During the Gilded Age, the gap between the rich and the poor grew larger than ever before because of industrialization and capitalism. The photographs of Carnegie’s mansion shows the extravagant life that the rich were able to live, while the photographs by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis shows the terrible conditions that the poor were forced to live in. The photographs by Hine and Riis best shows the great flaw in the American capitalist economy of the Gilded Age because they show the terrible living conditions that the poor were subjected to in day-to-day life. Oftentimes, poor families required everyone in the family to work in order to make ends meet - including young children. Lewis Hine’s photographs depicts children selling newspapers and …show more content…
Jacob Riis’s photographs shows the conditions that families lived in. For the people that even had places to sleep at night, they were small, dirty, and even falling apart. One photograph in particular, showing the outside of some buildings that the poor called home, describes the buildings as “Dens of Death”, most likely referring to the fact that the buildings were barely suitable for human occupation. Some people had no home, and slept in lodging houses with no privacy. Some other places that Riis photographed people being forced to sleep in include a cellar and a dump. In contrast, Andrew Carnegie owned several houses “from Georgia to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, and of course his beloved Scotland” (Ballard, 1). His house in New York City is shown to be large, clean, and extravagant. The fact that he had not just one house, but many extravagant ones shows the vast differences in life between the rich and the poor. The fact that the poor had no choice but to sleep in the places that they did shows how flawed the economy was, because the poor should not have to have been poor if they were working hard and contributing to society, like most of them