America at the Time of Andrew Carnegie: Enter the Foundation

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century was a time of dramatic expansion for the United States.

The Erie Canal, which brought the young Andrew Carnegie and his family to Pittsburgh in 1848, was completed in 1825 - opening up a boat route for people, products and raw materials all the way from Lake Erie (and its Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ontario shorelines) to the Hudson River, and from there to New York City, the many ports of the Eastern seaboard and beyond.

The 1840s featured American politicians' first use of the term "Manifest Destiny" to describe the "inevitability" of the United States' expansion from sea to sea, as well as a Gold Rush that sent hordes of prospectors (many of whom eventually became settlers) to the West Coast.

In 1869, the first U.S. trans-continental railroad was completed and by 1900, the United States could boast more railroad tracks than Europe...and, as a result, burgeoning railroad, coke, steel, and petroleum industries.

Meanwhile, inventions such as the telephone, light bulb and phonograph were fueling a new electrical industry.

Many nineteenth and early twentieth century Americans, Andrew Carnegie exuberantly among them, were confident that one could combine the same ingredients that they viewed as having just resulted in new empires of railroad and steel being built across America - the new scientific approach to problem-solving, the efficiency of an industrial organization and sufficient capital to free men of genius to innovate - to solve such previously intractable societal challenges as poverty.

It was this confidence - combined with the longstanding "tradition of private giving for public purposes"¹ and "spirit of mutual helpfulness"² that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in his 1835 book, Democracy in America, as characterizing the American community - that led to the creation of the foundation as we know it today. In a 1950 speech to the Federation of Illinois Colleges, then Carnegie Corporation President Charles Dollard described America at the birth of the foundation thus:

The Golden Age of organized philanthropy was the twenty-year period between 1895 and 1915. This was the age of the tycoon when rapid industrialization made it possible, indeed inevitable, that great fortunes would be made quickly in oil, in steel, in railroads, and in mining. The industrial corporation (which eventually would succeed to the dominion exercised by sole owners or partnerships) was in its infancy. Taxes were so low that the individual drive to make money was uninhibited. Confidence in America and its future was unlimited.

This was the age of affluence. It was no less the age of hope. Americans believed as they have seldom believed before or since that life was infinitely perfectible and that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were no match for American brains and American brawn. Lester F. Ward's doctrine of Social Telesis, which pictured a world in which progress was both inherent and preordained, expressed to a great extent the popular feeling... The confidence that American Money and American purpose could vanquish all evil, is well expressed in Andrew Carnegie's letter of gift to the trustees of the new Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, established in 1910. The closing paragraph of the letter reads in part as follows:

"...when civilized nations enter into such treaties as named, and war is discarded as disgraceful to civilized men, the Trustees will please then consider what is the next most degrading evil or evils or evils whose banishment - would most advance the progress, elevation and happiness of man, and so on from century to century without end, my Trustees of each age shall determine how best they can aid man in his upward march to higher and higher stages of development unceasingly;..."³

"Wealth is nothing new in the history of the world. Nor is charity. But the idea of using private wealth imaginatively, constructively, and systematically to attack the fundamental problems of mankind is new."⁵

¹ John Gardner, "Fifty Years in Review" (New York, Carnegie Corporation, Reprint of essay from the Carnegie Corporation's Fiftieth Anniversary Report, which was originally published in 1961), 5.

² John Gardner, "Fifty Years in Review" (New York, Carnegie Corporation, Reprint of essay from the Carnegie Corporation's Fiftieth Anniversary Report, which was originally published in 1961), 5.

³ Charles Dollard, "Role of a Foundation in a Democracy." Speech at the Federation of Illinois Colleges' 46th Annual Meeting. Eureka, Illinois. April 22, 1950. Page 3 in transcription in Carnegie Archive at Columbia University.

⁴ Andrew Carnegie, "Around the World" (Garden City, NY. 1935) as quoted in Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie, Revised Edition (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 375.

⁵ John Gardner, "Fifty Years in Review" (New York, Carnegie Corporation of New York reprint of this essay from Carnegie's Fiftieth Anniversary Report, which was originally published in 1961), 5.