Long hours as a young messenger boy in Pittsburgh left Andrew Carnegie little time and no money for books. Then a local businessman, Colonel James Anderson, opened his library of about four hundred volumes to working boys, letting them borrow one book each Saturday afternoon. Carnegie never forgot it. Decades later he would pay for thousands of free public libraries around the world.
"Working boys" and a debt repaid
Carnegie told the story in his autobiography. Anderson's books were at first offered only to "working boys," and there was a question about whether messengers and clerks, who didn't work with their hands, counted. The young Carnegie wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch arguing that they did. Anderson widened the rule. "To him I owe a taste for literature which I would not exchange for all the millions that were ever amassed by man," Carnegie wrote. As he later put it, quoted by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas: "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."
The Gospel of Wealth
Carnegie became one of the richest men in the world, and in 1889 he set out what he thought the rich owed everyone else. In the essay later known as "The Gospel of Wealth," he argued that a wealthy man should treat his surplus as a trust, becoming "the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren." The best gifts, he said, "place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise." And he ended with the line that still gets quoted: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
Libraries topped his list. "A free library occupies the first place," he wrote, "provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution," according to Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation he set up in 1911.
2,509 libraries, with strings attached
Starting in 1881 with a library for his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland, Carnegie and later his foundation "gave some $56 million to build 2,509 public libraries," the Corporation says, 1,681 of them in the United States. Counts vary by source, depending on whether you include college libraries and later grants: the Encyclopedia of Arkansas puts the total at 2,811.
The money came with conditions, and they were the clever part. Towns had to show a need, provide a site, make the library free to all, and commit about ten percent of the grant amount every year to run it, a requirement nicknamed "The Carnegie Formula." Carnegie paid for the building. The community had to keep it alive. That approach didn't always work: a 1915 survey commissioned by the foundation found many Carnegie libraries "were not providing good service because they lacked trained librarians."
The harder part of the story
Carnegie's generosity sat beside a hard record as an employer. In 1892, at his Homestead steel works in Pennsylvania, a labor dispute turned violent and "some 12 people were killed," according to History.com. Carnegie was at a castle in Scotland but stayed in contact with his manager, Henry Clay Frick, and endorsed his actions. After the union was broken, Carnegie cut wages and imposed a 12-hour workday. As PBS's American Experience puts it, "Carnegie presided over one of the darkest chapters in American labor history." Both things are true, and the libraries still stand. For more giving lives with their complications left in, see our magnanimous acts in history.
Today's act
The act: Be the community that "will accept and maintain it." Visit your local library this week and give it something it needs.
- Get or renew a library card, and check something out today.
- Ask at the desk whether there's a Friends of the Library group, a book sale or a volunteer shift you can join. Our volunteering guide has tips for getting started.
- Show up for your library at budget time: a short note to a city council member or library board counts.
- Bring a child and let them pick their own book, just as Anderson let the working boys pick theirs.
Give well
Carnegie's formula holds a lesson for any giver: a building or a one-time gift needs someone to pay for the lights and the staff afterward. When you give to a library foundation or Friends group, unrestricted support for operating costs is often the most useful kind. Check that the group is a registered nonprofit and ask how donations are used. Our guide to vetting a charity walks through the basics.
Sources
- Project Gutenberg — Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920), ch. IV "Colonel Anderson and Books"
- CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas — Carnegie Libraries
- Carnegie Corporation of New York — Andrew Carnegie, "The Gospel of Wealth" (1889), PDF
- Carnegie Corporation of New York — Andrew Carnegie's Library Legacy
- History.com — Homestead Strike
- PBS American Experience — Andrew Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World