In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
AC–1835–2026  ·  The Counting House

Andrew
Carnegie

1835  —  1919
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie
Dunfermline, Scotland, 1835  ·  Lenox, Massachusetts, 1919

The weaver's son who became the richest man in the world, preached that the man who dies rich dies disgraced, and was in Scotland when the Pinkertons came up the river to Homestead.

A handloom weaver's son ruined by the steam loom, he landed in Pennsylvania at twelve, worked as a bobbin boy and a telegraph operator who could read the wire by ear, and rose through the Pennsylvania Railroad into iron, bridges and steel. By 1890 Carnegie Steel made rails cheaper than anyone on earth. In 1889 he published 'Wealth', the gospel that the rich are trustees for the poor; in 1901 he sold out to J. P. Morgan for $480 million and gave almost all of it away, in libraries, halls, pensions and a palace for peace at The Hague.

In July 1892 his partner Frick locked out the Homestead union and sent three hundred Pinkertons up the Monongahela. He had approved the plan. He stayed at Cluny Castle.

Consultation

The man who dies rich
dies disgraced.

Carnegie speaks from 2,184 chunks across eight works — the Autobiography, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays, The Empire of Business, Triumphant Democracy, Problems of To-day, his life of James Watt, and the two travel books, Round the World and An American Four-in-Hand in Britain.

His discourse holds his accusers: Arthur Burgoyne's Homestead, the history of the strike at his own works written the year after it; Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth, the great indictment of monopoly; and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, which treats his giving as display. Veblen's room is in this hall.

Ask him what happened in the three years between the Gospel of Wealth and Homestead. Ask him whether a billionaire's pledge is what he meant. Ask him where he was in July 1892. Ask him why the Autobiography stops in 1914.

The Gospel of WealthSteelHomesteadLibrariesTriumphant DemocracyPhilanthropyPeace
The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
Wealth  ·  North American Review  ·  June 1889

Drawn From the Corpus