Greed In The Gilded Age Essay

In the Gilded Age many people used greed to their advantage of becoming well known and wealthy. The definition of greed is the selfish desire for something, especially wealth and power. To the more fortunate, greed was a great thing because they kept gaining power from what they were doing, but to the less fortunate greed was seen as an awful thing because it gave them nothing to benefit from. Some people during this time that were seen as greedy would often give back to the community what they had taken away from it after they had passed. They would do this type of good deed to clear their name.For example some people invested it in libraries which helped people get the opportunities to get books and learn to read. This makes greed seems as …show more content…
During this time it was workers versus bosses. This meaning the bosses saw themselves superior to all their workers. For example workers had a pay cut of ten percent, twice in less than 8 months. Typically workers had a little, while the owners were wealthy. They also had poor working conditions and had to work on weekends except they had Sunday off. This made workers go on strike and boycott against the company they worked for. During strike they did not work and they began sabotaging the business they worked for. They would sabotage it by going inside and destroying the equipment. Owners tried to prevent this by making them sign a yellow dog contract which just said workers could not join a union while working at the business, however, most employees that were already working would run off the workers that would not join a union because this would hurt the workers when they tried to strike. Owners then began locking up their businesses to try to keep the workers from sabotaging it. This hurt the owners more than the workers because nothing was being produced to bring in money to their company while it was locked up. For example in in SQ1 Source E “One Big Union” Solidarity, 1917 it shows the working class coming to fight together over the unfairness they have been …show more content…
This is showing how greed can be negative. Supporting question three source A shows us a picture from, “W. A. Rogers, The Forty Thieves]: Baba Jonathan: I don't like your looks, Mr. Merchant, you had better move on, illustration, Harper's Weekly, 17 March 1888”. This source is showing us different things in a line like monopoly, oil trust, sugar trust, gas trust etc. Monopoly is the first in line being held by dehumanized person. This tells us monopoly is over all things in that line and is going to tell the others behind how to run their trust. This is a negative aspect because it shows that the head person can use their power to tell them how much to charge for oil, gas, or sugar. This limits competitions between all the businesses meaning the higher the price is they still won't lose business because people need these things to get through their daily life. Critics may say this is unfair to the people that already struggle for money, but this means that people are going to work harder in the business they are working for to earn more pay to buy the things they need to survive.
The Gilded Age was stressful for many because all the struggles thrown at the people during this time. Greed helped many but was also some people's worst fear. For people like Andrew Carnegie is was a great thing because his founding of the steel industry brought him great wealth. For example in today’s world we see