The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Carnegie balanced his ability to make money with a serious engagement with ideas. This set him apart from other tycoons. His success in steel illustrated how American industry worked, the competitive pressures that shaped it, and the government programs that favored it. His own carefully cultivated image as the poor and grateful immigrant who pulled himself up by the bootstraps served to enshrine him along with Edison as symbols of the success of individualism and free labor. His writings demonstrated a real engagement with the problems of great wealth among pressing poverty. In thinking about income distribution, he stumbled clumsily into one of the great changes in the American economy, as questions of production yielded to questions of consumption, as production shifted from capital goods to consumer goods, and as issues of abundance replaced convictions of scarcity. He offered solutions forged in one industrial world for another very different world, and this laggard vision paradoxically shaped philanthropy.