Seemingly odd juxtapositions of wealth and poverty as well as power and powerlessness are offered by the two stamps that collectively are today’s #stampoftheday. While there is much truth to those contrasts, it also turns out that the stamps, which also are separated by more than three decades, are more connected than they appear.
On the one hand, there’s Andrew Carnegie, the famed industrialist and philanthropist, who was pictured on a 4-cent stamp, issued on November 25, 1960, the 125th anniversary of his birth in Scotland. On the other, there’s Puerto Rico, which was the subject of a stamp, issued on November 25, 1938, as part of a series issued to “direct to public attention to American ownership” of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
A Scottish immigrant who came to the US in 1848 when he was 12, Carnegie had seen his father go through many difficult times. “I began to learn what poverty meant,” he later wrote. “It was burnt into my heart then that my father had to beg for work. And then and there came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man.”
Carnegie never received a formal education, but read whenever he was able, often by taking advantage of the generosity of Colonel James Anderson, who every Saturday night opened his personal library of 400 volumes to working boys in Pittsburgh. Carnegie was so grateful that he “resolved, if ever wealth came to me, [to see to it] that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to the noble man.”
After a short time working in a cotton mill, Carnegie became a telegraph messenger when he was 12. He rose quickly, becoming a telegraph operator and secretary and then as a division superintendent for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He began making investments (sometimes using insider information) in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges, and oil derricks. He became a bond salesman, raising money for American enterprises in Europe.
In the latter part of the 19th century, Carnegie began building what became a steel empire. Ruthless in keeping down costs, he managed by the motto “watch costs, and the profits take care of themselves.” His mills were leaders in developing and adopting processes that allowed for cheap and efficient mass production of steel. In addition, he created one of the first vertically integrated enterprises, ultimately controlling not only mills, but also coal and iron fields, as well as rail lines and lake steamships to transport materials and finished products.
Unlike many other 19th century industrialists, Carnegie claimed to support the rights of laborers to unionize. However, his rhetoric didn’t always match his actions, which focused on getting steel workers to work long hours for low wages. And when workers at his Homestead mill struck in 1892, he supported the mills’ manager, Henry Clay Frick, a one-time competitor who had been bought out by Carnegie but was still managed the plant. Frick locked out workers and hired Pinkerton thugs to intimidate strikers, several of whom were killed in the conflict.
By 1900 Carnegie Steel was producing more steel than all of Great Britain, which a few decades earlier had outproduced all US steel mills. That year, financier J.P. Morgan mounted a major challenge to Carnegie’s empire. While Carnegie, who was then 64, believed he could beat Morgan, he decided that instead of spending years fighting Morgan, he would cash out and then as he had long planned and advocated he not only would get the education he had long desired. In addition, as he had written almost three decades earlier, he would “spend the surplus…for benevolent purposes” particularly those the supporting the “education and improvement of the poorer classes.”
“Man must have no idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry!” he had written at the time, adding, “To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery.”
Carnegie sold the company to Morgan for about $480 million, a transaction that earned him about $250 million (approximately $4.5 billion today). “Congratulations, Mr. Carnegie,” Morgan reportedly said when the deal closed, “you are now the richest man in the world.”
Fond of saying that “the man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” Carnegie turned his attention to systematically giving away his fortune in ways that helped people help themselves. The best ways to do so, he had written in 1889, was by supporting seven types of activities (listed in descending order): universities, free libraries, hospitals, parks, concert halls, swimming baths, and church buildings. (Several ministers publicly objected to his ranking swimming pools over churches.)
In keeping with these priorities, Carnegie helped fund over 2,500 public libraries and established the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (which later merged with another entity to become Carnegie-Mellon University). He also funded many other educational endeavors as well as Carnegie Hall and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. In addition, he founded both the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has helped establish or endowed many notable institutions, including the Children’s Television Workshop, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Brookings Institution.
A long-time supporter of efforts to ensure world peace, Carnegie also strongly opposed efforts to annex Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. While Cuba and the Philippines ultimately became sovereign states, Puerto Rico (and Guam) became US territories. The Carnegie Corporation later funded the first building in Puerto Rico built specifically to be a public library and it regularly funds entities and activities in Puerto Rico.
Such support, it seems to me, is ongoing evidence of the “better” side of Carnegie, who clearly was a complicated figure. In these challenging times, it’s worth paying attention to that part of Carnegie, the part who once wrote, in a memo to himself: “Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich.”
He added: “Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight.” Therefore, he hoped “to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring…sweetness and light” into the lives of his city’s workers. This, he concluded “is the noblest possible use of wealth.”
Be well, stay safe, contribute to the “enlightenment and joys of the mind” and all things that bring “sweetness and light” into the lives of others, fight for justice, and work for peace.