From the front page
of the Hickory Daily Record, Aug. 11,
1919
Andrew Carnegie,
Steel King and Altruist, Dead. . . Noted Figure in Business and Philanthropic
World Passes Away at Summer Home in Lenox, Mass., as Result of Pneumonia
By the Associated
Press
Lenox, Mass., Aug. 11—Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate and
philanthropist, died at his summer home, “Shadow Brook,” at 7:10 this morning
after an illness of three days.
So sudden was his death that his daughter, Mrs. Roswell
Miller, was unable to get to his bedside before he died. His wife and secretary
were with him when the end came.
Mr. Carnegie had spent most of the summer at Lenox, coming
here late in May and up to a few days ago enjoyed himself in almost daily
fishing trips on Lake Mackinak which borders his big Shadow Brook estate, and
in riding over his place.
He was taken suddenly ill Friday and grew steadily worse.
His advanced age made him an easy victim of the disease.
Mr. Carnegie came to Lenox to make his home in May, 1917,
and spent the last three summers here. He intended to spend his declining days
here and when he bought the place announced he would reside her permanently.
Mr. Carnegie leaves his widow, who was Miss Louise Whitfield
of New York, and his daughter, Margaret, who married last April Ensign Roswell
Miller of New York.
Raced Against Death
to Give Away Wealth
Andrew Carnegie began a race against time when, in 1901, at
the age of 65, he resolved to give away his enormous fortune. He held it
“disgraceful” for a man to keep on gathering idle millions. In the
comparatively few years which the actuary could allow him, he would
disembarrass himself of practically all he had. No man had ever launched a philanthropic
campaign of such dimensions.
His was then a fortune of just about a quarter billion
dollars, the largest ever acquired by a foreign-born American, second only to
the John D. Rockefeller wealth as the largest individual accumulation in the
United States, and, built, as it was, of 5 per cent steel bonds, it would
without so much as turning over one’s hand, have approached half a billion by
the time Carnegie could call himself an octogenarian on November 25, 1915.
To give the stupendous sum away, in about half the time he
had taken to gather it, was a purpose Carnegie had fairly well fulfilled when
his death overtook him to-day. He had distributed about $300,000,000.It was
giving money away at the rate of over $20 million a year, or more than $50,000 a
day.
He declared, when he gave up gathering wealth and announced
an era of distribution, that he expected to find it more difficult to give his
millions away than it had been to acquire them. “How would you give
$300,000,000 away?” became such a popular query that an English advertiser who
employed it, received no less than 45,000 suggestions as to how Carnegie could
rid himself of his wealth. Twelve thousand persons solved the problem in party
by asking some money for themselves.
The answers which Carnegie himself gave and backed up with
his millions have made him the most original if not the greatest of
philantropists.
Before he sailed for Scotland in 1901, he left letters
announcing gifts of $9 million. His first big give was setting aside $4 million
to supply pensions and relief for the injured and aged employes of his steel
plants—“an acknowledgement of the deep debt which I owe to the workmen who have
contributed to greatly to my success.” He added an extra million for the
support of libraries for his workmen, and took up his library hobby in a
wholesale way by giving $5.2 million to New York City for the erection of 65
branch libraries in the metropolis. Another million he gave for a library in
St. Louis.
“I have just begun to give money away,” he said in an
announcement of these gifts. He kept it up as fast as he could with
discrimination. On libraries alone he spent upwards of $53 million. He gave
them to some 2,000 English speaking communities throughout the world. One of
his libraries in the Fiji Islands.
He remembered Pittsburgh, the scene of his steel making
triumphs, by establishing there a great institute, including the largest of his
libraries, a museum, a magnificent concert hall, and the Carnegie Technological
schools, with a total endowment of $16 million.
He built a great national institution in Washington, which
should be the fountain head of advanced work in “investigation, research and
discovery,” and placed in the hands of its trustees at total endowment of some
$20 million.
To his native Scotland his largest single gift was a fund of
$10 million to aid education in Scottish universities.
He carried out his pet idea of a hero commission, endowed in
1905 with $5 million by which hundreds of men, women and children have been
rewarded with Carnegie medals of pensions for acts of heroism in the rescue of
imperiled persons. He later extended similar benefactions to several foreign
countries.
He established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, with a total fund of $15 million, which has taken up efficiently
and surveys of educational work, aided many institutions and provided pensions
for college professors. In 1911 he capitalized his educational benevolence, so
that his gifts to libraries, colleges and other institutions should live after
him by establishing the Carnegie Corporation with a fund of $25 million.
One of his latest and greatest ideals was the abolition of
war, a hope that he cherished in the face of international conflicts. He gave
$10 million toward an International Peace Fund, and built the Peace Palace at
The Hague, which was dedicated in 1913. He gave $750,000 for the Bureau of
American Republics at Washington.
His love of music moved him to equip hundreds of churches
and institutions with pipe organs. He never gave directly any large sum to
religious purposes. Of his organ gifts he said he would hold himself
responsible for what the organ pealed forth on the Sabbath but not for what
might be said in the pulpit. One of his very earliest gifts, as far back as
1891, was the Carnegie Music Hall in New York at a cost of $32 million, and as
president of the New York Philharmonic Society he spent his money liberally in
furthering its ideals. He also liberally back the Pittsburgh orchestra.
To the Allied Engineers Societies he gave $2 million. His
small gifts to colleges amounted to some $2 million. NO man left at his death
such an unique and such a scattered series of monuments to perpetuate his
memory.
In the background of these 15 years of philanthropy there is
the familiar story of Scotch thrift, a little luck, and steel, which made such
generosity possible.
Carnegie was fond of telling the story himself. Rapidly
covered it was this: His first penny he earned unexpectedly as a child when he
astonished his schoolmaster in Dunfermline by reciting Burn’s long poem, “Man
Was Made to Mourn,” without a break. There is an anecdote of how, when asked in
Sunday school to recite a proverb from scripture, the young Scot unwittingly
forecast his own fortune by giving the homely advice “Look after the pence, and
the pounds will take care of themselves.”
Andrew was 12 when his father, a master weaver, was brought
almost to destitution. The steam looms drove him out of business. The family
numbered four, including “Andy” and his younger brother William. The parents
decided to migrate to America, whence some relatives had proceeded them with
success. The settled at Alleghany City, Pa., across the river from Pittsburgh,
in 1848. The father and Andrew found work in a cotton factory, the son as a
bobbin boy. It was his first work. The salary was $1.20 a week. He was soon
promoted, at a slight advance, to engineer’s assistant. He stoked the boilers
and ran the engine in the factory cellar.
In these dingy quarters, where he worked 12 hurs a day, came
the inspiration that later led to his library benefactions, he said. A Colonel
Anderson, possessed for some 400 books, announced that he would open his
library every week-end and allow boys to borrow any books they pleased.
Carnegie was one of the most eager readers.
“Only he who has longed as I did for Saturdays to come,” he
has said, “can understand what Colonel Anderson did for me and other boys of
Alleghany. Is it any wonder that I resolved, if ever surplus wealth came to me,
I would use it imitating my benefactor?”
At 14 Carnegie emerged from the engine cellar and became a
telegraph messenger. J. Douglas Reid, a Dunfermline man, who had come to
America early, was head of the office and he made Andrew his protégé.
Telegraphy was then almost a new thing. Nobody ventured to read the dots and
dashes by sound. They were all impressed on tape. Carnegie is said to have been
the third operator in the United States to accomplish the feat of reading
messages by sound alone. He practiced mornings before the regular operators
came around.
“One day a death signal came,” he has related, “before the
operators arrived.” In those days death messages were the most important
messages we handled. I ventured to take this one.”
He did it correctly and delivered the telegram before the
regular force was on duty at all. It won him promotion to the key and sounder.
When the Pennsylvania railroad put up a telegraph wire of its own he became
clerk under Divisional Superintendency Thomas A. Scott. His salary jumped to
$35 a month. “Mr. Scott,” he observed, “was then receiving $125 a month, and I
used to wonder what on earth he could do with so much money.”
Andrew was 16 when his father died, and he became a
capitalist. He had been told by his trusted employer that 10 shares of Adams
Express stock could be had for $500 and it was a good investment.
At a family
council that night, Carnegie’s mother decided that she could mortgage her
little home for $500. The stock was built and it brought monthly dividends of
one per cent.
“I can see that first check of $10 dividend money now,” he
said when he became a retired ironmaster with millions. “It was something new
to all of us, for none of us had ever received anything but from toil.”
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