In his 1889 essay, The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie wrote, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Then the world’s richest person, Carnegie concluded that the wealthy were merely trustees of their wealth — and that their solemn duty was to administer it, during their lifetimes, “for the good of the people.” Worthy beneficiaries, he believed, included universities, colleges, hospitals, public parks, research laboratories, public baths, concert and meeting halls, memorial arches, museums, and churches. But what lay closest to the visionary philanthropist’s heart? The library — or, as history would show, thousands of libraries.
In The Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie traced the origins of his devotion to libraries:
It is, no doubt, possible that my own personal experience may have led me to value a free library beyond all other forms of beneficence. When I was a boy in Pittsburgh, Colonel Anderson, of Allegheny — a name I can never speak without feelings of devotional gratitude — opened his little library of four hundred books to boys. Every Saturday afternoon he was in attendance himself at his house to exchange books. No one but he who has felt it can know the intense longing with which the arrival of Saturday was awaited, that a new book might be had … I resolved, if ever wealth came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries, that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to that noble man.
“Sixty-Five Libraries at One Stroke”
On March 9, 1901, John S. Billings, director of the recently incorporated New York Public Library, wrote to Andrew Carnegie outlining his ambitious plans for a library system “promoting the education and enjoyment of the people and of making good citizens.” Billings knew that Carnegie — a proud immigrant who referred to himself as “the star-spangled Scotsman” — was also a very proud New Yorker. In a separate letter, he had shrewdly enclosed a statistical table about the number of libraries in Boston, Chicago, and other American cities relative to their populations — showing New York City well behind. Carnegie’s response came within days. He would consider it a “rare privilege” to furnish New York City with “sixty-five libraries at one stroke,” through a gift of $5.2 million. That act made New York City one of the first beneficiaries of Carnegie’s library philanthropy, which eventually helped build more than 2,500 libraries across the world. In New York, Carnegie’s gift helped guarantee that every resident would have a library in their neighborhood, carrying on his vision of creating opportunity for all — especially for the newest immigrants to America — through access to books and education.
