I'm from Pittsburgh. Once, on a business trip, I met an old woman. Over the course of our conversation, our common origins became apparent. She asked me, "Do the men still have to change their shirts after lunchtime?"[1] I said, "no, not anymore." "Well, maybe I will go back there again one day."
Carnegie stepped on a lot of heads on his way up. [2]
1: There was so much soot in the air, your shirt would be dirty by midday, so blue-collar workers brought spares and changed.
You're so right. Carnegie et al. should have used the non-polluting cold fusion technology that was widely available at the time. He didn't of course because he was an evil bastard and loved poisoning people.
Also, as is widely acknowledged, union bosses were in no way responsible for any violence or wrongdoing. It's all so obvious and one-sided in retrospect, you know.
Look, on the way from a nepotist aristocracy to creating a prosperous middle class you don't get it right the first time. Shit gets fucked up, and yes lots of people do bad things along the way. It's trivially easy to look back and point out how they only got it 30% right and ignore the fact that everyone before them got it 10% right.
You're both being dogmatic. Steveklabnik is claiming that Carnegie could've done more to be an ethical leader, Axiom is claiming that he couldn't.
The truth is, both are possible. I am baffled as to how either of you thinks the question can be answered without looking at the specific history and the specific choices Carnegie made and deciding whether he was willfully destroying lives.
Please see my response, which is a sibling to you. I'm being dogmatic on purpose, responding to the tone of TFA.
I think Carnegie was kind of a jerk, but if he hadn't done it, some other jerk probably would have. I try not to spend too much of my life casting moral judgements on others, so I'm still not quite how sure that shakes out.
Unions continue to destroy this town to this day. I'm not saying that Carnegie was pure unadulterated evil. But he's not the purely good man that TFA holds him up to be, either. That's all.
When I was 19-20, I helped this great fellow Dr. Eisenstadt, a retired professor from Brooklyn College, self-publish his books for his family and friends. At the time he had a lot of files in WordPerfect for DOS, and I had to (basically manually) get them into Word somehow, clean up the formatting, and fix up some of the few spelling mistakes it found. At first he balked that he had spelling mistakes... he had very few, but then he saw they were there, he was happy :)
Anyway, he loved to write about America and particularly Carnegie. So through formatting his book I learned a lot about Carnegie -- the guy came from nothing, and he was truly active. Check this out: http://bit.ly/fDMBd9
Carnegie stepped on a lot of heads on his way up. [2]
1: There was so much soot in the air, your shirt would be dirty by midday, so blue-collar workers brought spares and changed.
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike