different kinds of influences that is also why monopolies have two major names: “The Captains of Industry” and “The Robber Barons”. On the one hand the monopolies in the Gilded Age had a really positive effect on the economics of the United States of America, because they made America to a very economically strong nation. In the Documentary Drama “The Men who built America” by Patrick Reams and Ruán Magan it says, how the “five self-made men: Carnegie, Ford, J.P Morgan, Rockefeller and VanderBilt transformed the United States into a global superpower” (The Men Who Built America). The time after the Civil War and the Reconstruction, between 1860s and 1896 is called the Gilded Age. This time area is known for its impressive economic growth and extremely expansions of major cities. For example, Chicago’s population increased ten times between 1870 and 1900. Also, the technological innovations in this time included things like the telephone, the car, the electric lightbulb etc., as well as the advances in steel production and many other industries. The industrial productivity increased a lot. During this time area, the economics of the United States rose in the fastest rate in its history. The extreme-rich industrialists such as Carnegie, J.P. Morgan etc. added a ton of jobs thought out the entire nation with their businesses. They also donated a lot of their private money to charities. Namely, Andrew Carnegie donated over than 90 percent of his property and said, that this was an “upper-class-duty, the Gospel of Wealth” (The Men Who Built America). In this aspect, they were called “The Captains of Industry”.

On the other hand, these super-rich industrialists were labeled as “The Robber Barons” because the public felt that they cheated on the way how they go to their money, and also dictated it over the average citizen. Although they added many jobs in the nation, they also created the wages by themselves. Literally they were so “powerful that it can rule over people like a government” (Meyer, 5). Setting the wages as low as possible resulted to strikes and protests of the workers against the bosses. In documentary drama “The Men Who Built America” it showed the Homestead strike in 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania. When the monopolies decrease the wages down an enormous rate, workers of an industry will create labor unions and try to protest against them decreasing their, already low, wages. The decreasing of the wages were so bad, that some workers only earned $5 a week. The Homestead Act in 1892 was between the “Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers” and the “Carnegie Steel Company”. It resulted in that the strikers were defeated and a major setback in the unionization of the steel workers.