Summary Of Andrew Carnegie's Wealth

During the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie became a wealthy man due to his control over the manufacturing and distribution of steel. The Carnegie Steel Company and its use of vertical and horizontal integration allowed Carnegie to control the production and distribution of his steel, which made him into a wealthy industrialist (The New Tycoons 2014). In his article “Wealth”, Andrew Carnegie argues for the wealthy to give back their wealth to the community by providing “public institutions of various kinds … [to] improve the general condition of the people” (Foner 30). He uses this article to promote his Gospel of Wealth idea and provide his interpretation of the changing American society. Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth stated that “those who accumulated

America was facing greater problems than just the gap between the rich and the poor. Agriculturalists in the South were not losing control of the distribution of their goods with the emergence of the railroad. Industrialists like Carnegie used the railroad to collect additional money from poor farmers who wanted to ship their goods to the market to be sold. The industrialists were getting rich because they were taking advantage of the poor, which Carnegie should have recognized, but failed to do so because he was one of the wealthy industrialists. As the industrialists built big corporations and railroads across America, they continued to amass wealth that could not be matched by the agricultural regions no matter how much money was provided to the farmers and poorer individuals of society. Carnegie could have discussed the reservations the poor had about the ability of some to become rich through industrialization and how they felt about his Gospel of Wealth. Did the poor really want money from the rich, who had control of many forces throughout the nation? Carnegie fails to provide a bias opinion on the divide between the rich and the poor because he is no longer poor. He expresses the faults in the wealthy hoarding their money for themselves, but continues to believe the wealthy should exist. The classifications of rich and poor also goes against Carnegie’s belief that the American society was changing into something new, when in reality they were adopting some of the old colonial ways like