Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age

Are today’s donor classes solving problems—or creating new ones?

Skeptics fear philanthropies have gained undue influence on public policy.

In the spring of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay on money. If possession confers knowledge, then there was no greater expert on the subject: Carnegie was possibly the richest American who ever lived. The essay, which was printed first in the North American Review, then in Britain’s Pall Mall Gazette, and later reissued in a pamphlet, became known as “The Gospel of Wealth.”

The “Gospel” opened with a discussion of inequity. This was the Gilded Age, and, even as most Americans were struggling to get by, the one-per-centers were putting up “cottages” in Newport. The disparity was, in Carnegie’s view, unavoidable. It was the price of progress, and progress, ultimately, benefitted everyone. “The ‘good old times’ were not good old times,” he observed. “Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as today.”

Having dealt with accumulation of wealth, Carnegie then turned to his real concern: what to do with it. Passing on riches to one’s children was a mistake, he argued, for inheritances “often work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients.” Handing out money to the poor was similarly ill-advised, since “neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving.” Rather, the best way to dispose of a fortune was to endow institutions that would aid “those who desire to rise.” Universities were a good cause; so, too, were public libraries, music halls, and swimming baths. The “man of wealth,” Carnegie advised, should consider himself “the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer.” (More here)