Industrialization and Cooperate Consolidation: Attitudes

            Take a moment and think back to the moment in life when you decided on your career path. What is theperfect? occupation? Does it use all of a person's natural abilities or is it a learned trade? Is their room for advancement? Will there still be a job available in this field when you grow old? How many years of schooling are necessary and what level of degree is needed? Most importantly though, how much money can one make? In America, a common goal in the lives of most people is to become happy. A correlation can be drawn in our society between wealth and happiness. The American dream is based, for the most part, on the ability to pursue whatever career one decides on and to have the chance of becoming successful and prosperous. One might ask, how did wealth become so important in our society? Also, where did this wealth come from? For the answers to these questions we must go back into the times of the industrial revolution and the period known as the Gilded Age. To put things simply, during this period America had almost no middle class. There were the very, very affluent people, (known as Robber Barons) and the very, very poor people living in slums. In order to understand why and how this wealth was created one must put themselves into the mindset of the different classes during the late eighteen hundreds. Thus, we will be examining the following three people's attitudes towards the wealth that was created during the industrial revolution: Booker T. Washington, Andrew Carnegie, and Ida Tarbell. Booker T. Washington believed that any form of labor was honorable, Andrew Carnegie saw that wealth should be worked for and at the end of your life should be given according to thegospel of wealth?, they were both alike in how they agreed that progress up the economical ladder came from self- improvements; while Ida Tarbell believed that wealth was impossible to attain in this manner and that the ways in which big businesses obtained their monies was based on immoral and unethical practices.