Gospel Of Wealth

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At the turn of the century, when the United States industrialized, and chained by the gloved hands of the wealthy few were millions of impoverished workers, whose calloused hands turned the gears of the nation. Two texts, “The Gospel of Wealth” and “The Subtle Problem of Charity” were written by two vastly different authors, the monopoly owner and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and founder of a settlement house for the poor Jane Addams, but both texts focus on the inherent division in society and how charity should emerge from this division. Carnegie begins his entry by stating that the disparity between the millionaire and the laborer is a measure of how society has progressed and will continue to progress from when a time where both master …show more content…
A man of wealth must never partake in “indiscriminate charity”, because if the money of the rich is handed to the men at the bottom, the poor will squander the money on “evils” which the rich hope to “mitigate”. Carnegie promoted public projects, including parks, public libraries, and places for recreation, left a positive impression on society, but his belief that the impoverished could not be trusted with money and were poor because of their bad decisions or laziness contradicted the foundational value of democracy, which is all men and women are equal. Along with Carnegie, Addams acknowledges that inevitably there will be haves and have nots, but she believes both ends of the spectrum must seek to trust, respect, and seek to understand one another. Addams was critical of a society that became so focused on industriousness that it began to equate wealth to “superior morality”. In turn, poverty became “synonymous to vice and laziness”. This view both contradicted America’s democratic belief that all men are equal and made the division between rich and poor even greater as the wealthy paid what they felt they owed to the poor without paying any attention to understanding fellow human
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