I want to pause for a moment to consider the legacy of Andrew Carnegie.
He was born in Scotland, but moved to the Land of Opportunity before his 13th Birthday.
His beginnings were humble. He worked minimum-wage in an era before there were minimums. He worked 12-hour days for pennies. He was handed nothing.
He worked hard. Worked his way up. He profiteered off the Civil War, but on the Good Guys’ side. He invested wisely. He saw where the world was going. He saved, and he invested, and he speculated.
Telegraphs, railroads, oil, and of course, steel. He bought, and he saved, and he competed. He came from nothing and he built an empire.
In 1889 he wrote that a rich man must “set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance … consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds … thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren.” He called it “The Gospel of Wealth.” In short, he believed that wealth carries an obligation to society, that hoarding wealth or bequeathing it through inheritance is immoral, and that it was his duty to do Good for the world through his wealth.
He spent millions advocating for World Peace. He literally tried to bribe the rulers of Europe directly to stave off the Great War.
He is and always will be the poster child for bootstraps-pulling.
He knew that men could make it for themselves, and he opposed those men who would inhibit an individual’s ability to climb and pursue wealth. For example, labor unions.
He viciously opposed labor unions. They benefited only the workers in them, whereas Carnegie could benefit the entire human race. They envisioned a world where everyone had a decent wage, and taken to its extreme, that would have rendered Carnegie’s success impossible.
He worked from almost-nothing to almost-infinity; he spent almost no time earning a decent day’s wage.
In 1892, in Homestead, PA, not far from his adoptive hometown, Carnegie’s stooge Henry Frick led a deadly battle against strikers. Pitched gun battles resulted in the deaths of 7 men who, damnedly, wanted fair pay through collective action.
Carnegie did not believe in collective action.
He wrote that, since rich men can do so much good with their money, it is unethical for them to slack off on accumulating it. What good is a gift of $5 million, he writes, when you could have accumulated more wealth and been able to, as a result, give even more away in philanthropy?
Of the rich, to the poor, he writes of that obligation for “bringing to their service his superior wisdom.”
A true white man’s burden, if there ever was one.
We gather in the Hall that bears his name and hear the music that was once performed for the great Emperors of Austria, themselves Noble Men without whom most of the great works of Europe might never have been funded.
Carnegie wrote, of the new world of tremendous accumulations of wealth, that “whether the change be for good or ill, it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.”
Marx also spoke of inevitability, though differently.
Perhaps we should all be more like Carnegie. We should work hard, earn wealth, earn more wealth, and then, through great philanthropy, we can save the world. Is not mediocrity the truest villain? What would the world be like without the Taj Mahal, or St. Peter’s Basilica, or the ersatz-”Sears” Tower, or Carnegie Hall?
Are not the greatest achievements of the greatest men far more valuable than the modest survival of the billions of inferior men?
Is not the collective good better achieved through the gracious obligation of the greatest individuals?
Is it better to live in a world where anyone may become wealthy, or a world in which everyone may become comfortable?
We grant a vanishingly small number of men the power to make tremendous change. To build rockets to the moon, to build search engines and shopping websites, even to build prisons or schools. They earn their place, and they do more as single men than we could possibly do as a collective whole.
What could we ever have achieved collectively? What change could we possibly make in our unity, but to follow the lead of Great Men, of Pharaohs and Caesars, of Timurs and Atilas, of Cortezes and Napoleons, of Kims and Bushes and Netenyahus?
You can, perhaps, only estimate the power that the collective might have with one method: measuring the amount of blood and money spent by those with power in order to stop it.
But Carnegie is not wrong about the beauty of his world. Without wealth, there would be no philanthropy, there would be no investment, there would be no finance, there would be no loans, there would be no debt, there would be no power.
There would be no Carnegie Hall.