Andrew Carnagie: Robber Barron as American Hero
...r supremacy as the “Iron City.””1 Carnegie soon started in the earlier days to mold to that of a true business man, he did not have pity of any of his workers and gave very few benefits, he also very rarely visited some of the companies that he owned, nor did he ever look back to see how he had once been at the low poverty level as that of his workers. Also the book states that Carnegie later looked at things a little differently: “…despite becoming the riches man in the world, [Carnegie] always considered himself a liberal, a radical, and a friend of the poor working classes, opposed to men of lordly social position.”2 Andrew Carnegie was never aware of the fine points of the manufacturing process of steel. Carnegie was a busy man and hardly had time to learn anything new that is why he hired people to do these jobs for him. He could not bare to stand foot in the heat that his factories produced. His enthusiasm was clearly in the large lump sums of money rolling into his possession. Andrew Carnegie would often lecture to the young men that worked for him about his quick climb through the corporate ladder and how he went from rags to riches. He would give tips how they to could do better for themselves. “Thus spoke of the Carnegie who rose from rags to riches. He was certain that he had earned every penny of his great wealth. He was living the American Dream.”3 As far as Andrew Carnegie’s production methods and labor policies, there were three factors that lead to the expansion of his companies. The first one being basic economic expansion because steel was being used everywhere to replace iron. There were becoming new uses for this material everyday. Carnegie realized that if his business could not fulfill the steel needs that there were other companies that could have. The second factor was that Andrew Carnegie only surrounded himself with hard working people; by keeping his workers loyal by offering incentives such as extra money. Carnegie had a keen ability to organize production in such a matter to get the most done in a shorter time as the third and final factor. He did this by creating competition between the workers in turn for a small share of his own earnings for the ones that were the most efficient. Because higher efficiency led to higher payment, his workers became more efficient while making Carnegie an even wealthier man in the process. The book states that: “The United States only had a handful of millionaires before the end of the Civil War. From colonial days, there were prosperous Americans, but their wealth was in the form of land, mercantile enterprises, or both.”4 From most of the reading in chapter one, there seems to be that there is not much of a middle class. There were a ver...