First of all, doesn't he look just like Santa Claus?
I'm not going to criticize Andrew Carnegie -- too much -- for his ideas on philanthropy. Nor will I lambast
the many institutions he founded for the advancement of art, science, peace, and education, or the accomplishments of those institutions since the time of his death in 1919. My own grandfather attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon). I can't complain.
Andrew Carnegie was a product of his time. He amassed his fortune during "The Gilded Age," when Robber Barons and wildcat bankers and bamboozling con-men were the order of the day. It was also a time which some extol for its free-market values, when "success in the marketplace was equated with the virtues of hard work, thrift, sobriety, and even godliness." His was also a real-life and conspicuous "rags-to-riches" story, which can be trotted out as proof that unbridled wealth is attainable by us all if we invest ourselves in industry and follow our civilized Amercan Dreams.
When Carnegie wrote "The Gospel of Wealth" in 1889, at the age of 54, his annual take-home pay was $25 million. $1 in 1889 was worth about $25.40 of our current dollars. You do the math. He was a man who knew he could give away nearly 90% of his wealth and still have a castle in Scotland and a mansion on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
After reading Mr. Carnegie's Gospel, he strikes me as a rather uneducated man. In the opening paragraph of his treatise, he writes:
The conditions of life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers.
Carnegie's world before a "few hundred years" ago had no kings or queens or princes or sultans or rajes or ceasars or pharoahs or alexanders. So, from the beginning of this work, we are asked to buy in to Mr. Carnegie's alternate universe. His opening goes on to say:
The Indians are to-day where civilized man then was. When visiting the Sioux, I was led to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and the poorest of his braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization.
This, of course, depends on how "civilization" is defined in the alternate universe. What Mr. Carnegie did not know was that the Sioux considered his type of man to be insane, and quite savage. Given that "The Gospel of Wealth" was written one year before the
Wounded Knee Massacre, what the much-improved culture of Carnegie's time considered to be "civilized" was, indeed, highly questionable.
Carnegie's ideas on philanthropy were based on Social Darwinism, the same theories that would eventually inform the Nazis of the Third Reich. In Carnegie's alternate universe, the oilman, the wildcat banker, the hard-working con-man, the gambler on Wall Street deserved to be rich because they were fit to be so... and although he was a philanthropist, his money went chiefly to museums, libraries, and higher education, "for all the refinements of civilization." To Carnegie, the poor were poor because they did not work hard enough; he had his own rare yet quintessential rags-to-riches life story to prove it. "Better this great irregularity than universal squalor," he writes. In Carnegie's mind, apparently, one either has a castle and a mansion or nothing at all.
Of labor, Carnegie writes:
We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, in the counting house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is no better than a myth... Under the Law of Competition, the employer is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between rich and poor. Humanity loses its homogeneity.
A homogeneity humanity has never had anywhere on earth, except in Carnegie's alternate universe. That three years later, Carnegie would leave for Scotland before resolution of a brutal and bloody conflict between workers and management at his
Homestead steel plant attests to his ambiguity: a distaste for his own "hard work" and values.
I find myself ambiguous about Andrew Carnegie. I find his Gospel tedious and difficult to read, full of half-truths and tautologies and over-simplifications: a glimpse of what is seen through the tunnel-vision of the richest man in the world. Perhaps he gave his money away out of guilt over his "savage wealth." Or perhaps he was guilty upon reflection of his own role in the Johnstown flood which took the lives of more than 2,200 souls. Or both -- which would mean he at least had a conscience, and I'm glad that he did.
The name of Carnegie's essay was "Savage Wealth" when it was published in 1889. If you search on google, "publication date Gospel of Wealth", you'll find it was published in 2007 -- Was it renamed at that time? as a devastating global financial crash was in the making, when certain individuals needed to hear that the mind-boggling disparity between rich and poor was "not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial," in order to justify their own savagery.