Lynch, Frederick . Personal Recollections of Andrew Carnegie / by Frederick Lynch
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Chapter 12

XII
THE PHILANTHROPIST

    MR. CARNEGIE was the most original philanthropist the world has ever known. He evinced more genius in distributing money than he did in earning it, although he accumulated one of the largest fortunes known to history. One of the shrewdest business men that ever lived, he was an idealist. I do not know any other man who has combined in himself the man of affairs and the man of great vision so perfectly as he. He naturally enjoyed making money, but, as he often said, he enjoyed giving it away infinitely more. He once said to me, "These latter years of my life when I have been giving my money away have been my happiest years." All who knew him intimately will remember how engrossed and happy he was in working out some scheme for an endowment or a college or a library. He was always talking with those whom he knew


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intimately and in whom he had confidence about the right use of his money. Practically all of his gifts, though, eventually were dedicated to causes and movements in which he was especially interested. Even his most intimate friends could seldom persuade him to give large sums to anything in which he was not personally interested or of which he had not made a special study. I remember so well how a certain group, made up of men very close to him, tried to get him interested in giving a large sum toward the preservation of the health of the nation, the extension of human life, public hygiene and related movements. He appreciated its value, and believed in it. But it was never possible to get him interested in it. He would simply say: "It's a great thing; but that's Rockefeller's sphere. Get him to do it." (He did, however, give quite large sums for Professor Koch's work in Berlin and Madame Curie's in Paris.) He simply had not grown up in it. It had not become a part of him.

    If one looks over the recently published record of Mr. Carnegie's gifts, "A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie" (a remarkable volume containing the


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deed of gift written by Mr. Carnegie with each gift, which, taken together, throw more light on Mr. Carnegie's character and genius than almost anything extant), he will note that practically every endowment is his means of perpetuating the ideals which were peculiarly his own and to which he had devoted his life. Thus he himself once said: "It is, no doubt, possible that my own personal experience may have led me to value a free library beyond all other forms of beneficence." Music inspired and healed him. He was always quoting the great sentence of Confucius: "Music, sacred tongue of God, I hear thee calling and I come." Consequently he gave organs to the churches. He had always regretted the lack of educational opportunity when he was a boy and he was an ardent believer in vocational training, hence his vast gifts to technical schools and colleges. He honored the teacher and was always saying that he should be freed from financial worries to do his best work; hence the pension fund. He believed it took much more heroism to save life than to take it, to live nobly through trying crises than to die fighting; hence the Hero Fund. So it was with


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all his gifts. They were associated with his boyhood, or given in gratitude for some great blessing that had come to him, or were means whereby to achieve the ideals for which he himself was laboring.

    Should I begin to record here the things I have heard Mr. Carnegie say about his various gifts I could fill volumes. There are others, too, who were more intimately related to him in some of these special fields of activity than was I. But he was in the habit of talking very freely with his friends and there are some things which, although they may have been recorded at some previous time, deserve attention again if we are fully to understand this really great man.

    Perhaps the benefactions by which Mr. Carnegie is most widely known to the public at large are the public libraries. In three thousand cities distributed all over the world stand these buildings, of brick or marble or other stone. In almost every instance they are not only the public university of the town, but they are also things of beauty. (I have gone over the pictures of them with Mr. Carnegie by the hour, and in almost every instance the library is of real


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architectural beauty. Often it was the first real piece of architecture to grace the town. The best architects designed them, and Mr. Carnegie himself had a great eye for architectural effect. He wanted the building to be educational as well as the books within it. He used to get great enjoyment in turning over the pictures of these libraries and had interesting stories connected with many of them. He once said, as we were looking at a picture, which had just arrived, of a new library -- it was about five o'clock -- "Sometimes I like to sit here in the quiet at about this time and picture in my mind the thousands of schoolboys sitting in those reading rooms reading the books I put there. And, you know, sometimes -- isn't it strange? -- I see myself, a little fellow, sitting there among them. The thing I enjoy most about these gifts for libraries is that they work day and night. There isn't an hour that thousands all over the world are not reading those books -- and will always be reading them. And sometimes when I feel a little vain I say: `And I am their teacher.'")

    I have heard Mr. Carnegie tell again and again the story of what led him to think of building libraries. To quote his words as he


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himself has written them elsewhere, he says: "It is, no doubt, possible that my own personal experience may have led me to value a free library beyond all other forms of beneficence. When I was a working boy in Pittsburgh, Colonel Anderson of Alleghany -- a name that I can never speak without feelings of devotional gratitude -- opened his little library of four hundred books to boys. Every Saturday afternoon he was in attendance at his house to exchange books. No one but he who has felt it can ever know the intense longing with which the arrival of Saturday was awaited, that a new book might be had. My brother and Mr. Phipps, who have been my principal business partners through life, shared with me Colonel Anderson's precious generosity, and it was when revelling in the treasures which he opened to us that I resolved, if ever wealth came to me that it should be used to establish free libraries, that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to that noble man."

    Of course this ideal became immensely larger and more inclusive. One evening he told a little group of us the story of his


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boyhood in Scotland and referred -- as he often did -- to his father, who was a very remarkable man. He said that several of the weavers used to arrange to have one of their number read aloud to them while the others worked, they making up out of their earnings what the reader might have been earning at his loom. One of Mr. Carnegie's friends relates hearing the same story and says: "I have heard Mr. Carnegie mention as one of his earliest recollections those craftsmen, his father among the number, moving the first free library with which he was acquainted from one site to another in their aprons." There is no doubt that Mr. Carnegie often had in mind the picture of his father and those Dunfermline weavers seeking enlargement of life through books when he was considering the request that had come for a new library.

    There was one other thought, however, that was always in Mr. Carnegie's mind, and I am not sure that it was not the chief one, and that was to furnish opportunity to the exceptional boy to work his way out into the larger world.

    He once said to me as we were walking in


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Central Park and he had been telling me about a letter he had just received from someone, saying what a blessing one of his libraries had been to him: "When I was a boy I had ambitions and I would have given anything for certain books I could not get. I wanted to get out of the village into the great world of affairs, and books would have been the doors. One thing I have always had in mind in building libraries was that there might be in every town an open door through which the bright and ambitious boy could find his way out into the world. If you will examine the biographies of great men you will note how often the impulse to go to college and get out into the world came from a book. In Scotland the minister and the school teacher were always looking for the bright boy, especially in the smaller villages, and they would encourage him to go to college and lend him books. But he always needs books, and I want to make it possible for him to have them."

    Another time he said: "I think I am doing a whole lot for the morality of the country through my libraries. You know that much of the immorality and mischief is because of


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the long idle hours the boys and girls, especially in the rural regions, find hanging on their hands. Now they have hundreds of good books to read and pleasant reading rooms where they can go after school or after working hours. One other thing I would like to do if I had money enough, and that would be to build a hall in every town where I have put a library -- a hall with a fine organ in it, and endow it with a sum large enough to provide a good concert two or three times a week, and encourage every town to build up a good choral society to use the hall. There is nothing like music to elevate people."

    Perhaps the most unique of all Mr. Carnegie's endowments was that of the Hero Fund. No one else in all the world would have thought of it. It grew out of his intense conviction that it took just as much heroism to save life as it did to take it, whereas the man who took it got most of the recognition. How often I have heard him say: "The more men you can kill the greater hero you are;" and again, "Most of the monuments in the world are to somebody who has killed a lot of his fellowmen."

    In his deed of trust accompanying the


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endowment for the Hero Fund he said: "We live in an heroic age. Not seldom we are thrilled by deeds of heroism when men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows; such the heroes of civilization. The heroes of barbarism maimed or killed theirs."

    He was continually quoting the results of the vote which had been taken in the French schools as to who was France's great hero, where Napoleon, "who devoted his life to killing men, stood far down in the list, while Pasteur, who devoted his life to saving men, headed the list." He believed this marked the dawn of the new era, ushered in "the hero of civilization," to use a word he was often using.

    The Fund was criticized quite widely and the criticisms made Mr. Carnegie very impatient, because they so entirely missed the point, as criticisms often do. The chief note in these criticisms -- generally kindly and inclined to poke fun at Mr. Carnegie -- was that he thought he could create a race of heroes by money. This tune was played up far and wide. As I said, it made him impatient because the whole point was missed. As a


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matter of fact this motive played no part in the gift. Mr. Carnegie was too wise a man to be misled by any such vagary. The world soon came around to see that he had evinced the same wisdom here that he had in all his other gifts. Three great things were in his mind in creating this large endowment: first, the freeing the dependents of the hero, who often loses his life, from financial worry; second, the recognition of the heroic act of peace as it is recognized in war, and giving the hero such opportunities for education as he might desire; thirdly, he thought that by placing this emphasis upon the heroism of peace he might turn men's minds to thinking upon the fact that peace offered as much opportunity for the play of the finest impulses as did war and that the young men of the future who wanted to do noble deeds would see that saving life gave scope for heroism even more than taking it.

    Concerning the first of his motives he said in a letter to the Commission: "I do not expect to stimulate or create heroism by this fund, knowing well that heroic action is impulsive; but I do believe that if the hero is injured in his bold attempt to save his


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fellows, he and those dependent upon him should not suffer pecuniarily thereby." Again he said: "I have all along felt that the heroes and those dependent upon them should be freed from pecuniary cares resulting from their heroism."

    As to the third motive, we used often to talk about it. He would say: "We have got to lift war up onto the moral plane. There is an instinct in man that seeks to wrestle with some foe. The heroic impulse demands expression. We have got to show young men that there are just as great battles to be fought in peace-time as in war-time and just as much heroism demanded, just as much opportunity for the hero. That grand poem Gilder sent me shows this. I always keep that and the idea of the Hero Fund together in my mind. No one could have summed it up better than he did there. I thought by creating this fund it would be one way of setting the world to thinking upon the heroism of civilization, getting its mind off the association of valor and heroism with war only."

    He was very fond of keeping in touch with his "heroes". Several times when I have gone into his library before I could say


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anything he would insist on showing me the picture of his last hero, and the account in the papers of what he had done: "Look at that boy's face, now, isn't that a good face? Do you know what we are going to do with him? Put him in the Pittsburgh school (referring to the Technical Institute). We'll make something out of him. I'd like to see him. I'm writing him to write me once in a while. I like to keep track of them."

    He was very proud of the medal. It is a beautiful thing, with Mr. Carnegie's picture on one side and on the reverse the map of North America, with the Coats of Arms of the United States, Canada, and New Foundland, and a tablet in the middle for the hero's name. Around it all is the inscription: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

    I do not think any gift ever gave Mr. Carnegie more joy than that of the Palace of peace at The Hague. He was so deeply impressed with the work of the Hague Conference of 1899, whose results he considered the greatest step toward ending war that had yet been taken, that he intimated his desire to establish a great library of international law


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at The Hague for the use of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. After considerable correspondence and conversation with his friends, Dr. Andrew D. White and Frederick W. Holls, they made the suggestion that he enlarge the scope of his gift and build a great palace which should include not only the library, but rooms for the Court, assembly halls and international offices. Mr. Carnegie replied that if the suggestion should come from the Dutch government he would be glad to do this. The Palace was completed in 1913 and he was present at its dedication. He was as happy as a child as he roamed through its chambers finished in rare woods and polished marbles. A great crowd was present to take part in the dedication exercises, and the representative of the Dutch Government afterwards decorated Mr. Carnegie with the Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau. On the following day there were further exercises when the British Minister to the Netherlands unveiled a bust of King Edward, presented by the Peace Society of London, and Mr. Carnegie unveiled the bust of his friend Sir William Randal Cremer.

    I quote a few words from his memorable


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address because in them he came back again to the dominant thought in all his thinking on international problems, namely, that peace could come only through the organization of the world for law and order along the same lines on which the community was organized and the nation. This meant a League of Nations: "My first duty today is to unveil the bust of one of the pioneers of the greatest of all causes the abolition of war, the killing of man by man, the greatest of all crimes. The hero we are about to honor by unveiling his statue in this, the World's Temple of Peace, as among the foremost of peacemakers, was destined, as we have seen, to strange contrasts from beginning to end. Nor are these contrasts apparently destined to end, even with death, for his statue stands here next to that of his late Majesty the King of Great Britain, a fellow worker for international peace. Both, monarch and subject, by their labors endeavored to leave the world better than they found it, and we believe they succeeded in doing so, and advanced the greatest of all causes, the brotherhood of man, through international peace. At last, the civilized world, after ages of sore trial,


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realized that our greatest of all blessings is world peace. No ruler of civilized man, from Emperor to Secretary of State, but recognizes this. If it is forced upon them -- so far has mankind already advanced. Slowly has the truth been borne in upon men that nations were not intended to live or to labor separately, each for itself, but by interchange of their respective products. I submit that the only measure required today for the maintenance of world peace is an agreement between three or four of the leading civilized Powers (and as many more as desire to join -- the more the better) pledged to cooperate against disturbers of world peace, should such arise, which would scarcely be possible, however, in face of the partnership agreement suggested."

    The great war came just a year afterwards. A few shortsighted people poked fun at the Peace Palace. One night when I went into the library he showed me a clipping from some paper -- I forget now what journal it was -- written in rather flippant tone asking, "What shall we do with the Peace Palace?"

    "I hope that man will live long enough to


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see a League of Nations sitting there with an International Court," he said.

    I wish Mr. Carnegie might have lived a year longer, for as I write these words, July 1, 1920, a Commission appointed by the League of Nations is sitting in one of the rooms of the Peace Palace drawing up plans for a Court of Arbitral Justice.

    One day I showed him a headline "Grass Growing High in the Deserted Grounds of the Peace Palace." It stirred him for a minute. "They'll all come there yet," he exclaimed as he turned to his desk.

    "Have you got time to hear a little story?" I asked.

    "What is it?" he said.

    "Once upon a time," I went on, "there was a monastery in one of the hill towns of Italy, belonging to a famous order, and connected with it a Church, in which the red lantern burned night and day before the altar.


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The enemy came down from the North and sacked the place, overturning the stones and driving the monks from their habitation. But one monk had managed to hide himself somewhere among the ruins and at night crawled forth to see what had happened to the altar. To his joy he found the light which had been burning for years had not been extinguished. He filled it with oil. Every night he crept out of his hiding place and filled the lamp. After a time the enemy departed, the monks came back to rebuild their home and temple. When they came to rebuild the Church they found the light was burning. It had been burning all the days of catastrophe -- waiting for them. Around it they built the Church."

    "It's a beautiful story," he said, "and I see the point."

    Of course he had much to say about the Church organs. When he began giving them to the Churches he not only received innumerable requests for organs -- he received forty thousand during the last twenty years of his life -- but he received scores of letters from Churches from all parts of the world asking for every conceivable thing. But he stuck pretty closely to his organs so far as Churches were concerned. He used to say that he could "feel responsible for what came from the organ: not for what came from the pulpit." All together he gave away nearly eight thousand organs. He was a very reverent man and he thought reverence a mark of real


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character. He believed music encouraged it and he took great pride in his eight thousand organs. He gave them to the Churches "because of my own experience," to quote his own words, "that the organ is one of the most elevating of voices, often causing me to murmur the words of Confucius as I listen to its peals: `Music, sacred tongue of God, I hear thee calling and I come,' and also because of the consolation I experience under the influence of a maxim of the same seer: `All worship being intended for the true God, howsoever addressed, reaches and is accepted by Him.'"

    Enough about benevolences. The great endowments are known to all the world and their history has been written. I shall have something to say about The Church Peace Union later, because a new phase of Mr. Carnegie's character manifested itself then, in this last great gift of his life, namely, his interest in the Churches. Just a closing word here. One day he said in a joking way, "Don't you think I've shown wisdom in all my gifts?"

    "In all but one," I answered.

    "What do you mean," he said, turning upon me.




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    "I mean," I answered, "that in all but one of your gifts I think you have been the wisest man in the world, but I think the $300,000 you gave the Simplified Spelling Board was thrown away. Ten years from now the whole movement will be as dead as Volapuk or Esperanto; as dead as all artificial languages. Languages grow; they cannot be made to order. Furthermore, I think the simplified spelling perfectly hideous -- but you know my views."

    "I suppose you think you could have used that $300,000 to much better advantage?"

    "Yes, I do," I answered.

    "Well, you can't have it," was all he said.




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