by Peter Krass
“Yes.”
Carnegie, who was made an honorary member of the American Library Association, might peruse a few of the applications, then nod his approval. “All right, go ahead with them.”24
Some towns were refused for being too indebted already or for fumbling management of the library request, or for having what were deemed as adequate facilities, or because Carnegie knew a local capitalist who should be forced to give the building. Also, he did not give to state libraries, state historical society libraries, and proprietary or subscription libraries because they had access to alternative funding.
Detractors of his library giving naturally came to the fore with a reprise of the standard criticism that Carnegie was such a fervent building giver because he was Ramses II incarnate—he wanted to immortalize himself by demanding his name be carved above each threshold. “He has bought fame and paid cash for it,” his anti-imperialist ally Twain noted, “he has deliberately projected and planned out his fame for himself; he has arranged that his name shall be famous in the mouths of men for centuries to come. He has planned shrewdly, safely, securely, and will have his desire.”25 It was an easy criticism to make, but contrary to these loud and belligerent claims, Carnegie’s name being used was not a prerequisite to winning funds. While vain, he remained tasteful and practical. When the town of Lincoln, Illinois, proposed naming their library the Lincoln-Carnegie Memorial Library, Carnegie objected, declaring he “would consider it a desecration to have any name linked with that of Lincoln.” He also demurred when he gave a considerable sum to the Franklin Institute of Boston and it was proposed to rename the school the Franklin-Carnegie Institute.26 And as he explained to Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, “I find it difficult to avoid having gifts for new things called after the donors. Carnegie Hall New York was called by me The Music Hall a la Boston. Foreign artists refused to appear in ‘A Music Hall’—London idea. The Board changed it in my absence in Europe without consulting me. . . . The way of the Philanthropist is hard but I don’t do anything for popularity and just please my sel’—do what I think is useful. I never reply to attacks. Altho I confess I was surprised that you should have for a moment imagined there was a man living who could dream of coupling his name with Franklin or with any founder.”27 Carnegie held heroes in such high esteem that he never wanted or expected his name attached to theirs. Not one of the eventual 115 libraries in Indiana used his name, and only 27 percent of the libraries he provided for chose to do so.
Another blanket censure of his library program was that he was putting the proverbial cart before the horse. A taste for reading was a precious possession, Carnegie had said again and again, so why didn’t he provide the books?28 The books contained the knowledge, not the bricks, after all, and the quality of reading material at his libraries appeared to suffer. “Go to the nearest Carnegie Library and examine its catalog of books,” H. L. Mencken wrote years later. “The chances are five to one that you will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop.”29 Carnegie was steadfast in his refusal to give money for books; it was up to the locals to select what would best serve their community. When he did make exceptions—he gave $100 to Conneautville, Pennsylvania, $1,000 to Manassas, Virginia, and $6,000 to Erie, Pennsylvania, as well as about twenty-four other communities, for books—he came under fire for being a socialist.30 If giving free books, why not free clothes and furniture? And then there were the socialists who claimed his libraries were a devious means of distracting the worker from his daily suffering. Meanwhile, the allegedly distracted laborers, who were to be uplifted by the libraries, had no time or energy for books. In 1901, most steelworkers were still working twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks. It was a clear case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
It has been assumed that there was a broad-based movement against accepting his donations due to it being tainted money, but this is a false impression. Of the some 3,000 communities that applied and were offered libraries, only 225 ended up choosing not to sign the pledge when it was put to a vote; and of those, 98 already had library facilities. For the remainder, the majority of the reasons had nothing to do with Carnegie personally. The most frequent explanation was the community simply could not commit to the 10 percent maintenance clause because either it didn’t have the legal authority to raise the necessary taxes, or it simply couldn’t afford the added economic burden. Also, in some towns the paving of streets, the installation of sewers, and the building of new schools were the priorities, and there were instances when a single council member shot down the gift because of a pet project taking precedence. In yet other towns, people wanted more money than Carnegie was willing to give, or politically messy site controversies erupted that ended any hope for a gift. Across the southern states there was antagonism toward all northern industrialists, so communities there were less likely to accept his gifts. Ultimately, about 6 percent of those who rejected Carnegie money did so because it was tainted.31 It was a very small minority, but the most shrill.
When a Detroit contingent requested a library in 1902 and Carnegie offered $750,000, reaction was swift and cut to the bone. “We ought to be able to take care of ourselves, I should think,” said the city’s treasurer. “Who told Mr. Carnegie that we were worthy objects of charity, I wonder? . . . It doesn’t seem to me as though it would be a proper thing for this town to accept a big chunk of money as a gift from a man who has made his money the way Carnegie did.” The city was a labor stronghold, reflected vividly in the opposition’s opinions. “Carnegie ought to have distributed his money among his employees while he was making it,” said C. H. Johnson, Detroit resident and secretary of the Street Railway Employees. “No man can accumulate such wealth honorably. It may be legally honest, but it’s not morally honest.”32 When put to a vote, the offer was soundly rejected. Five years later, the people passed an issuance of bonds to fund a library.
The same reaction occurred in most labor and union strongholds; it was just a question of whether the labor contingent was large enough to vote down the offer. Labor leader Eugene V. Debs said, “We want libraries, and we will have them in glorious abundance when capitalism is abolished and working men are no longer robbed by the philanthropic pirates of the Carnegie class. Then the library will be as it should be, a noble temple dedicated to culture and symbolizing the virtues of the people.”33 Samuel Gompers thought Carnegie’s wealth could be put to more important uses but wrote a comrade in Toronto, “After all is said and done, he might put his money to a much worse act. Yes, accept his library, organize the workers, secure better conditions and particularly, reduction in hours of labor and then workers will have some chance and leisure in which to read books.”34 Labor leaders still carried the Homestead torch, echoing the 1892 St. Louis Dispatch editorial: “Ten thousand ‘Carnegie Public Libraries’ would not compensate the country for the direct and indirect evils resulting from the Homestead lockout.”
A handful of towns in England and Canada refused libraries because the money was considered tainted, but for a different reason: Carnegie spoke insultingly of Queen Victoria and the monarchy.35
Any criticism rolled off Carnegie because he knew millions of people derived pleasure from the libraries. In his lifetime, Carnegie and his foundations would establish 2,811 libraries at a cost of over $60 million. He could proudly say that the sun never set on his libraries. But not until the 1930s would scholars recognize that Carnegie had aided in the democratization of culture with his libraries.36 They were truly seeds.
The Patron Saint of Libraries also achieved the dubious distinction as a church organ donor, a seemingly quixotic choice for the agnostic. As a young man attending the Swedenborg society meetings in Allegheny City, he had found only the music exhilarating and was fond of quoting Confucius: “Music sacred tongue of God, I hear thee calling and I come.” When asked why he donated only organs to churches, he replied, “To lessen the pain of the ser-mons.”37 On another occasion he elaborated:
“You can’t always trust what the pulpit says, but you can always depend upon what the organ says.”38 Organs were a means for the agnostic to hedge his bet, too, just in case God was up there, watching Carnegie with a wry smile.
Contrary to all appearances, Carnegie was not completely antagonistic toward religion. He understood the need for a system of beliefs, wanted to believe there was a great Creator, and desired to reconcile religion and science, but he despised the oppressive creeds handed down by the various sects, and their branding of those who didn’t share their particular creed as heathens. So churches, as declared in his gospel, were not a top priority. In fact, Carnegie never intended organ giving to become such a popular component of his philanthropy, a position he divulged in explaining to Elizabeth Haldane, a Scottish author wanting to found a charity school in Edinburgh, why he would not aid her cause: “Sorry, I cannot extend my field to cover the cause you have at heart. It would be a case of Organs over again. I gave one Organ to a church in Allegheny City, my home, and it has resulted in giving or contributing to over four thousand Church Organs, and the correspondence really takes the greater part of one Secretary’s time. We have seven thousand Church Organs, arranged in order awaiting attention in this one department.”39 It was the uncontroversial nature of giving a beautiful organ that made the donations popular with the public and spurred thousands of requests.
Organ requests became so overwhelming that Bertram and Franks had to resort to the same process used for libraries: the request came in and a questionnaire went out. The U.S. church organ tally eventually reached 4,092, at a cost of $3,604,718.75. Pennsylvania received the most at 1,351, next was Ohio at 440, and then New York at 290. Nevada received 1. Another 3,597, at a cost of $2,643,593, were given to other countries, although 3,124 of those went to England and Scotland. The grand total: 7,689 organs costing $6,248,311.75.40 A good many clergymen’s voices were drowned out.
Nicely bronzed from their Mediterranean respite in the spring of 1901, the Carnegies made their customary visit to London for hobnobbing and shopping before proceeding to Skibo. Morgan was also in town, so talk of U.S. Steel could not be avoided. If Carnegie still had the feelings of a bereft father, he didn’t show it when both Morgan and he attended a dinner hosted by the London Chamber of Commerce for the New York Chamber of Commerce at Grocer’s Hall. Carnegie appeared to be the happiest man there, while, the newspapers noted, Morgan with his deformed nose hid behind a Mr. Morton when the photographer’s camera flashed.41 Besides being the world’s richest man and in the spotlight, Carnegie had another good reason to be happy— he was in the midst of planning a great benefaction for Scotland.
The Scottish universities at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews had been neglected for years, while the Scottish aristocracy sent their boys to Oxford or Cambridge. The Fortnightly Review had published a piece titled “The Scottish University Crisis” in December 1900, pointing out that the Scottish universities were second-rate educational institutions and estimating that it would take an endowment of $7.5 million to reorganize and modernize the schools.42 Thomas Shaw, a native of Dunfermline and a member of Parliament, was actively trying to revitalize the schools. As part of his campaign, he proposed some money be used to help students pay their tuition, thus attracting a larger and hopefully brighter body. In stepped Carnegie.
He approached Shaw shortly after arriving in Britain and offered $5 million in U.S. Steel bonds, the income to subsidize tuition. Based on the desired student enrollment, it was quickly determined that amount wouldn’t be sufficient, so Carnegie offered an additional $5 million. It appeared he was breaking from his creed of self-help. British critics certainly thought so, charging he would “pauperize” youth who should earn their education, and they resented his intrusion. Blackwood’s Magazine was ferocious: “Maybe Mr. Carnegie has never heard the fable of Midas. If for a moment he can overcome his loathing of the past, we would urge him to read it. . . . Push and screw; buy cheap and sell dear. . . . To get money you must strangle joy and murder peace. . . . Presently the American ideal of life will be our own. . . . In old days, a rich man enjoyed his wealth—and if he did the community ‘no good’ at least he did not insult it with ‘patronage.’”43 “Loathing of the past” referred to Carnegie’s derision of a classical education. More than ten years earlier, in the New York Daily Tribune, he had written an article titled “How to Win Fortune,” in which he concluded, based on the overwhelming number of businessmen dominating industry who started poor and had no university degree, that “college education as it exists seems almost fatal to success in that domain.”44 He had seen no use in studying the classics and dead languages; instead, he supported polytechnic and scientific schools, which were turning out men who made a real impact on manufacturing. Since then Carnegie, under the influence of men like John Morley, had modified his views. He had realized both technical and classical education played a role, but Blackwood’s cut him no slack. Other critics warned of Carnegie invading their country in an attempt to change their way of life, thus corrupting their educational system. Still others argued the money would be better spent refurbishing facilities, buying equipment, and building labs. Carnegie was caught off guard by the outcry, but if the likes of Blackwood’s thought it was going to bully him into shelving the idea, the editors were very wrong.
Supporters of tuition relief rallied around Carnegie, charging the English critics with desiring to suppress Scottish youth. Before proceeding, Carnegie wisely elected to consult with Lord Balfour of Burleigh, secretary of Scotland, the earl of Elgin, and Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour. Willing to hear all sides, Carnegie was hardly the autocratic monster his enemies made him out to be, but he was tenacious in his determination to help his homeland. Over a series of meetings, the group decided a balance between tuition aid and funds to enhance scientific research would be the most beneficial and would quiet the critics. Just before leaving London for Skibo, he received a crucial letter of encouragement from the prime minister, who congratulated him for his “splendid generosity, which is, so far as my knowledge goes, on quite an unexampled scale.” As for providing students with tuition relief, Bal-four still reserved judgment. “But as regards that part of it by which the adequate equipment of our scientific teaching would be permanently secured, I must express myself at once. . . . One discovery which adds to our command over the forces of nature may do more for mankind than the most excellent teaching of what is already known, absolutely necessary to national welfare as this latter is. And yet for sheer want of money our provision both in the department of teaching and that of research is deplorably deficient. It gives me intense gratification to think that, so far as Scotland is concerned, this wretched state of things is now, through your liberality, to be brought to an end.”45 Balfour’s emphasis on the crucial importance of scientific discovery influenced Carnegie now and in later benefactions. As he subsequently told Morley, “I get many letters telling me how important is the remission of fees, but I don’t place that feature as of first importance. Research is the soul.”46
After the deliberations, he judiciously created the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and endowed it with $10 million in U.S. Steel bonds, with revenue from $5 million going toward tuition aid for qualified youth who might otherwise not have a chance to attend a university, and revenue from the second $5 million going toward “improving and extending the opportunities for scientific study and research.”47 History, literature, and modern languages were also provided for. Based in Edinburgh, the elite board of trustees included Prime Minister Balfour, ex–prime minister Rosebery, future prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the earl of Elgin, and Morley, among others. These names alone were testimony to the power Carnegie and his money wielded in Britain.
To assuage any fears that he was trampling on British mores, Carnegie included in the deed a clause that allowed the trustees, by a two-thirds vote, to modify the regulations governing the trust if new conditions demanded it. As
difficult as it was for him, he gave them a free hand. At one of the first meetings, the earl of Elgin actually protested the clause, arguing that as a trustee he wanted to be told what to do, which prompted Carnegie to turn to Balfour and say, “Mr. Balfour, I have not known a man in any country who could legislate wisely for the next generation—and I have seen people that did not make a very great success in legislating for their own.”
“That is true,” Balfour said with a smile. As for the clause, he said, “It is the wisest provision I have ever seen included on a trust deed.”48
There was little ammunition left for the critics, especially considering that the preexisting combined endowments of the four universities—Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews—generated just $350,000 annually, while Carnegie’s gift would generate $500,000. Beginning in 1901, Carnegie met with the heads of the Scottish universities annually at Skibo, and the first week of September became known as “Principals’ Week.” By 1910, a St. Andrews official could claim, “At the present time, the University has a larger number of students and is doing a greater variety of work in all departments of study than at any period in its history.”49
At Skibo, the renovation was still under way. The main hall and new wings were completed but now required decorating and furnishing. Other ambitious projects were in various stages of completion: a man-made lake, Loch Ospisdale, which would be stocked with brown trout; two ponds, Lake Louise and Margaret’s Loch, for water lilies and other plants; a dam at the mouth of the Evelix River to create a loch with a salmon ladder; a nine-hole golf course, which would be expanded to eighteen, nestled between Loch Evelix and Dornoch Firth; and the marble, indoor swimming pool, twenty-four meters long and nine meters wide, heated and filled with salt water pumped from the sea. The county of Sutherland prospered as both the unskilled and skilled found plenty of work, with even “walkers” hired to walk the estate’s roads looking for bumps and ruts to repair.