Carnegie

by Peter Krass

  To Carnegie, “the duty of the man of wealth” was to uphold a thrifty lifestyle and “to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.” He was certain he could administer wealth better for the community than the community could. This idea of acting as trustee came directly from Peter Cooper and again reinforced the point that Carnegie considered himself a chosen one, per Calvin, or at least a man who walked with the gods, per Channing.

  Toward the essay’s conclusion, Carnegie, who didn’t believe in indiscriminate charity, suggested to whom and what kind of institutions the money should be given. His cornerstone: don’t bother with beggars, but only with those who will help themselves. This tenet fell in line with Spencer, who believed evolution was nothing but the “ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.” It was best that those unable to survive on their own be left to die. As leading examples of philanthropists, Carnegie invoked “Peter Cooper, Enoch Pratt of Baltimore, Mr. Pratt of Brooklyn, Senator Stanford, and others, who know that the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—free libraries, parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste; and public institutions of varying kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.”

  Carnegie concluded his essay with resounding words: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” It was a strong statement considering that the rich and powerful, with whom he had business dealings, preferred to create dynasties. His friend Morley immediately perceived its import, writing, “I found you had guarded the phrase well, but it will stick with you forever as an unreserved condemnation of those dying rich.” Carnegie didn’t hedge, confirming his position in an 1890 letter to a fellow industrialist: “Mr. Astor dies, in my opinion, disgraced by leaving $150,000,000 to one person, while the Astor Library suffers for want of enough money to make purchases of modern books necessary to hold its position as a first class library.”12

  Lloyd Stephens Bryce, the owner and editor of the North American Review, considered “Wealth” the finest essay he had ever read. Bryce, a rich merchant who served in Congress, was biased toward men like Carnegie, however. He encouraged the steel master to write a second essay that more specifically addressed how and to whom money should be given. Intoxicated with praise, Carnegie immediately agreed. Once again he was like Moses, down from Mount Sinai, the people waiting breathlessly for the commandments. After several months of work, he submitted his second essay, “The Best Fields for Philanthropy,” for the North American Review’s December 1889 issue.

  In the opening section, Carnegie reiterated that it was a disgrace to die rich and restated his basic principles for giving, which included being careful to not pauperize the recipients, but rather stimulate the members of the community to further “their own improvement.” As for the “irreclaimable destitute, shiftless, and worthless,” according to Carnegie, the city or state should shelter, clothe, and feed them. Again, his message was that indiscriminate giving, especially to charity cases, would not help the race as a whole, a position Uncle Lauder heartily agreed with, writing his nephew: “You are right on the subject of giving to the thriftless. The last clothes I gave to a beggar that I knew before he begged was worth 30/-. He sold them for 3/6 got drunk and beat his wife. That cured me.”13

  The most controversial section of the essay now confronted the reader: Carnegie’s hierarchical list of worthy causes.

  “First. Standing apart by itself there is the founding of a university by men enormously rich, such men as must necessarily be few in any country.” As examples he cited Cornell, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the Vanderbilts, but apparently did not yet consider himself in this pantheon.

  “Second. The result of my own study of the question, ‘What is the best gift which can be given to a community?’ is that a free library occupies the first place, provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution, as much a part of the city property as its public schools, and, indeed, an adjunct to these.”

  Third on his list was “founding or extension of hospitals, medical colleges, laboratories, and other institutions connected with the alleviation of human suffering, and especially with the prevention rather than with the cure of human ills.” Fourth was public parks, and Carnegie believed the community should pay “graceful tribute to the citizen who presents it” by giving “his name to the gift.” (Unlike Rockefeller and Morgan, who preferred to keep their name off buildings and monuments, Carnegie never shied from such recognition and endorsed it.) As a prime example for park giving, Carnegie used his very own partner Harry Phipps, who had donated a conservatory to Pittsburgh. Phipps had also founded the Phipps Cooking School, for which he paid all the expenses and salaries. Not everyone viewed such giving as useful, however. During the 1888 Edgar Thomson shutdown, the proletarian newspaper Commoner and Glassworker opined that the two thousand “idle workmen of Carnegie, Phipps, and Company at Braddock don’t care much how the cooking is done, but they are greatly interested in knowing where the food to be cooked for them is to come from.”14

  The Carnegie list continued: fifth was music halls; sixth was public baths; and seventh was churches. Placing churches last on his list rankled the clergy, but Carnegie relegated them to that position because he felt strongly that giving to churches was of limited benefit; they were sectarian, serving a small segment of the public. Carnegie concluded this essay with these words: “The gospel of wealth but echoes Christ’s words. . . . This much is sure: against such riches as these no bar will be found at the gates of Paradise.” Although not a believer, he thought it best to hedge his bets—a wise investment strategy.

  To prove to his idol, William Gladstone, that he truly believed what he had said in 1887—that it was disgraceful to die rich—Carnegie had Louise send the proof sheets of the first article to him with a note: “We think we have found the true path—it is the one we mean to tread. If it commends itself to you we shall be so happy.”15 Impressed, Gladstone requested permission to republish the essay in England, which was immediately granted. It appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, whose editor, William T. Stead, renamed it “The Gospel of Wealth,” a title Carnegie adored and adopted. The essay was also published in pamphlet form in both the United States and Great Britain.

  The next year an inspired Gladstone published his own essay on wealth, which appeared in the November 1890 issue of Nineteenth Century magazine. He endorsed Carnegie’s gospel but for two points: he placed churches further up on his hierarchical list, and he did not find “the hereditary transmission of wealth” to be evil, an expected British position. In complimenting Carnegie, Gladstone wrote: “This self-made millionaire has confronted the moral and social problem of wealth more boldly, so far as I know, than any previous writer. He may, like the rest of us, have his infirmities; but his courage and frankness, both of them superlative, are among the attendant virtues, which walk in the train of a munificence not less modest and simple than it is habitual and splendid.”16

  Carnegie was the first of his generation to espouse a systematic approach to giving away personal wealth and to damn those who did not. Such rhetoric meshed well with his radical heritage, but so had his epistles on labor relations, and had those been applied? No, they were not pragmatic and failed dismally. One certainty: between the wide distribution of the essays, the publicity from Gladstone’s endorsement, and his being the first industrialist to distinguish himsel
f on the issue of philanthropy, Carnegie invited criticism. As the New York Tribune noted, “Mr. Carnegie is not only the greatest ironmaster in the world, but also one of the most conspicuous controversialists in social ethics.”17

  Eager to fuel the debate over wealth and its distribution, the editor of Nineteenth Century solicited essays from three church leaders—Henry Cardinal Manning, archbishop of Westminster; Hermann Adler, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire; and Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, recognized as a great Methodist divine—which then appeared together as a forum in the December 1890 issue under the title “Irresponsible Wealth.” Cardinal Manning and Rabbi Adler had no quarrel with Carnegie. Not so with Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, who could not dismiss the Scotsman in the “approving way” in which Gladstone did. While Hughes acknowledged that Carnegie was most generous, “when I contemplate him as the representative of a particular class of millionaires, I am forced to say, with all personal respect, and without holding him in the least responsible for his unfortunate circumstances, that he is an anti-Christian phenomenon, a social monstrosity, and a grave political peril.” The British reverend was alluding to the protective tariff, considered a monstrosity in his country.

  “They have no beneficent raison d’etre,” Hughes wrote of Carnegie and his industrial American peers. “They are the unnatural product of artificial social regulations. They flourish portentously in the unhealthy forcing house of Protection, but everything else fades and dies behind them. We prefer fresh air. Millionaires at one end of the scale involve paupers at the other end, and even so excellent a man as Mr. Carnegie is too dear at that price.” No matter how generous Carnegie was with his money, according to Hughes, the fact remained that many of his laborers lived in squalor, had not shared in the protective booty that boosted Carnegie’s profits, and were becoming poorer while the rich became richer, all making this situation anti-Christian and unacceptable. With a sardonic tone, Hughes contended, “Free trade, free land, and a progressive income tax would relieve him of the greater part of his anxious financial responsibilities.”18

  Always one to get in the last word, Carnegie responded to Hughes in the March 1891 issue of Nineteenth Century with an article titled “The Advantages of Poverty.” It was a long, rambling response filled with flashy rhetoric. Carnegie’s counterattack opened: “Imagine one speaking of ‘growing poverty’ in the United States! The American, more than any other workman, spends his savings for the purchase of a home.” As for being anti-Christian, Carnegie now turned the tables on Hughes. In one body blow, he used a quote from the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–28), which strongly suggests God blesses those with talent: “It was those who had accumulated and even doubled their capital to whom the Lord said: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.’” To further refute Hughes’s criticism, Carnegie used the words of the founder of the Methodist Church— Hughes’s church—John Wesley, who preached: “Gain all you can by honest industry. Use all possible diligence in your calling. Lose no time. Gain all you can by common sense, by using in your business all the understanding which God has given you. It is amazing to observe how few do this—how men run on in the same dull track with their forefathers. . . . If then you have an overplus, do good to them that are of the household of faith. If there be still an overplus, do good to all men.”19 As far as Carnegie was concerned, he had shown diligence, common sense, and had used all his god-given talents. And now, he was bent on doing good to all men.

  There was, however, one extremely revealing line buried in “The Advantages of Poverty.” In discussing the distribution of wealth by the very rich, he stated that “they can, perhaps, also find refuge from self-questioning in the thought of the much greater portion of their means which is being spent upon others.” In his mind, philanthropy was, to a degree, a means for cleansing any doubts about how the money was made or class inequities, in spite of contrary claims made by the benevolent rich—including Carnegie himself. The “self-questioning” would plague the Scotsman even in his final years.

  Ultimately, Carnegie dedicated so many words to defending the accumulation of wealth, the class gap, and the need for millionaires to act as trustees that his gospel was indeed suspect. Another notable critic, William Jewett Tucker, founder of the Andover Review and later president of Dartmouth College, questioned Carnegie’s assumption “that wealth is the inevitable possession of the few” and claimed that the issue “begs the whole question of economic justice now before society. . . . The ethical question of today centres, I am sure, in the distribution rather than in the redistribution of wealth.”20 He was addressing the moral issue of fair wages, an issue Carnegie righteously swept aside. The usually supportive Pittsburgh press even took swipes at Carnegie, while the city’s most notable journalist, Arthur G. Burgoyne, published a poem about him that ended:

  On public libraries he spent

  Of shekels not a few;

  A goodly slice to Pittsburgh went

  And to Allegheny too;

  But still the loss he doesn’t feel,

  It cannot hurt his health,

  For his mills keep on with endless zeal

  A-piling up the wealth.21

  Still, for every critic, there were thousands who would take a Carnegie handout in a flash. Immediately after Carnegie’s “Gospel” was published, he began receiving hundreds of letters from people requesting money for statues, memorials, and libraries, among other ventures, both reasonable and madcap. He was also invited to speak before or to join dozens and dozens of organizations looking for a wee dollar or two. Many of the letters were painfully long, always starting with, “I wish to bring to your attention . . .” or “I have tried several times within the last year or two to come near enough to you for a little about a matter . . .” or “Permit me to introduce myself . . .”

  For all the criticism, it could not be denied that Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” spurred other rich men to incorporate philanthropy into their lives, from which the working class did benefit. His methodical approach to library giving impressed and influenced John D. Rockefeller, for one. By the early 1880s, Rockefeller was a world-famous celebrity who, due to the charges that Standard Oil was a monopoly, had a far more notorious reputation than Carnegie—for the moment. It was also estimated that his net worth in 1889 was well over $100 million, compared with Carnegie’s $15 million.22 His philanthropy had begun modestly enough; Rockefeller gave away $61,000 in 1881 and $119,000 in 1884.23 But in the years after Carnegie’s essay, Rockefeller’s philanthropy accelerated quickly; he gave $304,000 in 1890, $510,000 in 1891, and $1.35 million in 1892.24 In March 1891, he hired Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister, to work full-time on his philanthropy; in the ensuing years, he donated millions to the Baptist Church, its theological seminaries, and the University of Chicago.25 Although he was the university’s prime benefactor, Rockefeller’s only involvement was to take part in selecting trustees. His name appeared on no building until the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel was so named after his death.

  Like Carnegie, Rockefeller had to become very disciplined in adhering to his precepts for redistributing wealth. Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow wrote, “Even as he was being reviled as a corporate malefactor in the press, this contradictory man agonized over the judicious application of his money and found it harder to exercise scrutiny over charities than over business.”26 Just as Rockefeller often relied on his wife and four children to study charitable opportunities, Carnegie recruited Louise to assist him. Neither man was timid, nor did they scatter their resources, preferring to focus on big-ticket projects, which is why the pair became renowned for turning philanthropy into a big business.

  There was more humaneness to Rockefeller’s giving, though. He expressed more concern for the submerged tenth, the downtrodden, encouraging one clergyman he supported to venture into “the midst of the multit
udes thronging up and down the Bowery or thereabouts, and settle and stay right there with them, establish a church.”27 In the mid-1880s, he supported an Atlanta school for black women (later named Spelman College in honor of his wife’s family), and he even picked out shrubs and trees for a redesigned campus.28 A thought on the minds of many was that such philanthropy would cleanse the monopolist’s degradation. Even one of Rockefeller’s advisers, who was soliciting funds for a new university, wrote him: “You have the opportunity of turning the unfavorable judgments of the world at large into favorable judgments—and not only that—of going down to history as one of the world’s greatest benefactors.”29 The arm-twisting didn’t work in this case, but both Rockefeller and Carnegie had to be cognizant of the relationship between philanthropy and image.

  Banker Pierpont Morgan’s fortune ultimately didn’t match that of industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie—although he and his father’s combined net worth was about $30 million in 1889—but he, too, was active in public and personal philanthropy. He was not interested, however, in Carnegie’s tenet that the wealthy should live modestly and shun displays of extravagance. To the contrary, Morgan relished luxuries and indulged himself and his friends, whether it be bushels of oysters and brandied fruit or taking large parties to the opera or the Patriarchs’ Ball. In the 1880s, he once spent $55,000 on jewelry at Tiffany’s in Paris.30 Although Morgan did not publicly articulate a specific program for philanthropy, his interests were hospitals, museums, and the Episcopal Church, giving hundreds of gifts annually in a more haphazard fashion than Carnegie or Rockefeller. He was very active prior to Carnegie’s essay, however. In 1887, he gave St. George’s, an Episcopal church, over $200,000, and since the founding of the American Museum of Natural History in 1869 he had served as trustee and donated some $10,000 a year. In 1890, he gave the museum $15,000 toward the purchase of a gem collection, but wanted no public recognition, stating, “The less said the better to my taste.”31 The Episcopal Church was his main interest; he gave it millions, donating $500,000 in 1892 alone for an Episcopal cathedral, St. John the Divine, to be built on 112th Street.32 (Over one hundred years later, it was still under construction.)