Mary Klann HIST 110 – Fall 2019 September 20, 2019 Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth The United States saw vast industrial development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this era, known as the “Gilded Age,” manufacturing industries such as steel, machinery, chemicals, and packaged foods grew, transforming the nation from a country of farmers into an industrial society. (Module 5 Lecture Slides) Ordinary Americans experienced drastic changes in their everyday lives. In addition to increasing access to technological innovations like typewriters, telephones, and refrigeration, the workplace became more mechanized and routinized. (Module 5 Lecture Slides) However, although Americans all over the country felt these changes, not everyone profited from them. The Gilded Age was an age of sweeping economic development but also extreme inequality. Leaders of newly consolidated corporations worked to improve efficiency, cut costs, and grow profits. By the 1890s, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and other businessmen like J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan had accumulated vast amounts of wealth, fortunes that are “still among the largest the nation has ever seen.” (American Yawp, Ch 16, Part III) Carnegie and other “captains of industry” were part of an elite class of Americans which not only controlled the majority of the nation’s wealth, but shaped American understandings of “high” culture. (Module 5 Lecture Slides) Carnegie justified the societal and economic inequality that his own business practices exacerbated by asserting that millionaires like himself were beneficial for American society: they were “the bees that make the most honey, and contribute most to the hive even after they have gorged themselves full.” (Module 5 Lecture Slides) Commented [MCK1]: Make sure you include your name somewhere in the document. Commented [MCK2]: Use the title of the primary source for the title of your paper. Commented [MCK3]: Citations can be in this simple format. When in doubt, cite your information. Commented [MCK4]: Use direct quotes from secondary sources like the American Yawp textbook sparingly. Only use them when you are sure there is no better way to state this information. Commented [MCK5]: The historical context you highlight should be relevant to your specific source. What background information is necessary to establish before you can get into more detailed analysis of your source? In his essay, “Wealth,” published in the North American Review in 1889, Carnegie argued that inequality itself was a marker of advanced civilization. It was better, he reasoned, to have “great irregularity” between the wealth of laborers and the upper echelons of society than to have “universal squalor.” (Carnegie, Ch 16) Carnegie maintained that despite this “irregularity,” all Americans were better off in 1889 than they had been in the past. With industrialization ca.