Andrew Carnegie: “Wealth”

The original articles Carnegie wrote were for the North American Review, then and now one of the foremost intellectual journals in the United States—Thomas Jefferson was one of its early subscribers. For Carnegie to have his article accepted for publication in the North American Review was a testament to his notoriety and his intellectual reputation in the United States in 1889. His first readers would have included the most prominent and powerful literary people in the country at the time—Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton among them. Carnegie also published articles in other highly intellectual journals such as Contemporary Review and Century Magazine, also anthologized in The Gospel of Wealth in 1901. Clearly, his original expected audience consisted of the sort of people who would accord him credit as a philosopher and cultural commentator, to him a loftier status than that of a mere entrepreneur and industrialist.

Compiling the essays in 1901 was a different issue. Carnegie sold his interests in his corporations in the same year; he accumulated the largest fortune in the world and wanted to announce to the world exactly what he intended to do with the money. To publish all of his essays was more than an effort to get a larger public to buy his work—in fact, for Carnegie, whether he made money off the book might have been an irrelevancy. Rather, The Gospel of Wealth was more of a statement of purpose, to collect all of his ideas on money, philanthropy, class relations, socialism, pacifism, labor, and imperialism in one place and try to capitalize on the attention by persuading others to adopt his ideas. Seemingly, the effort was half-successful. Virtually no wealthy person in the United States or Britain since has simply handed away his fortune in the same fashion. Conversely, the idea of philanthropy among the wealthy is well established, to the point where The Gospel of Wealth is still read today, available even in a digitized version online despite its century-old provenance.