Andrew Carnegie - Everest

Everest Leo

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

11 April 2022

Andrew Carnegie and Giants of the Gilded Age

    Just like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are household billionaire names today, there were similar people in the Gilded age who amasses insane amounts of wealth and become very famous for it. One of these businessmen is Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate, and well-known philanthropist. Like many of the other multi-multi-millionaires of the time, Carnegie started from relatively modest beginnings, but not poverty. However, unlike the other giants, he was born outside of the US and moved to the US for financial opportunities like most other immigrants. Carnegie invested in many booming industries such as coal and oil and made some money that way before pouring a lot of time into the steel industry and making a huge profit that way. Something that caught my eye, however, was the Homestead Strike that happened while Andrew Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland, his home country. It was a strike by union workers, and they were protesting wage cuts made by the general manager at the steel mill. It became a huge fiasco with a few hundred armed guards getting involved and leaving a dozen or so dead. I find it odd that Carnegie supported his general's decision to cut wages as Carnegie was often seen as the champion of a working man, going from rags to riches, and one would think that he would understand how a low-class working man felt, but perhaps that much money gets to people's heads.

    Carnegie, along with Rockefeller and other ultra-wealthy businessmen of the time were also very prominent philanthropists. Granted, not all were, but some of the richest people in the world at the time donated ample amounts of money to existing organizations and charities as well as in order to build new organizations or help different causes. The issue that many see with generous philanthropy from large figures, however, is that sometimes, that money is not made in a "fair" or "just" way. For example, John D. Rockefeller and his businesses were and are often accused of "crushing out competition, getting rich on rebates from railroads, bribing men to spy on competing companies, of making secret agreements, of coercing rivals to join the Standard Oil Company under threat of being forced out of business, building up enormous fortunes on the ruins of other men, and so on." It really comes down to whether or not one cares about "dirty money", because if someone doesn't care, then this idea of amassing great amounts of money by any means and then giving it away is fantastic. However, someone who does care would find those sorts of donations dishonest and perhaps think it a way to uphold reputation.

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