Andrew Carnegie: “Wealth”

The post–Civil War era in the United States saw a vast expansion of capitalist industry and finance that made a tiny fraction of Americans obscenely rich, while the vast and overwhelming majority struggled to survive. The “Gilded Age,” as coined by Mark Twain, was a pejorative metaphoric term for the times: a shiny coating of gold covered a rotting economic system underneath. The question as to how to repair it—indeed, whether it needed repairing at all—occupied intellectual life for the rest of the nineteenth century. On one side were socialists, who believed power in politics and economics belonged to the workers; many workers agreed with them, but all lacked the power to get elected to positions of power in government or to simply overthrow the system as it stood. On the other side stood philosophers, philanthropists, and the rich themselves, who believed they had earned their wealth through a combination of biological inheritance, financial buccaneering, the privileges of education, and, to some extent, luck. They had the money to put their ideas into practice, and as a result their ideas dominated the era.

Maybe the most influential stream of thought arose from the intellectual earthquake occasioned by the release of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin argued that all beings on earth were descended biologically from ancestors who had been born by happenstance with genetic mutations that allowed them to adapt easily to the environment where they lived, while beings of the same species without the mutation were likelier to die off, thus perpetuating the mutation and shaping the species. While the churchgoing public generally condemned Darwin's ideas as antireligious, most intellectuals embraced the idea of life itself as being a competition between different versions of the same species and believed that while most would die off, a select few would survive and prosper because they were simply better designed to do so.

It took little to convince laissez-faire economic philosophers and the wealthy people who adhered to their ideas that the rich were obviously better designed by natural selection to prosper. Such “social Darwinists,” as they were called, believed their economic successes were signs of their biological superiority. Adherents of the ideas of the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer—in particular, many robber barons (ruthless and unscrupulous businessmen) in the United States—believed they were deemed by birth to be more talented, smarter, and harder working than the poor, specifically the people they employed. Social Darwinism justified the low pay they offered their workers too. As Spencer put it, was it more humane to keep feeding a sick deer and prolonging its suffering or to let it get attacked and eaten by predators in the woods owing to its weakness, thus ending its painful existence? Such ideas were too draconian for a lot of people, particularly anyone of a Christian persuasion.

One such wealthy industrialist was Andrew Carnegie, an admirer and friend of Spencer's who nonetheless did not agree that ignoring the plight of the poor and allowing them to die off was better for society in the long term. Rather, Carnegie was a proponent of what came to be called the “Gospel of Wealth,” the idea that those better designed by God to succeed in capitalist society also had the Christian responsibility to take care of the poor through philanthropy. To Carnegie, Spencer provided him with the justification for his headlong pursuit of wealth during his working lifetime. According to Spencer, Carnegie was simply a human being superior to the other men around him.

Even so, Carnegie's Scottish Presbyterian upbringing demanded that he recognize the equality of all men and do something to take care of the less fortunate. From his early thirties, Carnegie planned to give away his entire fortune in philanthropic efforts to improve his fellowmen; the older he got, the more he publicized his intentions. Despite his devotion to Spencer and social Darwinism, he never let the idea of giving away his fortune lie softly on his conscience; he intended to do it. In 1889 he published two articles entitled “Wealth” in North American Review. The articles later were collected with several other related essays and published as The Gospel of Wealth (1901), thus making Carnegie the foremost champion of the idea.