Andrew Carnegie

Some time in the years before the First World War, the steel-maker Andrew Carnegie sat down to write the chapter of his memoirs about the philosopher Herbert Spencer. He wrote that he and three or four friends had been in a stage of doubt about theology when they came upon the works of Darwin and Spencer, and that one passage had changed everything:

I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.¹²³

He did not publish it. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie came out in 1920, the year after he died.⁴ In his lifetime the steel-maker who gave away his fortune said nothing so plain; he wrote instead a "gospel of wealth" that claimed to echo Christ, and he gave thousands of organs to churches. This chapter asks how a weaver's son who was raised among men who had walked out of Calvinism lost what was left of his belief, what he put in its place, and why he kept it half hidden.

A radical town

He was born on 25 November 1835 in the attic of a small house on Moodie Street in Dunfermline, the centre of the Scottish damask trade, where his father William was a weaver.⁵⁶ Dunfermline, he wrote, was perhaps the most radical town in the kingdom; the clubs took the London papers and had the leading articles read aloud from one of the town's pulpits.⁷ His father spoke at political meetings, and the index of the Autobiography calls him a radical republican and "liberal in theology."⁸

The family's religion had already broken with the Kirk. "We had not one orthodox Presbyterian in our family circle," Carnegie wrote; his father and his uncles and aunts had fallen away from Calvinism, and most of them found refuge for a time in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg.⁹¹⁰ His father had left the Presbyterian church soon after Andrew was born, when the minister preached the damnation of unbaptised infants:

If that be your religion and that your God, I seek a better religion and a nobler God.¹¹¹²

He went on praying in his closet every morning. Theologies were many, he had decided, but religion was one.¹² Carnegie's mother did not go to church, was reticent about religion, and loved the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing.¹³ Andrew and his cousin George Lauder were excused, by some arrangement he never understood, from learning the Shorter Catechism.¹⁴ Still, the old creed reached him:

I well remember that the stern doctrines of Calvinism lay as a terrible nightmare upon me, but that state of mind was soon over¹⁵¹⁶

A Swedenborgian boy in Allegheny

On 17 May 1848 the family left Dunfermline for the United States; Andrew was in his thirteenth year.¹⁷ In Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh, fewer than a hundred people formed a Swedenborgian society, and his father took him there.¹⁸ He became deeply interested in Swedenborg's mysterious doctrines, and his devout Aunt Aitken congratulated him on his ability to expound their "spiritual sense"; she hoped he might become a preacher. Those hopes weakened, he wrote, as he wandered more and more from "man-made theology."¹⁹²⁰ When a cousin who had become a Baptist complained that Andy was not a member of any church, the aunt answered: "Andy! Oh! Andy, he's naked, but you are clothed in rags."²¹²² On the belief timeline, this is where his faith stands: a mild, family faith, held by a boy among people who had already left the old one.

The circle votes down the dogmas

In February 1853 he went to work as clerk and telegraph operator for Thomas A. Scott; his father died in October 1855.²³ In these years he belonged to an inner circle of half a dozen young men. The wife of a Presbyterian minister, Mrs McMillan, drew them into her husband's church, and there one of them, Tom Miller, raised a Methodist, heard a sermon on predestination, including the damnation of infants. Miller told the minister:

Mr. McMillan, if your idea were correct, your God would be a perfect devil²⁴²⁵

The friends had read Thomas Carlyle and his struggles, and they followed him: "If it be incredible, in God's name let it be discredited."²⁶²⁵ "One after the other," Carnegie wrote, "the dogmas were voted down." They agreed that each stage of civilisation creates its own God, and that a forgiving God would be the noblest work of man.

Thereafter we all became less theological, but I am sure more truly religious.²⁷²⁸²⁹

On the timeline, this is where his doubt begins. It is undated, placed in the 1850s only by its position in the Autobiography, and it was a loss shared among friends, caused, as his father's had been, by revulsion at predestination and the damnation of children. Even then something remained. When his friend John Phipps died after a fall from a horse, he told himself that John had only gone home to England: "I had then no doubts. It was not a hope I was pressing to my heart, but a certainty."³⁰³¹

"A philosophy at last"

In December 1868, in a memorandum to himself at the St Nicholas Hotel in New York, he wrote that he would take fifty thousand dollars a year, spend the surplus on good works, and retire from business at thirty-five:

Man must have an idol--the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry--no idol more debasing than the worship of money.³²³³

He did not retire. In the autumn of 1878 he set out on a voyage around the world. Spencer and Darwin, he wrote, were then high in the zenith, and he had become deeply interested in their work. He read Confucius in China, the Buddha and the Hindu books in India, and Zoroaster among the Parsees of Bombay, and he came back with a certain mental peace:

I had a philosophy at last.³⁴³⁵

All the remnants of theology in which I had been born and bred, all the impressions that Swedenborg had made upon me, now ceased to influence me or to occupy my thoughts.³⁶³⁵

On a coaching trip about 1880 the poet Matthew Arnold told him what his own theological views had cost him, and, Carnegie wrote, "in one short sentence" had slain the supernatural: "The case against miracles is closed. They do not happen."³⁷³⁸ In 1882 he crossed the Atlantic with Herbert Spencer, whom he already knew and whose "disciple" he called himself, and took him to Pittsburgh. At a dinner at Delmonico's the preacher Henry Ward Beecher told Spencer, "you were my teacher," which alarmed church circles.³⁹⁴⁰

Few men have wished to know another man more strongly than I to know Herbert Spencer, for seldom has one been more deeply indebted than I to him and to Darwin.⁴¹

The reading that brought the "light ... as in a flood" is undated in the Autobiography; Carnegie places it in the doubting years of his youth, but the books he names include Darwin's Descent of Man and Spencer's Data of Ethics, which are later. It is best read as a replacement philosophy reached over decades, after the break of the 1850s. His motto, he said, became "All is well since all grows better."⁴²³⁴³ The timeline marks this as the point where his views settled.

A gospel in Christ's name

In public he was careful. In An American Four-in-Hand in Britain (1883) he joked about the sermons of "the Reverend Mr. Froth," wrote that three pages of Robertson Smith's article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica destroyed more theology in an hour than all the preachers could build up in a lifetime, and, on everlasting punishment, said that if there were Scriptural warrant for it, he wished to embrace it at once.⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶ In Triumphant Democracy (1886) he described the American as a churchgoer who had outgrown the narrow creeds of early days.⁴⁷⁴⁸

In November 1886 his mother and his brother Tom died within days of each other while he lay ill with typhoid. "My whole nature seemed to change," he wrote; he became reconciled, and was left alone in the world.⁴⁹

In June 1889 he published "Wealth" in the North American Review, and later that year a second article; republished in Britain, they became "The Gospel of Wealth."⁵⁰ The rich man, he argued, was a trustee for the poor, and of the man who left great wealth at his death the public verdict would be: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."⁵¹⁵² He set the plan in Christ's name. The highest life was to be reached not by imitating Christ as Tolstoy did, but "while animated by Christ's spirit," by recognising the changed conditions of the age; and "the gospel of wealth but echoes Christ's words."⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵ On the timeline, this is the first stage of his declaration, an unbeliever's programme, preached in the language of the Gospels.

The other side

The clergy answered. The Methodist minister Hugh Price Hughes, as Carnegie quoted him, called it the very thing for the passage "from social heathenism to social Christianity," but objected: "Christ distinctly prohibited the accumulation of wealth."⁵⁶⁵⁷⁵⁸ Carnegie answered with the parable of the talents, and said that a literal reading would justify the destruction of civilisation.⁵⁸ Gladstone, Cardinal Manning and the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, joined the debate.⁵⁹ The sharpest reply came from William Jewett Tucker of Andover Theological Seminary, who honoured the giver but not the gospel:

Mr. Carnegie's gospel is really a belated gospel. It comes too late for a social remedy.⁶⁰⁶¹

In the long run, Tucker wrote, "society cannot afford to be patronized."⁶²⁶¹ Three years later the Homestead strike, at Carnegie's steel works in July 1892, became in the public mind, as he admitted, "Mr. Carnegie's war upon labor's just earnings."⁶³

Organs and the public face

In March 1901 he sold his company to J. P. Morgan and "resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution."⁶⁴⁶⁵ He gave organs to churches. The first went to the small Swedenborgian church in Allegheny that his father had favoured; strict Highland Presbyterians called it wicked "to worship God with a kist fu' o' whistles." His reason was the music:

Believing from my own experience that it is salutary for the congregation to hear sacred music at intervals in the service and then slowly to disperse to the strains of the reverence-compelling organ after such sermons as often show us little of a Heavenly Father, I feel the money spent for organs is well spent.⁶⁶⁶⁷⁶⁸

The often-quoted saying that he gave organs "to lessen the pain of the sermons" is not in any of his writings read for this chapter.⁶⁹ By 1919 the organ department had given 7,689 of them.⁶⁸

His biographer Bernard Alderson, writing in 1902, said that Carnegie was "emphatically not an agnostic," and that he believed in Christianity and the goodness of God but would not be bound by sects and creeds; Alderson also quoted him: "I am an evolutionist. My teacher is Herbert Spencer."^70717273 The public face and the private account differ, and this chapter gives both: Alderson wrote more than a decade before the Autobiography's plain sentence, which Carnegie never published while he lived. His friend Richard Watson Gilder described his passion as the purification of religion from gross superstition, a just God in place of "a Westminster-Catechism God."⁷⁴⁷⁵

A hope of immortality

The chapter on Spencer that announced the end of theology and the supernatural does not end there. Evolution, he wrote, does not prevent hope:

All this, however, does not prevent everlasting hope of immortality.⁷⁶⁷⁷

It would be no greater miracle, he reasoned, to be born to a future life than to have been born into this one. "Therefore there is reason to hope for immortality. Let us hope."⁷⁸⁷⁷ He closed with Franklin's saying that the highest worship of God is service to man.⁷⁷ This is his revision on the timeline: no return to a creed, but a hope he chose to keep. Wikipedia says that in his last years he belonged to a Presbyterian church in New York and founded the Church Peace Union in 1914, but these statements were not checked against a primary source for this chapter.⁷⁹ He died, by Wikipedia's account, at Lenox, Massachusetts, on 11 August 1919.⁸⁰

Did his unbelief change shape?

Carnegie's unbelief was never a single break. It began in his father's refusal of a God who damned infants, became a young men's vote against the dogmas in the 1850s, found its philosophy in Spencer and Darwin by the 1880s, and was stated plainly only in a book published after his death. In public he spoke the language of the churches, preached his gospel of wealth in Christ's name and bought organs for the music. In private he wrote that he had got rid of the supernatural, and then, a page later, that he still hoped. What did not change was the creed he took from Spencer: that all grows better, and that the highest worship is service.

Thomas Henry Huxley, who belonged to the same Darwin-and-Spencer circle and gave that position the name "agnostic," which Carnegie never took, has his own chapter in this book.