At age 13, newly arrived Scots immigrant Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) first worked 12-hour days earning $1.20 a week as a bobbin boy at a Pennsylvania cotton mill. By dint of his drive, a keen mind, and an eye for opportunity, he improved his lot by becoming a messenger boy. His abilities and ambition soon made him a telegraph operator, then a superintendent for the Pennsylvania Railroad. By 30, Carnegie was rich, an investor in the ironworks industry and other enterprises, and was fast becoming a major player in steel production. When he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901, Carnegie retired from business as the wealthiest man in the world.
During Carnegie’s time as a teenage messenger, a local entrepreneur, Col. James Anderson, made his private library available on Saturdays for use and borrowing privileges to working-class boys. Writing later about the consequences of this generosity, Carnegie observed that in this way “the windows were opened in the walls of my dungeon through which the light of knowledge streamed in.” In his “Autobiography,” Carnegie paid this tribute to Anderson, “To him I owe a taste for literature which I would not exchange for all the millions that were ever amassed by man. Life would be quite intolerable without it.”
Monument to Col. James Anderson, above a seated figure representing Labor Reading, outside the Carnegie Free Library in Pittsburgh, Pa. Library of Congress. Public Domain
Eclectic Enthusiasms
From Anderson’s library, Carnegie selected and studied with special attention George Bancroft’s “History of the United States” and enjoyed the essays of Charles Lamb and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Somewhat later, through visits to the theater, he developed an affection for Shakespeare.A lifetime of reading found him reading all over the literary spectrum. Some of his selections fall in the category of “great books,” such as Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” and the ancient Greek philosophers. Yet Carnegie also enjoyed reading travel books as well the works of his friends and contemporaries, like Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, Bret Harte, and Matthew Arnold.
Regarding fiction, Carnegie reserved his highest regard for the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poet and storyteller from the land of his birth. His uncle George Lauder, who regaled the boy with tales of Scotland’s heroes, first introduced Carnegie to Scott’s colorful and romantic bestsellers, which remained lifelong literary favorites.
But it was another Scottish writer who was closest of all to his heart.
The Ploughman Poet
Carnegie’s affection for Robert Burns (1759–96), who wrote about common men and common things, was profound and remained constant throughout his life. He memorized many of Burns’s poems and once called him the “Poet Prophet of his age.” From the verse “Poetical Inscription for an Altar to Independence,” Carnegie took the words—“Thy own reproach alone dost fear”—and made them a guideline for living.
He paid more than lip service to his beloved Burns. He had at least three busts of the poet made, one of them for his personal library. He befriended some of Burns’s descendants, and served as honorary president of the Robert Burns Federation for a decade. At Skibo, originally a Scottish castle that slowly evolved into a residence, which Carnegie purchased in 1898 and which is today the home of the Carnegie Club, a portrait of Burns is located just outside the library. On a shelf inside the library stands Carnegie’s personal three-volume set of “The Poetical Works of Robert Burns.”
A bust of Robert Burns, commissioned by Andrew Carnegie and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain
In 1912, at the unveiling of a statue of Burns in Montrose, Scotland, Carnegie offered the bard this high praise: “We are met to-day to testify that the immortal Bard still lives in our memory, that his fame increases with time—that his place in the world as in our hearts strengthens with the years—and that the debt we owe him is indeed unpayable. No man who ever lived has so many memorial statues in so many lands, and yet we meet to-day in Montrose to dedicate still another.
“It was not his genius, his insight, his vision, his wit or spirit of manly independence, nor all of these combined, which captured the hearts of men. It was his spontaneous, tender, all-pervading sympathy with every form of misfortune, pain or grief; not only in man but in every created form of being. He loved all living things, both great and small.”
To his benefactor James Anderson, Carnegie had also raised a statue to honor the man who had opened his library to the book-hungry youth. But much more importantly, Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,800 libraries in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, all intended to further the opportunities for self-education among the common people.
The boy who craved books had returned Anderson’s generosity a million-fold.
Carnegie Free Library of Braddock in Braddock, Pa. built in 1888, was the first Carnegie Library in the United States to open (1889) and the first of four to be fully endowed. Jdh123149/CC BY-SA 3.0 US
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