Andrew Carnegie was a capitalist. It’s not easy to visualize, but without him breathing life into the American steel industry, we could never be the nation we are today. Not only did he revolutionize the American mega-corporation, he’s the epitome of the American success story. Starting as a Scottish immigrant working in the depths of the Pennsylvania railroad industry, he clawed his way up to being the richest man in America by 1900. He had the foresight to see where demand would lie in the future, taking the risk of investing in steel in an iron-dominated market. He put in the man-hours and effort to seek out a consistent and cost-effective method to produce the material that would forge America into the powerhouse we have known for the past 100 years. The 19th century was the peak of the limitless power that capitalists could reach in America’s “free market” before the trust-busting movement at the turn of the century. His questionable political influences along with his horizontal and vertical integration completely shut out all competition and middlemen, supplying roughly 90% of the steel in the US by 1901. He tried his best to give back with his accrued wealth; building schools, concert halls, and libraries. That being said, he didn't build his fortune by being a humanitarian. Although he was a pleasant man in person, his steel works were a hellish environment, running 12, sometimes 24 hour shifts in dangerous conditions with little to no upward mobility amongst his workforce. Carnegie was a man of contradictions in many respects, but he was the embodiment of American capitalism, for both good and bad. John D. Rockefeller, Relentless Though “big oil” seems to come up constantly in the news today, in the late 1800s (before the rise of the automobile) the US oil industry had not yet taken off of the ground. Rockefeller could not have entered the oil market at a better time, in the 19th century, the oil industry was