country and Europe has demonstrated this by the steamer that arrived in six days and ten hours’ time from European shores to our own. As the interval between the downtrodden and the oppressed operatives in the Old World and America is thus reduced to hours, Europe will quickly send us all the labor we need to meet the emergency. Mrs. Gray, the Third Avenue Railway Company, and the Missouri Pacific are the Generals that have won the victory. Strikes may have been justifiable in other nations but they are not justifiable in our country, and there is where the mistake was in organizing such a movement. The Almighty has made this country for the oppressed of other nations, and therefore this is the land of refuge for the oppressed, and the hand of the laboring man should not be raised against it.
Document 7
Source: William Cullen Bryant, letter to Hamilton A. Hill, New York, NY, February 11, 1876.
For my own part it seems to me that the present is as favorable a time as we can expect for the agitation of the free trade question. Manufacturers are not prosperous and many of them begin to suspect that under a more liberal system they would better thrive. That is a view of the question which may now be incited on with great effect. I have no doubt, for my part that under the tariff now before the House of Representatives a great many branches of industry would start into immediate activity.
As to the currency question, that is no doubt extremely important but who knows when it will be settled? By waiting for it, we may produce the impression that we acquiesce in a protective tariff. It is unfortunate in my opinion that when during the war prohibitory duties were laid under pretense of procuring a revenue we did not protest more vehemently and keep up the agitation, instead of contenting ourselves with a quiet protest. Before the war the protective system had almost died out—wasting away by a kind of old age. During the war the country went back to state of ignorance and prejudice on the question of free exchange. A new generation had arisen who knew nothing of the subject, and who easily adopted the plausibilities of the protectionists. It appears to me that at this moment while even the protectionists are bewildered and perplexed at the failure of their thievery the time has arrived for the earnest and unintermitted agitation of the free trade question.
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