Andrew Carnegie: “Wealth”

Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is best known as the entrepreneur who launched the expansion of the steel industry in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Carnegie came to the United States from his native Scotland in 1848 and began his career in business in a cotton factory. By 1853 he had reinvented himself, first as a telegraph operator and then, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Carnegie was able to turn the relationships he had formed during his young manhood to his advantage, and by 1872, he had laid the basis for the Carnegie Steel Company. By the time he wrote the essay “Wealth” in 1889, his company dominated steel production in the United States, and he personally was worth an estimated $350 million (the equivalent of $4.8 billion in today’s dollars).

“Wealth” was Carnegie’s celebration of the rich and an ode to the accumulation of wealth. For Carnegie, as for his contemporary Herbert Spencer, wealth was the just reward for the “best” in society (Spencer had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Carnegie applied it to himself). Carnegie believed that the proper use of the accumulation of wealth was for the betterment of society—whether that meant supporting the arts or building libraries for working men. However, at the same time that Carnegie committed himself to giving away most of his vast fortune before his death, he also cut wages for the men working for him whenever possible, and the dangerous conditions in his steel mills killed and maimed hundreds of workers over the years.