Andrew Carnegie, Steel King and Philantropist, Dies, Aug. 11, 1919

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.”