Andrew Carnegie: born in a one-room cottage in Scotland to a master weaver named William Carnegie who’d been put out of a job by the advent of the factory system, and his wife Margaret, who tended to the family and helped her brother in his cobbler business. He would grow to become the richest man America had ever known, and much of this he would credit to his early determined statement that “the wolf of poverty should be driven from our door someday” (viii). He extols the values of the necessity of work in the pursuit of wealth in his writing, yet is considered a great capital investor, who made much of his money from investments. He expresses that the value of wealth is in its application as a philanthropic device, but is known to have …show more content…
He began in the railroad industry, where he was able to move up the chain of employment due to his dedication to going above-and-beyond what role he was given. After graduating from this stage, he was first introduced to capital investing by a contact he’d made in the railroad business, a pattern of utilization of personal contacts repeated as his career continued. His business efforts were concerned primarily with growth and expansion. He broke up strikes, reorganized corporations and formed monopolies to gain more power and thereby grow his influence, resulting in a domino effect. It’s important to understand at this stage that his actions were not viewed as overly evil, because in the ambitions of Andrew Carnegie, one finds the driving spirit of Gilded Age America writ large. After the closing of the frontier, the nation remained a land of pioneers and pathfinders who were forced to look in different directions to find their destiny. Carnegie is not unique in that he pursued commercial success. Indeed, an entirely new class of self-made millionaires arose out of the economic and cultural transition of the late 19th century into the early 20th century. Carnegie however, is notable for the exceptional relationship between his personal beliefs, his business practices, and the ethical environment of his