You Can’t Take it With You

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The New York Sun

Why did Andrew Carnegie give away all of his money? This is the question that Carnegie’s biographers have to confront. David Nasaw’s authoritative new biography goes a long way toward answering the question, even if he cannot—perhaps no biographer can—ultimately fathom Carnegie’s complex motives and temperament.

Mr. Nasaw deftly dismisses the conventional explanations. Carnegie did not feel guilty about accumulating a vast fortune. He did not feel he had earned his wealth immorally, let alone illegally. J.P. Morgan’s claim that Carnegie became the richest man in the world when he sold his steel corporation to Morgan did not embarrass Carnegie a bit. Carnegie did not build his famous public libraries or establish his endowments for peace and social welfare as public relations ploys. Long before he became a controversial public figure, during a period when he was regarded as a pro-union supporter of the workingman and a rebuke to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he had resolved to divest himself of his capital.

Mr. Nasaw’s probes Carnegie’s personality and philosophy — which Carnegie wrote up as “The Gospel of Wealth” — to describe an individual who believed he owed his good fortune to his community, a key term in the Carnegian lexicon. Unlike many self-made men (Carnegie was the son of a feckless Scottish weaver), he did not claim he had succeeded through hard work and genius. Carnegie scoffed at businessmen who put in 10- and 12-hour days. Even at the height of his involvement in business, Carnegie rarely spent a full day in his office. He disliked the go-getter mentality and counseled his fellow Americans to make opportunities for leisure. Carnegie loved to travel, read, attend the theater, and generally absorb culture, which he regarded not as a frill but as a necessity.

Carnegie headed for the country’s cultural capital, New York City, as soon as he could break away from commitments in Pittsburgh, where he had begun his rise as a messenger boy and telegraph operator before graduating to Pennsylvania railroad executive positions. Pittsburgh had set him up to sell bonds and form partnerships in the iron and steel industries based on insider trading (not yet designated a crime or even considered immoral). What Mr. Nasaw dubs “crony capitalism” formed the basis of Carnegie’s success.

But the ebullient Carnegie — one associate called him the happiest man he had ever met — had literary aspirations and quoted Shakespeare liberally. He befriended influential figures like Matthew Arnold and William Gladstone, not to mention the man who became his philosophical mentor, Herbert Spencer. Indeed, Spencer and Shakespeare went hand in hand for Carnegie to the point that he could close a deal quoting either writer.

Herbert Spencer, Mr. Nasaw believes, is the key to Carnegie’s decision to give away his money. Spencer believed in evolutionary progress and that the “apogee of human achievement was industrial society,” Mr. Nasaw writes. “What counted most for Carnegie was not simply that Spencer had decreed that evolutionary progress was inevitable and industrial society an improvement on its forbears, but that this progress was moral as well as material.” Businessmen like Carnegie were not the creators of this progress but its agents. They arose out of the community that fostered their efforts.

In Carnegie’s view, Spencer was not merely presenting ideas. For him, Spencer’s notions were laws, and so in “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie refers to the “Law of Accumulation of Wealth” and the “Law of Competition.” In this positivist reading of history, Carnegie met the world head-on — very much as he does in the evocative photograph on the cover of Mr. Nasaw’s biography. Carnegie is shown walking toward us, open to whatever experience has to teach him. Naturally, then, he argued that he should give back what the world had, in effect, bestowed upon him. So certain was Carnegie that great wealth must be redistributed that he even argued against the notion of inheritance for children of the wealthy. Let them, as well, meet the world head-on.

With so much empathy for his community, then, how could Carnegie have consorted with Henry Clay Frick, a notorious and brutal strikebreaker? Unions, Carnegie concluded, did not understand that the Spencerian world, had periods of downs as well as ups—as Mr. Nasaw’s illustrates in his redaction of the philosopher:

“It seems hard than an unskillfulness which with all his efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan,” Herbert Spencer had written, almost as if he were advising Carnegie not to give in to the demands of employees. “It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence.

Or as Carnegie himself notes in the social Darwinist “The Gospel of Wealth” (included in a new Penguin paperback edited by Mr. Nasaw): “While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” As you may already have gathered, Carnegie was a better stylist than Spencer.

But a mystery remains in the heart of Andrew Carnegie’s heart. When he published “Triumphant Democracy,” which essentially ignored the terrible suffering that Spencer’s version of evolutionary progress entailed, Spencer himself wrote Carnegie: “Great as may be hereafter the advantages of enormous progress America makes, I hold that the existing generations of Americans, and those to come for a long time hence, are and will be essentially sacrificed.” What did Carnegie say to that? Mr. Nasaw does not comment, except to say, “What mattered most was that he be taken seriously as a thinker and author.”

In other words, Mr. Nasaw does not know what Carnegie thought of Spencer’s rebuke. Instead of just shilling for capitalism, shouldn’t Carnegie have explored its devastating consequences as well? Failure to do so deprived Carnegie of the very status of literary figure and thinker he craved.

Didn’t Carnegie understand as much? And shouldn’t Mr. Nasaw probe this fatal flaw? Instead, he writes that Carnegie “wore his many hats well.” So he did, when he looked in his own mirror. But biography ought to reflect perspectives not available to the subject. Even where evidence is lacking, some rather sharp questions have to be asked of a subject who did so much good while refusing to acknowledge that it arose out of so much questionable philosophy.

crollyson@nysun.com


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