John Cramerus Document Based Questions Essay December 5, 2011 Was Andrew Carnegie a Hero?

Andrew Carnegie was one of the most influential people of the late nineteenth century and was instrumental in moving along the industrial revolution of America, refining steel to higher quality and lowering prices. One of a few huge businessmen with monopolies on their respective business along with fellow giants J. P. Morgan and the Rockefellers, he came up from a poor cottage from Scotland to owning a massive portion of the worlds steel industry. Once he had a handle on the industry he continually reduced both production and selling costs and nearing the end of his life he sold the company and created an institution dedicated to donating his money to charities. Surely a hugely important figure in Americas history, but was this man a hero? If anything, hero or not, Carnegie was certainly at his core, a businessman, firmly believing in capitalist ideology and aiming to reduce costs for production and prices. At this he succeeded certainly, over a period of roughly ten years from 1875 to 1885, give or take a couple years, the average production costs went from $55 to $30 and prices going from $77 to $33, becoming more than cut in half. The steel production of the USA, from the space of 1870 to 1900 had gone from the within a couple hundred thousands of tons of steel to over 10,000. One time, Carnegie asked one of his colleagues, a publisher by the name of Frank Doubleday how much money he had made within the last month. Frank answered that statements were only drawn up once a year in the business that he worked for. Carnegie responded with the sentiment that if her were in such a business he would immediately do his best to get out of it. Aside from his remarkable accomplishments of entrepreneurship, Carnegies business also took no stops in attempting to secure the competitive market. A competitor rose up in 1889 called at the time Allegheny Bessemer Steel using a mill with a new method of making steel called the direct rolling method. With the new method they had lower production costs than Carnegie and were able to lower production costs even lower than Carnegies, enabling him to steal some of the market. Of course, Carnegies company responded in kind, sending out a notice to the railroad companies claiming that this new method produced steel of a lower quality and implied that there could be fatal consequences. After the companys second year its turnout decreased dramatically and Carnegie bought it out. After little investigation Carnegies partners believed the method to be superior and Edgar Thompson was modified to make rails using the direct rolling process. Of course, although Carnegies business was ever-growing, working conditions werent necessarily improving uniformly. A column in a magazine described a man, Hamlin Garlands look through the Homestead steel mill in Pittsburgh the site of one of the larger strikes in American history.

The picture sounded very gruesome, describing fire, grime, gas, exhaustion, etc. All subjective accounts aside, work conditions werent very good, the average amount of daily hours and pay being 10.67 hours and $1.81, respectively, while at the Homestead account allegedly two thirds of the workers were being $1.41 a day for twelve hour work weeks. With a $600 annual salary one could support a typical six member family in that time. Assuming a 50 week work year, that would get them $500. On the 1892 strike, he urged his associate, Frick, to simply wait for the workers to decide to once again work by their own voting process. Frick, however, had different ideas and ended up causing an incident of combat between the police and strikers, which eventually resulted in the workers being forced to work once more. While the moral quality of how Carnegie handled his business can be forever questioned, there is something to say for Carnegie, and that something is quite large: all that he has given in philanthropy. Carnegie even himself wrote something of a philosophical exert on how one with many assets should handle philanthropy; He said that you can either leave it as inheritance to your children, leave it to the public upon your death, or actively give it up during life. He decided that the first two were foolish, the first being because there was simply no reason to do so specifically other than affection. The second he considered it no greater a good than taking it to their death, for it is meaningless to give things up after death. From there Carnegie decided that he would give up his wealth while he still lived, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars mainly to education and libraries, and even today his company gives out over a hundred million dollars a year. It is this that one might say that it is Carnegies greatest success. So, was Carnegie a hero? Maybe, maybe not, but more certainly, he was a man. A business man with a taste for philanthropy, even more specifically. He brought up the market of the United States and offered some of the best paying blue collar jobs in addition to helping other companies by lowering his prices. Of course he was also nonnegotiable concerning strikes, even when the conditions of his workers were less than pleasant, so as nice as he was, he wasnt some knight in shining armor riding to every childs rescue. So, what can be said about Andrew Carnegie? He was a good man, certainly, but was he foremost a hero? No, but what he was and still is one of the most important figureheads in American History.