campus for Spelman College in Atlanta, dedicated to educating black women, and the University of Chicago. He provided backing for many medical triumphs: a treatment for meningitis, a campaign that cured 500,000 cases of hookworm in the South and a vaccine against yellow fever.”(Chernow 103). In the Gilded age many didn’t have enough money to care for themselves and their families and through such gracious philanthropy, large industry owners were able to give back to their community. After all, before become one of the richest men in American history, Carnegie was working himself: “Andrew started at the bottom as a $1.20 a week helper in a textile factory, doing piece work”(Burner 417), so he knows that many americans need financial help. As their was such a wide gap between wealthy and poor due to the period of private interest of the Gilded Age, those at the top of the scale would use their money to help those at the bottom.During the Gilded Age, people were working freely on their own because the government had become passive. The laissez-faire style of control allowed for the surge in the economy. The most important element that the government left to the people in the Gilded age was freedom of contract. The people were given he right to establish their own contracts through “Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), where freedom of contract was established as an essential element of the ‘liberty’ protected by due process”(Schwartz 148). ...
