Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie will soon aid in shaping the industrialization and urbanization movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. His early life leads up to his innovations and the becoming of being the wealthiest American of his time.
Dunfermline was the center of a linen industry and William Carnegie, Andrew’s father, was a weaver. The emergence of the industrial revolution soon put hand weavers out of business. Faced with poverty, the Carnegies spent 20 pounds, which is about twenty five dollars in the U.S., to pay for the fare of the Atlantic passage in 1848. When they arrived to America, they first reached New York City, from there they traveled by steamboat 370 miles to Allegheny, Pittsburgh. The Carnegies
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stayed with Andrew’s mother, Margaret Carnegie's, two sisters. William Carnegie began working in a cotton factory along with his son Andrew who was the bobbin boy for $1.20 a week. In 1849, Andrew Carnegie was hired as a messenger for a local telegraph company, where he was taught how to use the equipment. With this skill, he obtained a job with Pennsylvania Railroad. By the age of 24, he was promoted to superintendent. Thomas A. Scott, Andrew’s boss at Pennsylvania Railroad, alerted Carnegie of the impending sale of ten shares in the Adams Express Company. Convinced the share would reap great rewards, the Carnegie’s obtained 500 dollars from mortgaging their home to buy the shares. Soon the monthly dividends of one cent per stock were paid to the Carnegie family. In 1865, Theodore Woodruff established the idea of sleeping cars on railways.
Woodruff offered Andrew Carnegie a share in the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company; in order to accept this offer, Carnegie had to secure a bank loan. The loan was paid off relatively soon as sleeping cars became more and more popular. After about two years, Carnegie began receiving about $5,000 annually. While also investing in the sleeping cars, Carnegie developed the Keystone Telegraph Company with several associates from the railroad in 1867. The company strung telegraph wire along the Pennsylvania Railroad, which stretched across the entire state. While Carnegie’s business life was progressing, his love life was just beginning. In 1870, Andrew Carnegie met 21 year old, Louise Whitfield through a mutual friend. It isn’t until 1880 that Louise and Andrew began showing an interest in each other. Seven years later, they married and Louise agreed to a prenuptial agreement. It was apparent that Carnegie wanted his money to go towards organizations he created or felt needed to be supported. Carnegie built libraries all around the U.S. and even throughout his hometown, Dunfermline. He founded 2,509 libraries, of those, 1,679 were built in the United States at the cost of $55 million. Carnegie also established several institutions such as: Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. In 1911, The Carnegie Corporation of New York was founded and dedicated to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. At this point, Andrew’s remaining fortune was $135 million. Eight years later Carnegie passes from a brief illness at his home in Lenox, Massachusetts with his wife, Louise. Andrew Carnegie once said, “To try to make the world in some way better than you found it is to have a noble motive in life.” He lived by the belief that to live a successful life, you needed to help everyone around you. If something in your presence is broken, you need to fix it. Andrew Carnegie grew up poor, with very little and changed his life for the better. He aided in the beginning of the industrialization of the 19th and 20th century. He developed an abundant amount of organizations to help the United States and even other places around the world. Andrew Carnegie lived by his motto, to leave the world better than it was when you first entered it.
Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie were all robber barons. They all showed that they were robber barons because they were all cruel and ruthless. John d. Rockefeller was a cruel and inhuman person to his worker. He treated his workers like slaves, low pay, long working hours and he disliked union activity from anyone. Andrew Carnegie another ruthless person that would stop at nothing to win. He would compete against others and fiercely try to squash the opponents. He was a very possessive and control person.Morgan mount govern one of the less cruel and ruthless of the two powerful businessmen. Morgan criticized for creating monopolies by making it difficult for any business to compete against his own. These three business man all have done bad
Andrew Carnegie, was a strong-minded man who believed in equal distribution and different forms to manage wealth. One of the methods he suggested was to tax revenues to help out the public. He believed in successors enriching society by paying taxes and death taxes. Carnegie’s view did not surprise me because it was the only form people could not unequally distribute their wealth amongst the public, and the mediocre American economy. Therefore, taxations would lead to many more advances in the American economy and for public purposes.
I would first like to tell you about Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in Port Richmond on Staten Island, N. Y. in 1794. Cornelius, at the age of 16, had already stepped into the business world and he didn’t even know it. At 16 he entered into the steamboat business when he established a freight and passenger service between Stanton Island and Manhattan. Little did Cornelius know this would be one of the key ways he would make millions upon millions.
In the documents titled, William Graham Sumner on Social Darwinism and Andrew Carnegie Explains the Gospel of Wealth, Sumner and Carnegie both analyze their perspective on the idea on “social darwinism.” To begin with, both documents argue differently about wealth, poverty and their consequences. Sumner is a supporter of social darwinism. In the aspects of wealth and poverty he believes that the wealthy are those with more capital and rewards from nature, while the poor are “those who have inherited disease and depraved appetites, or have been brought up in vice and ignorance, or have themselves yielded to vice, extravagance, idleness, and imprudence” (Sumner, 36). The consequences of Sumner’s views on wealth and poverty is that they both contribute to the idea of inequality and how it is not likely for the poor to be of equal status with the wealthy. Furthermore, Carnegie views wealth and poverty as a reciprocative relation. He does not necessarily state that the wealthy and poor are equal, but he believes that the wealthy are the ones who “should use their wisdom, experiences, and wealth as stewards for the poor” (textbook, 489). Ultimately, the consequences of
Andrew Carnegie was a man who was born poor, but wanted to change many lives for those who were like him. Since he was able to walk, he started to work he was a bobbin boy in Pittsburg. Carnegie would work 12 hours a day to
In Harold C. Livesay’s Andrew Carnegie and the rise of Big Business, Andrew Carnegie’s struggles and desires throughout his life are formed into different challenges of being the influential leader of the United States of America. The book also covers the belief of the American Dream in that people can climb up the ladder of society by hard work and the dream of becoming an influential citizen, just as Carnegie did.
To understand Carnegie before he became a wealthy man, he grew up poor working for $1.20 a week (Document LV). At the age of 50 years, he took a risk by investing in a package delivery company. His gamble paid off and he gained money to start his company, Carnegie’s Steel Company. Eventually, his company grew and caused
Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835. His father, Will, was a weaver and a follower of Chartism, a popular movement of the British working class that called for the masses to vote and to run for Parliament in order to help improve conditions for workers. The exposure to such political beliefs and his family's poverty made a lasting impression on young Andrew and played a significant role in his life after his family immigrated to the United States in 1848. Andrew Carnegie amassed wealth in the steel industry after immigrating from Scotland as a boy. He came from a poor family and had little formal education.
He went to London in 1872, saw the new Bessemer method of producing steel, and returned to the United States to build a million-dollar steel plant. Foreign competition was kept out by a high tariff conveniently set by Congress, and by 1880 Carnegie was producing 10,000 tons of steel a month, making $1 1/2 million a year in profit. By 1900 he was making $40 million a year, and that year, at a dinner party, he agreed to sell his steel company to J. P. Morgan. He scribbled the price on a note: $492,000,000.”
Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers were two important people during the Guided age. This is the era where big industries started growing and taking over. They both had different viewpoints about the big industries that grew in the Gilded Age and the challenges this presented to working people. The only similarity in both views was they were geared toward helping the less fortunate. They way they went about it were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Andrew Carnegie believed that the wealthy should put their money back into society and not spend it frivolously, while Samuel Gompers believed that workers needed to organize into labor unions to protect themselves from the growing industries. One thing they both agreed on were big industries was
Andrew Carnegie believes in a system based on principles and responsibility. The system is Individualism and when everyone strives towards the same goals the system is fair and prosperous. Carnegie’s essay is his attempt to show people a way to reach an accommodation between individualism and fairness. This system can only work if everyone knows and participates in his or her responsibilities. I will discuss Carnegie’s thesis, his arguments and the possible results of his goals.
Chapter three Pittsburg and Work of Andrew Carnegies autobiography starts off with a 13-year-old Carnegie thinking about going to work. He already determined that his family should be able to make 300 dollars a year, which would keep them from depending on others. Uncle Hogan had already seen the businessman in Carnegie at a very young age. He tells Carnegie that he was a likely boy and apt to learn; and believed that if a basket were fitted out for him with knickknacks to sell, he could peddle them around the wharves and make quite a considerable sum. This comment by Uncle Hogan leaves Carnegies mother outraged. She wanted her two sons Carnegie and his brother to always be honorable, respectful and always do what is right. Soon after the incident Carnegies father gave up handloom weaving for the cotton factory. This decision also granted Carnegie a position as a bobbin boy, where he made one dollar and twenty cents per week. Carnegie will go on to make millions after, but he
Carnegie's first job was a telegraph messenger boy, and later upgraded to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as a telegraph operator. His persevering work allowed him to quickly advance through the company, and he became the superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division. He continued making investments and made good profits throughout the civil war, and finally left Pennsylvania Railroad and started his own iron companies, eventually Keystone Bridge Works and Union Ironworks.
With all his businesses, investments, and accomplishments, Carnegie still struggle with some of his partners and managers, especially after his brother Tom dies. He hires Henry C. Frick and names him chairman in 1889, pleased with his choice as Frick increases profits from $2 million to $5.4 million by 1890. However, times become difficult during a four-year depression and strike, damaging Carnegie’s reputation. He comes to lose trust in Frick, and their relationship suffers as they disagree on managerial issues. Frick resigns and Carnegie forces other partners out to cut cost and labor. He monopolizes the industry, making a deal with John D. Rockefeller to purchase his iron ore, keeping him from becoming competition in the steel industry. At 63 years old, Andrew Carnegie is approached to sell Carnegie Steel to an unknown buyer, whom Frick vouches for. However, because he is suspicious of Frisk, he seeks out the mystery buyer. After revealing Frisk’s dishonesty, Carnegie eliminates him from the buyout deal, causing a year-long conflict. That conflict results in Frick taking a loss and Carnegie taking control of both Carnegie Steel and Frisk Coke, worth $320 million in capital. The Carnegie company is later sold
Speaking of where that money, in document #10 we see a small cartoon post from The Saturday Globe, Utica, New York, July 9, 1892. At the bottom it conveys, “Forty Millionaire Carnegie in his Great Double Role” With this message, it displays Carnegie both giving away a Library to Pittsburgh and money to Scotland, and cutting wages from workers. This drawing signifies what he does with the money rather than paying his workers with that money. Looking at wages in document #7 helps to see how much a worker are paid in a chart, even though iron and steel workers look like they have decent wages(daily hrs. 10.67, daily wages 1.81), it was to many unfair wages. Compare this to Carnegie’s daily “wage” was ninety two grand! Confirming wages are unfair.