Traces of Carnegie's 'Gumption' Linger
By Salena Zito - February 16, 2014
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/16/traces_of_carnegies_gumption_linger_121597.html
Ghosts are everywhere along Reedsdale Street on
Pittsburgh's North Shore.
Despite the crisscrossing
expressways overhead and the post-industrial surroundings, you can feel that
something extraordinary happened here.
You can easily summon images of
mid-19th-century men and women who helped to make this country great, beyond
our Founders' wildest imaginings.
Such greatness was not beyond the
determination of poor immigrants who settled in what then was an Allegheny City neighborhood. Circumstances were
never fair, they knew, but opportunity was abundant in their new country.
Even at age 16, Andrew Carnegie was
struck by the vast possibilities.
“In Dunfermline I would have been
a poor weaver all my days,” he wrote to an uncle back in Scotland, “but
here I can surely do something better than that (and) if I don't it will be all
my own fault, for anyone can get along in this country.”
Back then, Reedsdale was called Rebecca Street.
Margaret Morrison Carnegie settled here with her sons, Andrew and Thomas; the
family emigrated from Scotland
in 1848 after patriarch William Carnegie's weaving trade became obsolete in the
Industrial Age.
William failed to earn a living as
a weaver in America,
too, so he worked in a textile mill, then as a peddler.
Emotionally crushed and
disheartened, he died shortly after arriving here.
Andrew took his first job, as a
bobbin boy in a textile mill, at age 13. Later in life, he often fondly
recalled the “great joy” of earning his first $1.20 “from the labor of my own
hands.”
Next, he became a messenger boy
for the O'Reilly Telegraph Co. Running messages led him to discover Col. James
Anderson, a local industrialist who turned his own collection of books into a
library for the city's laborers.
An omnivorous reader, Carnegie was
transformed by those books, which led him to relentlessly question life's
status quo.
Bright, curious, generous and
ambitious, he quickly advanced from working as a telegraph operator to working
for and then investing in railroads and related industries, and eventually to
building an iron-and-steel empire. By the turn of the 20th century, he sold
Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan for nearly $500 million — and proceeded to give
away most of the money, much of it to create libraries across the country.
The book collection that Col.
Anderson lent to poor laborers is still available at the main branch of Carnegie's library in Pittsburgh.
Carnegie's great flaw was an
inability to understand his father's tragedy, or to understand his workers'
demands for fewer hours and higher pay. Instead, he steadfastly believed that
anyone with a little “gumption” could do what he himself had done.
Historian David Pietrusza said it
is interesting to consider the type of charity Carnegie ultimately pursued: “He
respected religion, and he respected beauty and culture — that is why he funded
so many church organs. He respected knowledge — that is why he funded
libraries.”
Yet he also respected the virtues
of self-help and self-rule, Pietrusza explained. “He built the library
buildings, but he expected local communities to do the rest, to hire the staff
and buy the books.
“He might have bought the books
and told people what to think, but he did not.”
In Andrew Carnegie's world,
Americans worked for their own success and thought for themselves.
A bust of Col. Anderson can be
found a mile from the old Rebecca Street slum, along with a larger-than-life
statue of Labor, portrayed as a shirtless, muscled blacksmith sitting on an
anvil, a sledgehammer at his side and an open book on his lap — a working man
reading on his break.
The statue's commemoration reads:
“This monument is erected in grateful remembrance by Andrew Carnegie, one of the ‘working boys' to whom were thus opened
this precious treasure of knowledge and imagination through which youth may
ascend.”
The shadows of the past are all
around us. They are not always particularly distinguished, and often they are
hidden in plain sight.
Carnegie's legacy is many things
to many people. Yet it is his ghost of “gumption” — a gumption that spit in the
face of fairness and found opportunity as a result — that tells the most about
a country on the brink of greatness.
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie
was the endowed predecessor schools for the Carnegie Mellon
University, the
founder of the Carnegie Museums of
Pittsburgh, and the founder of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think tank).
Note: Teresa Heinz
Kerry is a life trustee at the Carnegie
Mellon University, a trustee at the Carnegie
Museums of Pittsburgh, married to the U.S. Department of State secretary John F.
Kerry, and an honorary trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank).
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think tank), and the Brookings
Institution (think tank).
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society, and is a board
member for the International Crisis
Group.
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is the
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think tank),
a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg (think tank), was a board
member for the International Crisis
Group, an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think tank),
and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview with
Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace uncovered the plans for population
control by involving the United
States in war)
Cameron F. Kerry
is a fellow at the Brookings Institution (think tank), the U.S. Department of State secretary John F. Kerry’s
brother, and was the general counsel; acting secretary for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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