Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant to the United States in the mid-19th century, arriving with his family in 1848. He was poor and was working full-time at the age of twelve. As a boy working a hard job with long hours, he had no access to education. However, a Colonel Anderson started a small library of 400 books which he lent on Saturday afternoons to local boys. This is how Carnegie educated himself. “It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community.” |
Despite his poor background and the discrimination he faced as an immigrant, he built an industrial empire based on the manufacturing of steel, and when he sold his business empire and retired, he was worth almost an estimated 400 million dollars. However, Carnegie believed that those who became wealthy had a moral obligation to give their fortune away before they died to benefit society. In particular, this money was to be spent in a way that did not encourage laziness (charities that only dealt with symptoms and not the problem) but that created institutions that made opportunities for anyone with the right character to be successful and rich.
This philosophy of Carnegie was translated into a wide variety of areas, but his largest gifts were reserved for libraries. Carnegie gave money to build 2,509 libraries throughout the English speaking world including the British Isles, Australia, and New Zealand. Of these libraries, 1,679 of them were built in the United States and in American possessions that were later incorporated into America proper (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). He spent over $55 million on libraries alone and he is often referred to as the “Patron Saint of Libraries.”
Carnegie had two main reasons for donating money to the founding of libraries. First, he believed that libraries added to the meritocratic nature of America. Anyone with the right inclination and desire could educate himself. Second, Carnegie believed that immigrants like himself needed to acquire cultural knowledge of America which the library allowed immigrants to do.
Excerpted and adapted from “Deconstructing the Philanthropic Library: The Sociological Reasons Behind Andrew Carnegie's Millions to Libraries,” © 2002 by Michael Lorenzen, retrieved 11/13/08, with additional biographical information from Wikipedia.