(American steel baron Andrew Carnegie and a party of frien...)
American steel baron Andrew Carnegie and a party of friends took in the British countryside by horse coach-a "four-in-hand"-in the summer of 1881... a season of grassy picnic luncheons, bucolic scenery, and philosophical discussions in coffeehouses.
(Andrew Carnegie was one of the wealthiest people in Ameri...)
Andrew Carnegie was one of the wealthiest people in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. After he had earned his millions however he spent much of the remainder of life using his wealth to help with large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education, and scientific research. He passed away in 1919 and his book The Gospel of Wealth and other timely essays was first published in 1901.
Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, business magnate, and philanthropist. He became a self-made steel tycoon and one of the wealthiest businessmen of the 19th century. Carnegie was the leader of the American steel industry from 1873 to 1901. He was also one of the most important philanthropists of his era. He donated large sums of his fortune to educational, cultural, and scientific institutions.
Background
Andrew Carnegie was born on November 25, 1835, in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, the United Kingdom, to William Carnegie, a weaver, and Margaret Morrison Carnegie. He was the second of two sons. Andrew's mother went to work to support the family, opening a small grocery shop and mending shoes.
Advances in looming technology rendered his father’s occupation obsolete, threatening the family with dire poverty. Andrew's mother, Margaret, fearing for the survival of her family, pushed the family to leave the poverty of Scotland for the possibilities in America, about which she had heard encouraging reports. Seeking a better future, in 1848 the Carnegies borrowed money to go to the United States.
The Carnegies auctioned all their belongings only to find that they still didn't have enough money to take the entire family on the voyage. They managed to borrow 20 pounds and find a found room on a small sailing ship, the Wiscasset. At the harbor in Glasgow, they and the rest of the human cargo were assigned to tightly squeezed bunks in the hold. It would be a 50-day trip, with no privacy and miserable food.
They settled near Pittsburgh, where young Andrew began an extraordinary rags-to-riches business career. Carnegie's father found a job in a cotton factory, but he soon quit to return to his home handloom, making linens and trying to sell them door to door. Carnegie also worked in the cotton factory, but after his father died in 1855, his strong desire to help take care of the family pushed him to educate himself.
Education
Young Andrew began work at age 12 as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory. He quickly became enthusiastically Americanized, educating himself by reading and writing and attending night school. It was only after Carnegie lost his father in 1855, he realized the importance of education. He quit his job at the cotton factories and diverted towards reading, theater, and music.
At the age of 13, Carnegie worked from dawn until dark as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, carrying bobbins to the workers at the looms and earning $1.20 per week. A year later, he was hired as a messenger for a local telegraph company, where he taught himself how to use the equipment and was promoted to telegraph operator. With this skill, he landed a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He worked as the assistant and telegrapher to Thomas Scott, one of the railroad's top officials. Through this experience, he learned about the railroad industry and about business in general. When Scott was named assistant secretary of war in charge of transportation, Carnegie helped organize the military telegraph system. But he soon returned to Pittsburgh to take Scott's old job with the railroad.
While working for the railroad, Carnegie began making investments. He made many wise choices and found that his investments, especially those in oil, brought in substantial returns. He left the railroad in 1865 to focus on his other business interests, including the Keystone Bridge Company.
Between 1865 and 1870 Carnegie made money through investments in several small iron mills and factories. He also traveled throughout England, selling the bonds of small United States railroads and bridge companies. Carnegie began to see that steel was eventually going to replace iron for the manufacture of rails, structural shapes, pipe, and wire. In 1873 he organized a steel rail company. The first steel furnace at Braddock, Pennsylvania, began to roll rails in 1874. Carnegie continued building by cutting prices, driving out competitors, shaking off weak partners, and putting earnings back into the company. He never went public (sold shares of his company in order to raise money). Instead, he obtained capital (money) from profits - and, when necessary, from local banks - and he kept on growing, making heavy steel alone. By 1878 the company was valued at $1.25 million. In the 1880s Carnegie's purchases included a majority stake in the H. C. Frick.
Over the next few decades, he created a steel empire, maximizing profits and minimizing inefficiencies through ownership of factories, raw materials, and transportation infrastructure involved in steel making. In 1892, his primary holdings were consolidated to form Carnegie Steel Company.
The Carnegie Steel Company continued to prosper even during the depression of 1892, which was marked by the bloody Homestead strike. (Although Carnegie professed support for the rights of unions, his goals of economy and efficiency may have made him favor local management at the Homestead plant, which used Pinkerton guards to try to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers.) Carnegie built plants around the country, using technology and methods that made manufacturing steel easier, faster, and more productive. For every step of the process, he owned exactly what he needed: the raw materials, ships and railroads for transporting the goods, and even coal fields to fuel the steel furnaces.
This start-to-finish strategy helped Carnegie become the dominant force in the industry and an exceedingly wealthy man. It also made him known as one of America's "builders," as his business helped to fuel the economy and shape the nation into what it is today. By 1889, Carnegie Steel Corporation was the largest of its kind in the world.
In 1900 the profits of Carnegie Steel (which became a corporation) were $40,000,000, of which Carnegie’s share was $25,000,000. Carnegie sold his company to J.P. Morgan’s newly formed United States Steel Corporation for $480,000,000 in 1901. At the age of 65, Carnegie decided to spend the rest of his days helping others. While he had begun his philanthropic work years earlier by building libraries and making donations, Carnegie expanded his efforts in the early 20th century.
He built some three thousand public libraries all over the English-speaking world. In 1895 the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh was opened, housing an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a music hall. He also built a group of technical schools that make up the present-day Carnegie Mellon University. The Carnegie Institution of Washington was set up to encourage research in the natural and physical sciences. Carnegie Hall was built in New York City. The Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was created to provide pensions for university professors. Carnegie also established the Endowment for International Peace to seek an end to the war.
He was an influential writer too. His well-known piece of writing, Triumphant Democracy was published in 1886 and well accepted in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it was a subject of huge criticism as it highlighted the quality of American life. Carnegie wrote frequently about political and social matters, and his most famous article, Wealth, appearing in the June 1889 issue of the North American Review. This was later published as the 1900 book The Gospel of Wealth. This doctrine held that a man who accumulates great wealth has a duty to use his surplus wealth for "the improvement of mankind" in philanthropic causes. A "man who dies rich dies disgraced."
Andrew Carnegie is considered as the second richest man in history. He built the Carnegie Steel Company which was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world in the 1890s. He later turned towards philanthropy and did significant work in the field of education and culture. He founded various organizations like Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. His benevolence can be seen in the donations he made for the promotion of education, uplifting the weaker section of the society and world peace. Andrew Carnegie’s donations summed up to around $350 million.
He was also the recipient of many honorary degrees, including honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Glasgow, honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Aberdeen, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen the Netherlands.
In 1901 he received the Freedom of the City of Glasgow and the Freedom of the City of Belfast in 1910.
Carnegie and his family belonged to the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, also known informally as the Northern Presbyterian Church. Though not very religious himself, Carnegie adored the hymnody of his youth, and provided some 7,500 organs, free of charge, to congregations around the world.
Politics
Carnegie became convinced for life that American republicanism was the perfect solution to Europe's long-standing political failures.
Views
In 1901, Carnegie retired from business and turned his full-time interest in giving away his vast fortune to improve the lives of others. Fond of saying that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced," Carnegie turned his attention to giving away his fortune.
An admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Carnegie had maintained a lifelong focus on social justice, education, and the promotion of peace. After selling the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan for a sum approaching $500 million, he started numerous nonprofits that are still in existence, including Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In 1903, Carnegie handwrote a note establishing the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust with the purpose of enriching the lives of people living in the town of his birth. Today, the trust administers public programs that further education, culture, and the arts, sports and recreational activities, and community welfare projects.
Carnegie made major contributions to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, as well as to the New York City Public Library. His donations helped New York to expand its branch library system, and they funded close to 3,000 other public libraries in the United States and beyond.
Carnegie believed, however, that just giving away money was not enough - in fact, it could make things worse. "[O]f every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today," he opined, "it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent - so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure." The problem, as he saw it, was "indiscriminate charity" - providing help to people who were unwilling to help themselves. That sort of philanthropy only rewarded bad habits rather than encouraging good ones. He argued that philanthropy should instead support universities, libraries, hospitals, meeting halls, recreational facilities, and similar projects that strengthened and refreshed individuals so they could become more independent and productive themselves.
Quotations:
"You are what you think. So just think big, believe big, act big, work big, give big, forgive big, laugh big, love big, and live big."
"There is a power under your control that is greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all your fears and superstitions combined. It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire."
"The first thing to do about an obstacle is simply to stand up to it and not complain about it or whine under it but forthrightly attack it. Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven't half the strength you think they have. Just stand up to it, that's all, and don't give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it. Something has to break and it won't be you, it will be the obstacle."
"Wealth is not to feed our egos but to feed the hungry and to help people help themselves."
"It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office."
"The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich."
"There is no use whatsoever in trying to help people who do not help themselves."
"A man's reading program should be as carefully planned as his daily diet, for that too is food, without which he cannot grow mentally. "
"Young man, make your name worth something."
"Ninety percent of all millionaires become so through owning real estate. More money has been made in real estate than in all industrial investments combined. The wise young man or wage earner of today invests his money in real estate."
Membership
Carnegie was one of more than 50 members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
,
United States
Personality
Throughout his life, Andrew Carnegie possessed a voracious appetite for learning and spent many hours reading. During his family’s passage in steerage across the Atlantic, he learned everything he could about the ship, helping the sailors and often sharing meals with them. During his years as a messenger boy, he earned renown for memorizing every house and businessman who lived along his route. With a group of young friends, he created a debate society. A literature enthusiast, he hung around local theaters learning all the lines in Shakespeare’s plays. He taught himself Morse Code and became one of the few telegraphers who could transcribe the messages immediately, simply by listening to the dots and dashes.
Carnegie also loved libraries. As a working teen, he found himself suddenly barred from the local library when a new rule stated that patrons must be enrolled in school. A letter he wrote to the newspaper was instrumental in getting libraries opened to all the youth of Pittsburgh.
Besides his business and charitable interests, Carnegie enjoyed traveling and meeting and entertaining leading figures in many fields. He was friends with Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain, William Gladstone, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Interests
reading
Politicians
Abraham Lincoln
Writers
William Shakespeare
Sport & Clubs
golf
Connections
In 1887, the 51-year-old industrial baron married Louise Whitfield (1857-1946), who was two decades his junior and the daughter of a New York City merchant. The couple had one child, Margaret (1897-1990). The Carnegies lived in a Manhattan mansion and spent summers in Scotland, where they owned Skibo Castle, set on some 28,000 acres.
Father:
William Carnegie
William started to work in cotton factories but did not continue for long and ended up making linens at home.
Mother:
Margaret Morrison Carnegie
Carnegie’s mother, who was a major influence in his life, lived with him until her death in 1886. Andrew founded the Carnegie Institute of Technology and created Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women in honor of his mother.
Spouse:
Louise Whitfield Carnegie
Louise advised Andrew as they jointly helped the creation of more than 2,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929.
Thomas was the younger brother of Andrew, also a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
Daughter:
Margaret Carnegie Miller
From 1934 to 1973 Margaret was a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the grant-making foundation established by her father in 1911. From 1973 until her death she was an honorary lifetime trustee.
