The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in American history, and perhaps the most controversial. This era had its virtues and its flaws in American history. The Industrial Revolution was just the beginning of countless new innovations, opportunities, and immigrants on American soil; however, it also brought to fourth place many harmful problems such as child labor, poor living and working conditions, overcrowded cities, pollution, long and boring hours, and low wages. This has contributed largely to the rise of political leaders and the harmful problems they have introduced into the country. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Wise Use of Flaws and What Came Out of It The Gilded Age demonstrated hundreds of obstacles for the American people, and one of them is that the rich continued to become more and more prosperous and the other citizens poor (for the most part) became twice as poor as they already were. This was the main result of the large influx of immigrants from countries such as China, Eastern and Southern Europe. Political leaders like Andrew Carnegie decided to use these disadvantaged new immigrants to expand their companies. Andrew Carnegie grew up in an extremely poor Scottish home, he was an immigrant who at the age of 13 worked in a textile mill earning only about $1.50 an hour, and later in life. At age 65 he was known by millions as one of the richest men in America with as much as 200 million ($372 billion in current U.S. currency). Carnegie's belief in the inequity of workers in the Gilded Age, as stated in his excerpt Andrew Carnegie's Wealth, "though the law may sometimes be harsh to the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures survival of the fittest in every department." Following this, Carnegie had a strong belief that those who are rich should only use their earnings to help those people who need money, such as charities and those people who use money to improve themselves. This man was someone who believed that if he paid his workers a higher amount, he would only harm them by rewarding them for having immoral and evil behavior, and to him this was unacceptable because people had to help themselves to get to where they wanted to be instead of relying on someone to give them what they needed. In relation to the average miner, from the passage “The slow progress of the boy who begins in a glass and ends. an old man in the glass,” told by a man who was once a miner. In this fragment the coal miner begins by toiling in a low-wage mining job along with 16,000 other young people at the young age of nine. In this passage it is interpreted that the miner was a hard worker; however, he knew that the lifestyle he was living was one he chose to live rather than one he was forced to have. “It's an endless routine of a boring and tiring world from nine years until death, a sort of voluntary life sentence. Few escape. Once started, they continue to live their banal and low-level existence, ignoring the daily danger, knowing nothing better", in this sentence of the song the miner states that it was "a sort of voluntary life sentence", meaning that it was his choice to be in that job position. Since Carnegie says that he who wants to be helped helps himself, and the coal miner in this case was one who didn't want to help himself, so he remained in his misery..