Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate, wrote one of the best defenses of the time of the New Economic Order. This defense came in the form of an essay called “The Gospel of Wealth”, published in 1889. In this essay, he argues that the benefits of industrialization outweigh the negatives, saying,
“To-day the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible. In the commercial world similar causes have produced similar results, and the race is benefited thereby. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain.”

For the given time period, I am forced to disagree with this quote for the same reason that the poor likely would have. As discussed in “American Horizons- US History in a Global Content”, although this was a time of much technological advancement, there was also a widening gap between the upper and lower class. In The Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie says, “The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford”. Although this may have been true, it is important to understand the circumstances of the time period. Yes, the poor could indulge in things that were once luxuries “a few generations ago”, but these were not necessarily still considered to be luxuries, since the rich were able to treat themselves to luxuries that were much more magnificent then ever before thanks to the rise in technology.
Andrew Carnegie likely had this opinion because of his own financial status. He had money; so thus he didn’t realize what it was like to be someone without. He tried to compensate by saying that “no man should die rich” and donating much of his fortune to build “the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”, such as playgrounds, parks, and public libraries for the lower class to use. But, even Carnegie’s philanthropic acts failed to convince critics of the New Economic Order’s validity. According to “American Horizons”, an American clergyman bluntly stated that “the real problem with the afflicted society was the distribution, not the redistribution, of wealth and that it was wrong to make charity do the work of justice”. If Carnegie had been forced to suffer the way the millions of farmers and skilled workers that had lost jobs in the late 1800’s had, he likely would have had a different opinion.