Pennsylvania has been home to many influential people. One such person was Andrew Carnegie. Despite the many early years he spent with his family in poverty, he decided to become successful and give his money away to help other people relish in his success. Andrew Carnegie was an influential Pennsylvanian because he was a hard worker, an accomplished businessman, and he was determined to grow the steel industry.
Andrew Carnegie had quite the interesting life. He was born in a stone cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835 (111). His father worked hard at a hand loom until the Industrial Revolution put him out of work. His mother sold the few things that they had, and decided that they should go to America. The Carnegie’s went to Allegheny, Pennsylvania where they could find work.
Although Andrew Carnegie eventually achieved great things, he experienced quite miserable conditions in his early life. One struggle that he had to overcome was that he grew up in a poor family where everyone had to earn a living. He took his first job as a bobbin boy in a textile factory when he was only 12 years old (111). He worked from six in the morning until six at night and was paid only $1.20 a day. Despite his abject poverty, he never stole money. He once found a check for $500 on the street and he turned it over to someone who could find the owner. The Pittsburgh Gazette even wrote a story about him, calling him “an honest little fellow” (112). That very action impressed someone by the name of Thomas A. Scott who was soon to become a leading railroad man. He offered Carnegie a job as an assistant for $35 a month. He was only 17 at the time, but he knew that this was a huge opportunity, and he took it.
He soon learned how money was important in starting a business. He put money to work, and invested in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges, and oil derricks; by the time he was 33, he was rich (112). He kept working hard and then decided to enter the steel business, because he realized it was the metal of the future. Andrew Carnegie became the king of the steel industry, and his business was very profitable. He used machinery that was efficient, and kept wages extremely low. He was hurting people like his father, who earned very little. “The streets were horrible; the buildings poor; the sidewalks sunken and full of holes…. Everywhere the yellow mud of the streets lay kneaded into sticky masses through which groups of pale, lean men slouched in faded garments.” wrote Hamlin Garland who visited a steel town (113). Andrew Carnegie seemed to have lost his origins in life, and forgotten the struggles of the working class.
Later in life, he faced the struggle of having his own steel factory with his workers going on strike because they disliked the low wages that they were being given. They went on strike because Andrew Carnegie hired someone by the name of Henry Clay Frick who was in charge of paying the workers. Once Henry successfully cut the wages of the workers down to nearly nothing, the workers went on strike and protested against the low wages. Andrew Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland at the time, and was living like a prince. He owned a castle in Scotland and houses in America that seemed like palaces (113). All the while Henry sent in men with guns to oppose the strikers. Twenty strikers were killed, and so were four of the armed men. Andrew Carnegie was more or less turning into the sort of tyrant that hurt his family.
At that time, Andrew Carnegie was 66. Then, the most successful banker in America, John Pierpont Morgan, offered to buy Carnegie out (114). The sale would make him one of the richest men in the world. He hesitated, but then finally decided that he would sell it. After all of the hard work he put into the steel industry to earn him billions of dollars, he still had one big challenge ahead of him. That humongous challenge was to give away all of his money that he earned from building the steel industry. That was a big job for him, considering that he was immensely rich, and that he wanted to do it well. He wrote that “the man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced” (114). He began by building libraries all across the country—3,000 of them, costing nearly 60 million (114). He gave money to schools, artists, writers, and to an institute to promote peace, one to improve teaching, and another to make the world better. He gave away almost all of his riches. Not long before he died he turned to his private secretary and asked, “How much did you say I have given away, Poynton?” “Three hundred and twenty-four million, six hundred and fifty-seven thousand, three hundred and ninety-nine dollars,” came the answer. “Good heavens!” said Carnegie, “Where did I ever get all that money?” (114) Finally, he proposed an idea that the wealthy people in this world should work the hardest to help raise money for those who don’t have as much.
Andrew Carnegie was influential because of his interest to develop a growing industry and his determination. He overcame his pitiful conditions as a child by being honest and investing in an industry that became extraordinarily powerful. Even though he was rich he was eventually able to understand how to be humble again. His humbleness came through when he decided to give roughly $324 million away to charity, institutions, and universities. Even despite the struggles he and his company faced, he always found a way to grow and do something better. He is an example of someone who cared about growing and overcoming his problems, and is someone that we all could look up to.
Hakim, Joy. A History of US Volume C 1865 to 1932. Roanoke, VA: RR Donnelley & Sons, 2013.
