The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in American history, and perhaps the most controversial. This era had its virtues and its faults in American history. The Industrial Revolution was just the beginning of countless innovations, opportunities, and immigrants on American soil; However, it has also led to many detrimental problems, such as child labor, poor living and working conditions, overcrowded cities, pollution, long hours of boredom, and low wages. This has largely contributed to the rise of political leaders and the detrimental problems they have introduced into the country. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Judicious Use of Flaws and What Came of It The Gilded Age presented hundreds of stumbling blocks to the American people, one of them being that the rich continued to become more and more prosperous and the other poor citizens (for the most part) became twice as impecunious as they already were. This is a primary consequence of the massive influx of immigrants from countries such as China and Eastern and Southern Europe. Political leaders like Andrew Carnegie decided to use these new disadvantaged immigrants to help them expand their businesses. Andrew Carnegie grew up in an extremely poor Scottish household. He was an immigrant who, at age 13, worked in a textile factory earning about $1.50 an hour, and later in life. At the age of 65, millions knew him as one of the richest men in America, with a whopping 200 million ($372 billion in today's US currency). Carnegie's belief in the inequity of workers in the Gilded Age, as stated in his excerpt Andrew Carnegie's Wealth, "although the law may sometimes be hard on the individual, it is better for the race , because it ensures the survival of the fittest in each department. " As an extension of this, Carnegie believed that a wealthy person should only use their income to help people who need it, such as charities and people who use that money to better themselves. This man believed that if he paid his workers a higher amount, he would only harm them by rewarding them for their immoral and wicked behavior, and to him, this was unacceptable because people should help themselves themselves to get there. where they wanted to be instead of relying on someone to give them what they need. In relation to the average coal miner, from the excerpt “The boy's slow progress that begins in a beaker and ends. an old man in the beaker”, told by a former miner. In this fragment, the coal miner begins by toiling in a low-wage mining job with some 16,000 other young men as young as nine years old. In this extract it is interpreted that the miner was a very hardworking man; however, he knew that the lifestyle he led was one he chose to live rather than one he was forced to have. “It is an endless routine of a boring and painful world from nine years until death – a kind of voluntary life imprisonment. Few escape. Once they start, they continue to live their mundane, low-level existence, ignoring daily danger and knowing nothing better,” in this sentence from the excerpt the miner states that it was “ of a kind of voluntary imprisonment for life", that is to say that it was his choice to be in this.