David Nasaw: Clapping with one hand for Buffet's give-away
[David Nasaw is a professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the new biography Andrew Carnegie.]
Warren Buffett's announcement in June that he was giving $31 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was greeted with near universal acclaim. About 120 years ago, when Andrew Carnegie declared in his "Gospel of Wealth" essays that he was going to give away his entire fortune and asserted that it was the duty of other rich men to give away theirs, his announcement provoked as much criticism as praise. Labor leaders condemned Carnegie for giving away money that did not rightfully belong to him. Prominent churchmen, including Methodist Bishop Hugh Price Hughes, characterized him as "an anti-Christian phenomenon, a social monstrosity, and a grave political peril."
Hughes insisted that millionaires, even those who agreed to give away their fortunes, were "the unnatural product of artificial social regulations." He believed that Carnegie's accumulation of millions had come at the expense of his less fortunate countrymen. "Millionaires at one end of the scale involved paupers at the other end, and even so excellent a man as Mr. Carnegie is too dear at that price," he argued. His point was well-taken. One doesn't have to a Socialist—and Bishop Hughes certainly was not —to wonder whether a more equitable distribution of wealth might be better for society than the idiosyncrasies of large-scale philanthropy.
Questions about Carnegie's millions multiplied over the years, especially after the summer of 1892, when armed Pinkerton guards intervened to break a strike at his Homestead steel mill. Workingmen on both sides of the Atlantic questioned whether the Pittsburgh steelmaker's huge charitable donations would have been better spent on higher wages, improved working conditions, and an eight- rather than 12-hour workday. Carnegie responded in a speech in Pittsburgh that he kept wages low to remain competitive, and that even had it been possible for him to share some of his profits with his workers, it would have been neither "justifiable or wise" to do so. "Trifling sums given to each every week or month ... would be frittered away, nine times out of ten, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit; upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich nor poor." The lower the costs of labor, the higher the profits. Far better, in his view, to squeeze money from workers' paychecks, aggregate it, and give back to the community in the form of public libraries and concert halls.
Yet by 1915, the outcry against the efforts of Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Russell Sage to protect and sanitize what many saw as their ill-gotten fortunes had swelled to the point where Congress and the executive branch agreed to organize a federal Commission on Industrial Relations. Its charge was to investigate whether self-perpetuating private foundations posed "a menace to the Republic's future." The private foundation, it was claimed, was a profoundly anti-democratic institution, one that concentrated too much wealth—and power—in the hands of trustees who were neither elected nor accountable to the public. Frank Walsh, the chairman of the commission, recalled the complaint of a Colorado coal miner about $250,000 of Rockefeller Foundation money that had been allocated for a retreat for migratory birds. That money, the miner insisted, had come from the labor of men like him who should have had a say in how it was spent. "He protested against this apportionment of the wealth to the migratory birds," Walsh remembered. "He said he wanted first to see established a safe retreat for his babies and his wife."...
Read entire article at Slate
Warren Buffett's announcement in June that he was giving $31 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was greeted with near universal acclaim. About 120 years ago, when Andrew Carnegie declared in his "Gospel of Wealth" essays that he was going to give away his entire fortune and asserted that it was the duty of other rich men to give away theirs, his announcement provoked as much criticism as praise. Labor leaders condemned Carnegie for giving away money that did not rightfully belong to him. Prominent churchmen, including Methodist Bishop Hugh Price Hughes, characterized him as "an anti-Christian phenomenon, a social monstrosity, and a grave political peril."
Hughes insisted that millionaires, even those who agreed to give away their fortunes, were "the unnatural product of artificial social regulations." He believed that Carnegie's accumulation of millions had come at the expense of his less fortunate countrymen. "Millionaires at one end of the scale involved paupers at the other end, and even so excellent a man as Mr. Carnegie is too dear at that price," he argued. His point was well-taken. One doesn't have to a Socialist—and Bishop Hughes certainly was not —to wonder whether a more equitable distribution of wealth might be better for society than the idiosyncrasies of large-scale philanthropy.
Questions about Carnegie's millions multiplied over the years, especially after the summer of 1892, when armed Pinkerton guards intervened to break a strike at his Homestead steel mill. Workingmen on both sides of the Atlantic questioned whether the Pittsburgh steelmaker's huge charitable donations would have been better spent on higher wages, improved working conditions, and an eight- rather than 12-hour workday. Carnegie responded in a speech in Pittsburgh that he kept wages low to remain competitive, and that even had it been possible for him to share some of his profits with his workers, it would have been neither "justifiable or wise" to do so. "Trifling sums given to each every week or month ... would be frittered away, nine times out of ten, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit; upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich nor poor." The lower the costs of labor, the higher the profits. Far better, in his view, to squeeze money from workers' paychecks, aggregate it, and give back to the community in the form of public libraries and concert halls.
Yet by 1915, the outcry against the efforts of Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Russell Sage to protect and sanitize what many saw as their ill-gotten fortunes had swelled to the point where Congress and the executive branch agreed to organize a federal Commission on Industrial Relations. Its charge was to investigate whether self-perpetuating private foundations posed "a menace to the Republic's future." The private foundation, it was claimed, was a profoundly anti-democratic institution, one that concentrated too much wealth—and power—in the hands of trustees who were neither elected nor accountable to the public. Frank Walsh, the chairman of the commission, recalled the complaint of a Colorado coal miner about $250,000 of Rockefeller Foundation money that had been allocated for a retreat for migratory birds. That money, the miner insisted, had come from the labor of men like him who should have had a say in how it was spent. "He protested against this apportionment of the wealth to the migratory birds," Walsh remembered. "He said he wanted first to see established a safe retreat for his babies and his wife."...