Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie
Birthday	Wednesday, November 25, 1835
Birthplace	Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
Died	Monday, August 11, 1919
Occupation	Business magnate, Philanthropist

Carnegie, Andrew

(1835–1919) iron/steel manufacturer, philanthropist; born in Dunfermline, Scotland. Although he had only a primary-school education, he grew up in a family that valued ideas and books as well as progressive social and economic reforms. His father was a handloom weaver and he brought his family to the U.S.A. in 1848 where they joined relatives in Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pa. Young Andrew quickly moved from bobbin boy in a factory to a telegraph operator (and was one of the first to learn to read messages "by ear"); he then became an assistant to Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad (1853–65); during the Civil War he was not in military service but he helped improve the Federal army's telegraph communications. He left the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 to concentrate on his own businesses, first the Keystone Bridge Company, then making iron and steel. Everything he took up made him wealthier, and the secrets of his success seemed to be that he surrounded himself with intelligent men, invested heavily in new equipment, and managed to keep majority ownership in his companies so that he did not have to answer to stockholders. As he prospered, he broadened his interests, traveling abroad and deliberately seeking to exchange views with leading individuals in Great Britain as well as America; he would count Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain, William Gladstone and Theodore Roosevelt among his friends; he wrote several books, including Triumphant Democracy (1886), setting forth his optimistic views about the role of capitalism and democracy; he built a great estate in Scotland where he often entertained prominent people. Although progressive in some respects, he was essentially a benevolent dictator; he had little patience with the burgeoning labor movement, and the blackest mark on his career was the Homestead strike of 1892, when he allowed his assistant, Henry Clay Frick, to take steps that led to violence. (Carnegie himself was in Scotland during the strike.) By 1889 his Carnegie Steel Company had become one of the world's largest; when he sold his business to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for some $260 million profit for himself, he was one of the richest men in the world and could devote himself to his philanthropies. He had started donating money as a young entrepreneur; in 1889 he published an article, "Wealth," in which he argued that the wealthy were obligated to distribute their fortunes to improve the world. He had begun by helping communities build libraries and helping churches buy organs; he established pension funds for teachers, eventually setting up the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1905) to support this as well as other programs; he helped support various scientific undertakings, eventually establishing the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1902) to support such; he set up the Carnegie Hero Funds (1904) to recognize individuals who had performed heroic acts; he donated to many institutions of higher learning in Scotland as well as in America and set up the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (and its sister school, Margaret Morrison); he set up the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910 and helped build the international court of justice at the Hague. It is estimated that he eventually gave away $350 million, but his money failed to buy what he most wanted, world peace, and he died before the U.S.A. rejected the League of Nations he had long dreamed of establishing.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919)

steel magnate who believed the rich should administer wealth—for public benefit. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 83]

See: Philanthropy

Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.