Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Carnegie, Andrew
CARNEGIE, ANDREW (1835-1919), manufacturer and philanthropist, the elder son of William Carnegie, a damask linen weaver of Dunfermline, by his wife, Margaret, daughter of Thomas Morrison, of the same town, was born at Dunfermline 25 November 1835. In the ‘hungry forties’ an unprecedented depression was experienced in the linen trade of Dunfermline, and in 1848 the Carnegie family emigrated to the United States of America, and took up residence in Allegheny city, Pennsylvania. At the age of thirteen Andrew Carnegie began work as a bobbin-boy in a cotton factory at a weekly wage of one dollar and twenty cents. Within a few months he had changed to a bobbin manufacturing establishment, where his duties included the firing of the furnace of a small engine in a cellar. Feeling like a ‘bird in a cage’ in the cellar, he applied for a post as a messenger boy in Pittsburg telegraph office (1850), and was appointed at a weekly wage of two and a half dollars. As he entered on his new duties Colonel James Anderson, the founder of free libraries in Western Pennsylvania, announced that he intended to open his private library of 4,000 volumes ‘to working boys in Pittsburg’. As telegraph messengers did not ‘actually work with their hands’ it was proposed to exclude them. The youthful Carnegie wrote a letter to the Pittsburg Dispatch arguing that telegraph messengers were ‘working boys’, and so impressed was the colonel that he enlarged the classification. Every Saturday a new volume was obtained by Carnegie, and in after life, when he had become a great founder of free libraries, he declared that it was his own personal experience which led him to value a library beyond all other forms of beneficence.
In 1853 Carnegie was appointed clerk and telegraph operator to Thomas A. Scott, assistant superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Two years afterwards Scott asked his youthful clerk if he could find five hundred dollars to invest in the Adams Express stock. The dollars were raised by mortgaging a small cottage which the Carnegie family had acquired. The Adams Express investment was followed by a successful railway sleeping-car venture with T. T. Woodruff. Having been shown a model of a car by Woodruff, Carnegie divined that the invention was destined to become an ‘important adjunct of railway travelling’. The Woodruff Company was ultimately absorbed by the famous Pullman Car Company. In 1859 Scott became vice-president of the railroad company, and appointed Carnegie superintendent of the western division of the line. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Carnegie accompanied Scott, then assistant secretary for war, to the front. During the Civil War iron reached 180 dollars a ton and, new rails being scarce, the railway systems of America were regarded as ‘fast becoming dangerous’. Quick to grasp the situation, Carnegie organized a rail manufacturing company, and at the same time launched the Pittsburg Locomotive Works. Fires in connexion with railway wooden bridges led to the formation of the Keystone Iron Bridge Company. Wealth flowed in to Carnegie from all three concerns, and he and his colleagues found another profitable investment in the oil wells of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
A visit to England in 1867 convinced Carnegie that the Bessemer converter would revolutionize the iron industry, and, hurrying back, he formed a new combination and raised capital for the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which were erected on a site of 1,200 acres near Pittsburg. By 1881 Carnegie was the foremost ironmaster in America, and the capital of the concerns controlled by Carnegie Brothers and Company was estimated at five million dollars. Of the total, Carnegie was credited with 2,737,977 dollars. By 1888 his wealth had increased sixty times over, and in 1899 when the various interests were vested in the Carnegie Steel Company, the profits were forty million dollars.
In 1900 Carnegie issued his book The Gospel of Wealth to emphasize a doctrine which he had proclaimed from many platforms that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced’. He then decided to ‘cease to struggle for more wealth’ and to take up ‘the more serious and difficult task of wise distribution’. The great Carnegie steel concern was accordingly sold to the United States Steel Corporation for the colossal sum of £89,000,000 (1901), and Carnegie retired from business the same year. Of this total, £60,000,000 represented Carnegie’s share. Free from the cares of the steel company, Carnegie inaugurated his task of ‘wise distribution’ of surplus wealth by making a grant of four million dollars for the establishment of an accident and pension fund for the workmen who had ‘contributed so greatly’ to his success, and another of one million dollars for the maintenance of the libraries and other institutions which he had founded for his workers in and about Pittsburg.
Carnegie’s first gift of a library had been made to his native city in 1882, and one of the conditions attached to acceptance was that the local authority should adopt the Free Libraries (Scotland) Act (1867), and provide site and maintenance. On the plea that, when a library is supported financially by a community, ‘all taint of charity is dispelled’, Carnegie imposed a similar condition in connexion with most of the libraries which he endowed. In glancing over a newspaper immediately after he had founded the pension fund for his old workers he read: ‘The gods send thread for a web begun.’ The words sank into his heart, and his first ‘web’ thereafter took the form of five and a quarter million dollars for sixty-eight branch libraries in New York city. Between the date of the opening of the Dunfermline library and the year 1919, Carnegie and (after 1911) the Carnegie Corporation of New York made gifts amounting approximately to 60,600,000 dollars in order to endow libraries in the United States, the British Isles, Canada, and other countries. Of this sum about twelve million dollars were devoted to the endowment of 660 libraries in the British Isles.
Carnegie also made, among others, the following benefactions:
| In the United States | dollars | |
| 1896, | The Carnegie Institute and Carnegie Library of Pittsburg | 27,000,000 |
| 1902, | The Carnegie Institute of Washington | 22,300,000 |
| 1904, | The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission | 5,000,000 |
| 1905, | The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching | 29,250,000 |
| 1910, | The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | 10,000,000 |
| 1911, | The Carnegie Corporation of New York | 125,000,000 |
| In the British Isles | ||
| 1901, | The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland | 10,000,000 |
| 1903, | The Carnegie Dunfermline Trust | 3,750,000 |
| 1908, | The Carnegie Hero Fund Trust | 1,250,000 |
| 1916, | The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust | 10,000,000 |
| In Europe | ||
| 1903, | The Palace of Peace at the Hague | 1,500,000 |
| 1909-1911, | The Carnegie Hero Fund Commissions (France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy) | 4,290,000 |
The ‘hero’ funds provide for the recognition and compensation of those who lose their lives or receive injuries in their efforts to serve or save their fellows; the objects of the Scottish Universities fund are the improvement and expansion of the four Scottish universities and the payment of the whole or part of the class fees of students of Scottish birth or extraction; the trust deed of the United Kingdom Trust directs that the income shall be applied for the well-being of the masses of the people of Great Britain and Ireland by such means as are embraced within the meaning of the word ‘charitable’; the Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching embraces the Ten Million Dollar fund for pensions for the teachers of universities, colleges, and technical schools in the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland; the Institute of Washington was founded to ‘encourage research and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind’; while the Carnegie Corporation of New York was established to support and develop the institutions which Carnegie had founded. Carnegie had a great affection for his native city. His benefactions began with public baths; then came the free library, a technical school, new baths, the purchase of the romantic Glen of Pittencrieff, and the formation of the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Three-quarters of a million pounds were placed in the hands of the trust ‘to bring into the lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more sweetness and light’.
Carnegie was installed as lord rector of St. Andrews University in 1902, and received the honorary degree of LL.D. He was also lord rector of Edinburgh University in 1906, and of Aberdeen University from 1912 to 1914. He could lay no claim to education in the scholastic sense of the term; but he showed a wonderful affinity with men of letters, and was on terms of close friendship with Gladstone, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and especially with Viscount Morley of Blackburn. His association with these men quickened and strengthened his love for English literature, and, viewing things more from the point of view of culture than he had done in early life, he became less inclined to ‘weigh up national wealth’ in the language of commerce. A desire to live in romantic surroundings led him to purchase the estate of Skibo, of some 80,000 acres, in Sutherlandshire, where he built a mansion and delighted in maintaining the traditions of the Scottish Highland laird, his guests being led to meals by a piper.
Carnegie, who was a member of the Peace Society of Great Britain, became in 1907 the first president of the Peace Society of New York, and in 1913, when the palace of peace was opened at the Hague, he had visions of the establishment of an international court of justice. He thought Wilhelm II ‘a man of destiny’, and in 1912 had the distinction of presenting the Kaiser with ‘an address of congratulation on his peaceful reign of twenty-five years’. Two years later, in the closing chapter of his Autobiography, Carnegie wrote: ‘What a change! The world convulsed by war as never before. Men slaying each other like wild beasts.’
Carnegie died at Lenox, Massachusetts, 11 August 1919. He married in 1887 Louise, daughter of John W. Whitfield, of New York, by whom he had one daughter.
Carnegie wrote extensively, beginning with two books of travel, An American Four-in-Hand in Britain (1883) and Round the World (1884). These volumes were followed by Triumphant Democracy (1886), The Gospel of Wealth (1900), The Empire of Business (1902), Life of James Watt (1905), and Problems of To-day (1908).
A three-quarters length portrait of Carnegie by W. W. Ouless, R.A., is reproduced in Royal Academy Pictures for 1900; Edouard Lanteri executed a bust in 1907; a portrait painted by E. A. Walton, R.S.A., in 1913 belongs to the university of St. Andrews. A life-size bust in marble by Sir W. Goscombe John, R.A., was sculptured in 1914 to be placed in the palace of peace at The Hague (Royal Academy Pictures, 1914).
[Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, 1920; John Ross, The Carnegie American Benefactions in Operation, 1912; Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, 1900; A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1919; H. N. Casson, The Romance of Steel, 1907; private information.]