Andrew Carnegie The Robber Baron Essay

ANDREW CARNEGIE—THE ROBBER BARON
Andrew Carnegie was one of the greatest of the tycoons of industry in the late nineteenth century, also being one of the greatest of the robber barons of the late nineteenth century. A Robber Baron is an owner of business who puts others down to gain fame and fortune. During a time of laissez faire, which is French for let alone, meaning government stays out of the business of others, any business owner could do whatever they wanted with their industry and workers—Carnegie took advantage of this by paying workers little salary and poor treatment. Some say that his past dictated what his future would be like—growing up poor meant others should grow up poor. With all of his money and power, he considered himself

To help support his poor family, he immediately got a job as a bobbin boy, a person who gives and brings bobbins to the weavers at cotton mills, and then went from a delivery boy for the telegram service to the telegram operator, making more than twice the money as the bobbin boy. He then became the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. He invested in railroads and sleeping cars, making more than ten times the amount from his superintendent job. He decided to start a business called Keystone Bridge Company and started the process of building bridges from iron rather than wood. He made the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, Louisiana. He made the Carnegie Steel Company using the Bessemer process, dropping the steel price, allowing him to buy the rivaling Homestead Steel Works. He used the steel for railroads, making his superintendent job much easier and

One way to explain this was that he treated his workers as slaves. He wanted to lower steel prices to seem more fair, but what the average person did not know was that to lower steel prices by twenty percent, he lowered workers' salaries by twenty percent. He, being so smart, should have known that fair treatment was fair. Most of the people he employed were in poverty and therefore could not buy a home, food, clothes, etcetera. He did not care, and he still did not care when his workers went on multiple strikes. Dangerous working conditions were commonly found in U. S. Steel's factories. People would get injured from harmful machinery and get sick from the bad air in circulation, which was ironic, because hid father was part of a union fighting for better working