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Robber Barons: The Progressive Era

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Robber Barons were like robin hoods, but reversed. Instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, they would steal from the poor by giving the rich a discount on a product, then making that same product up for a poorer person (Whitehead, 2016). The Civil War has just ended. America is thrown into a time of industrialism that it wasn’t properly prepared for. Before all of the industrialism was put into the equation, we were a mess and with the industrialism, we were a disaster, just waiting to explode. However, with all of the good things that the new era brought, it also brought many bad things too. For an example, it brought bad living conditions, poverty, segregation, women don’t have rights, and monopolies. Something needs to change to make America better. The era that makes this possible, and gives America the potential to be a great country, is the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era was the era that destroyed many things that the big industrialist liked having (i.e. monopolies) (Whitehead, 2016). The changes in the Progressive Era were not a result of the big industrialist changing their minds, because they like having things that were latter banned in the Progressive Era.
The robber barons got rich by cheating the poor people who were either their worker or their customer. Ways they cheated people …show more content…

So, someone else might say that the changes in the progressive era were a result of the big industrialist changing their minds because in the end of their lives, they gave away all of their money. If the big industrialist gave away all of their money at the end of their lives, they must have felt bad about cheating their workers, so they changed the way that they treated their workers. Whoever said that would be wrong. They would be wrong because it took two acts to end monopolies, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (Whitehead,

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