Was Andrew Carnegie A Hero Or A Captain Of Industry Essay

With a net worth of sixty million dollars today, Christopher Gardner is an American businessman, author, stockbroker, motivational speaker, and philanthropist who struggled to raise his four year old son while being homeless and unemployed. The story of Gardner is similar to that of Andrew Carnegie’s. When Andrew Carnegie was only twelve years old, he started to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory and then as a telegrapher and personal assistant with Tom Scott in order to support his family. Just like Christopher Gardner, Andrew Carnegie worked his way to the top through hard work and he stayed there by giving back to the people and modernizing America. Due to that, Andrew Carnegie is considered a captain of industry because he was a hardworking

When Carnegie was young, his family was in poverty, so in order to provide for them, he started to work at a cotton mill at the age of twelve for only $1.20 a week. After five years of hard work, he eventually earned a higher paying position when he worked for Tom Scott. Then, by the year of 1853 he was promoted to working on the railroad for $8.75 dollars a week. From one of his own writings, Document D, Andrew explained, “Do not make riches, but usefulness, your first aim...Concentrate, perform more than your prescribed duties; be strictly honest in word and deed. And may all who read these words be as happy and prosperous and long lived as I wish them all to be.” He wrote this in hopes that others would learn from his ways and succeed in life with riches as well. Carnegie had a can-do attitude; he preached that any honest man who worked hard, was capable to gain wealth. Mr. Carnegie built a great business with outstanding profits. Document P, a dot graph that shows the net profits of Carnegie’s associates, shows that his net profit for his associates’s wages were already $20,000 by the year 1900. These profits showed how much excess money the company was making in order to continuously raise the wages of his workers. With all this, one can conclude that Andrew Carnegie worked hard to get to where he

From the beginning, he wanted to make a better life for himself. Through hard work he slowly moved up the ladder and earned a higher paying job. By the age of 17 he worked for Tom Scott and was made $35 dollars a month, which was $30.20 dollars more than he made five years before that. He made such a surplus of money, by 1856 he took Scott’s advice and invested in a stock. Scott also told Carnegie to build a bridge, that no one thought was impossible at the time, but he knowed how to negotiate, so the bridge was built. Carnegie is still the second richest man in history. An expert from the book, Outliers about the seventy-five richest people in human history, in document E, Carnegie is second. How did he do it? By knowing how to run his business and beat out the competition. Not many successful businessman today got to where they were without knowing the game of life and this is how you be successful. Andrew Carnegie was a wise man who gave motivational speeches of how he got to where he was. In document A, Carnegie, at an opening ceremony of a library, stated, “Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment...it is the mind that makes the body rich... My aspirations take a higher flight.” Andrew Carnegie spoke out to the people saying why just being rich doesn’t get you anywhere you have to be smart