There is good with the bad, and bad with the good. Andrew Carnegie is an example of this. He was directly responsible for killing and maiming untold numbers of industrial workers through notoriously hazardous working conditions found throughout his iron and steel factories. Andrew Carnegie made his fortune by keeping his labor costs inhumanely low. Andrew Carnegie is the quintessential robber baron of American history. Indeed, Carnegie and other businessmen like him are the reason the term robber baron was coined in the first place, because these men became rich specifically through exploiting the American workforce with dishonest, unfair, and ruthless practices.

Though Carnegie’s culpability is indisputable in terms of understanding the danger and suffering his workers were experiencing each and every day, he did show remorse for this fact through his actions, most notably through his philanthropy. This is something that cannot be said for other robber barons of the time, such as Carnegie’s long-time business partner and eventual enemy, Henry Clay Frick.

Andrew Carnegie is one of the greatest philanthropists of all time, funding numerous foundations, huge amounts of scientific research, and has ensured a lasting place in American history as the quintessential American Dream success story. The quintessential American Dream success story, that mirrors a paradox seen throughout American history; seemingly the very worst of human nature, inextricably linked and hopelessly intertwined, with the lofty ideals of the founding fathers themselves. The founding fathers, who believed with all their hearts and souls and minds that this was worthwhile. Men who crossed the treacherous ocean in analog mode. Men who defied the monarchy that provided the very boats they forged their new path aboard. That all of them, that each and every one of them, are created equal and deserve freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is, all white, land-owning men are created equal. Fuck all the rest, and especially fuck the factory workers under the thumb of the American robber barons of the 19th century.

Andrew Carnegie was a poor, disadvantaged Irish immigrant, once discriminated against in the United States as blatantly as Black Americans in overtly segregated times (e.g. "whites only" and "colored only" bathrooms, water fountains, schools, sections of the bus, etc., there are many years of history where "Irish need not apply" was featured in nearly every help wanted sign in any given shop), moved to America in 1848 as a 13 year old child by his parents because though they were all actively, gainfully employed, the wages gained from available Irish employment opportunities (for a 13 year old, or anyone for that matter) was the equivalent of making $42 a week in 2021 money, and the hours? 12-hour shifts. 6-days a week. Of constant manual labor. In factories with poor lighting, no HVAC systems, disease carrying vermin, no antibiotics, and no Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which was the first year in American history that hours worked beyond 40-hours per week are to be compensated at an overtime rate, “time-and-a-half” wages.

The wages gained from the typical American factory job in 1850 were the equivalent of making $75 a week in 2021 money, but with the same 72-hour work week, and abhorrent working conditions. $75 a week, to work in one of Andrew Carnegie's factories. What was that like, to be a worker in one of those steel factories in the 1800's, you must be thinking? Like this:

They wipe a man out here every little while," a worker said in 1893. "Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodes.... Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen.... Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all right! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."

For Carnegie, efficiency, not safety, was paramount. His vast steel mills at Braddock, Duquesne, and Homestead boasted the latest equipment. As technology improved, Carnegie ordered existing equipment to be torn out and replaced. He quickly made back these investments through reduced labor costs, and his mills remained always the most productive in the world.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegie-steel-business/

Carnegie Steel Corporation was the largest steel manufacturing company in the world in the late 1800's. For a little perspective on the typical lifestyle experienced by the public at that time, the first over-the-counter pain reliever (aspirin) wasn't available to the public without a prescription until 1915; that's 67 years after the Carnegie's first immigrated to America in 1848. The medical instruments of the time look like torture devices. Three devastating waves of cholera between 1832 and 1866 make the delta variant of COVID-19 of today look like fun (5-10% of every large city in America died from cholera; death rate from covid is about 2% at the beginning of 2022) except the first cholera vaccine wasn't developed until 1885, 53 YEARS after the first American cholera outbreak in 1832.

In 1832 sewage runs freely down the streets, as people literally threw their waste out of windows because plumbing wasn't constructed until the 1850's in the United States. Sewer construction started in Chicago, Illinois in 1852, and began in Brooklyn, NYC in 1849 after the cholera outbreaks (aka death by dehydration from constant diarrhea) had ravaged the city beginning in the summer of 1832.

1832 was almost 100 years before electric window air conditioners were widely available to the public. 1832 was 34 years before Juneteenth. The date of first occurence of Juneteenth was June 19, 1866. Do you know what Juneteenth is, or did your white-washed American US History lessons of high school just skip right over the depressing bits like that, as mine and everyone I’ve ever talked to about this did?

"Juneteenth (short for "June Nineteenth") marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops' arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday."

Source: https://www.history.com/news/what-is-juneteenth.)

On May 25, 2020, just under 13 months before Juneteenth became a federal holiday in the United States, George Floyd lost his life after Derek Chauvin was recorded using his knee to compress George’s neck. The almost 200 lbs of weight that Chauvin represented when including the gear he was wearing restricted the blood flow to George’s brain for too long. As Chauvin casually leans back, eyeing with incredulity the Black child who records the evidence that will later convict him of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, his hands facetiously placed in his pockets as he squeezes George’s life from his body. Executing him publicly in the street over a fake 20-dollar bill. Unable to believe he is wrong. Unable to recognize the humanity in George; echoing the disturbing history of this paradoxical country.

Echoing the injustice that has always been here. The countless undocumented lives lost. The millions of freed Black people that were released from plantations between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and June 19th, 1865 when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to finally enforce the new law, and into the care of just 100 medical professionals nationwide who were willing to even consider seeing them at all.

Source:

Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction:

Medical professionals who more often than helping them at all would sterilize them without their knowledge. The eugenics movement was just taking off in America. It entered into law in the early 1900’s, first seen in Indiana law in 1907. In 1914 the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law was passed, and the practice of eugenics continued overtly in the United States until at least the 1940’s for a host of marginalized and vulnerable populations within the United States who were deemed feebleminded or otherwise unfit to reproduce.

Source:

Early American Eugenics.

That means a person of color born to my great-grandmother’s generation, born around 1900, had a very real possibility of entering an operating room for a bullshit reason and leaving with no fucking uterus, and never having any knowledge of this development in their medical history. If my great-grandmother had been a Black American, it is very possible that my great-grandmother would’ve tried to have children but would never be able to do so, and would never know the true reason why. Black human beings were displayed in human zoos until the mid-1900’s, the last human zoo being closed in Belgium in 1958. And that doesn’t even touch upon all of the people indigenous to this continent who were also brutalized and exploited by the founding colonies of this country.

Source human zoos:

https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/human-zoos-a-shocking-history-of-shame-and-exploitation

Basically, there has been a consistent, concerted effort in this country to make someone else do the dirty work. The hard labor. We stole people from Africa and made them do it, and that’s why this fucking country is a country at all. We cultivated the myth that these people were stupid, that we were doing them a favor by bringing them over here. Then, after the enslaved became the free, extermination through less overt means became the approach and appears to have come from (to not even consider the rampant amount of lynching that happened) primarily medical neglect, forced sterilization, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Jim Crow laws. Segregation. The Civil Rights movement. Redlining. Gerrymandering. Prison gerrymandering. The war on drugs. And I think that just about catches us up to the modern day, minus a few million details. And today it seems that the brunt of the resentments are hurdled at the seasonal workers who immigrate to do the dirty work that farm labor and large vegetable harvests at a commercial scale represents. To the point that entire crops of fruits and vegetables have rotted in the fields because there was not enough labor coming from south of the US border to fill those intensely exhausting jobs in recent years, jobs that no American would even consider taking. Taking risks no parent would willingly take unless their home country and circumstance is more dangerous than the perils of immigrating by foot across hundreds of miles, all to just get within spitting distance of the pure vitriol of the 45th American presidential administration, with no guarantee of relief at the end of that brutal, and oftentimes lethal, journey to reach America.

To reach the hope of possibility of the American Dream. Just as Andrew Carnegie’s parents did. The poor Irish boy who was willing to work hard, but just needed a chance. The quintessential American businessman, who just needed access to the raw materials that still to this day represent a precious commodity all around the world; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The quintessential American businessman, who just needed access to what every modern day billionaire had access to; their entire indoctrinated identity that gives them access to power and privilege that has been impossible for many non-white people to achieve, regardless of how hard they work and how many hours they are putting in.

Amazon would’ve never been a thing without his mommy and daddy giving old Jeffy B something like $300,000 to start it up. Trump filed for bankruptcy six times. SIX TIMES. Microsoft dropped the ball on so many flipping new things that later became widely used in tech that it's the punchline of jokes, when the real joke is more likely the sickening reality that monopolies in America are, historically, almost impossible to kill once their teeth are sunk in and they’ve tasted blood, lock-jawed and ruthless in their savagery as they defend their bottom line.

The bottom line, that line of numbers, typed onto the paper by someone who lives paycheck to paycheck. The paper, milled and transported by not-Andrew Carnegie. The logging of the lumber, cut and hauled and processed by not-Andrew Carnegie. The shoeing of the horses, the plowing of the fields, the harvest of the crops, the preservation of the harvest, the cooking of the food that graced his plate and sustained his body and his mind. The rearing of his children. The mending of his socks. The amputation of limbs mangled by the machinery of Andrew Carnegie’s factories. The hiring of the scabs to replace the striking workers who demanded humane working conditions. All done by not-Andrew Carnegie, as he made his way up by stepping on the backs of others. The American Dream, realized. At least he donated some of that blood money though? :/