In his manifesto The Gospel of Wealth (1889), the American tycoon Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) argued forcefully that the wealthy had a moral obligation to serve as stewards for society: “No man becomes rich unless he enriches others.” After selling his interests in U.S. Steel to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1901 at the age of sixty-five, he lived up fully to his philosophy, turning an abiding interest in philanthropy into a compulsion. He received between 400 and 500 letters a day from those seeking his indulgence, ranging from William Gladstone to Mark Twain, and bestowed on various charitable causes and institutions sums worth about 90 percent of his aggregate wealth: about $332 million. These included:
* $25,000 toward the construction of a swimming bath in his native Dumferline, Scotland: his first benefaction, in 1873
* 2,500 free libraries
* 7,689 church organs (after a donation to the Swedenborgian church in Allegheny, which his father had attended)
* New York’s Carnegie Hall, inaugurated in 1891 with a concert conducted by Tchaikovsky
* Carnegie Technical Schools, founded in 1900, which from 1912 was the Carnegie Institute of Technology—now part of Carnegie Mellon University
* $5 million for the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, a charity for citizens putting their lives at risk for the sake of others, moved by the deaths of rescuers at the Hawick coal mine disaster in January 1904. In his Andrew Carnegie (1989), Joseph Frazier Wall records: “Every other philanthropic fund that Carnegie had ever established had been proposed to him—often forced upon him—by others. The Hero Fund came out of his own head and heart, and it delighted him.”
* $36 million endowment for the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, consisting of a museum, library, art collection, and music hall
* Funds for the construction of the artificial lake at Princeton (to allow “a rowing crew to compete with Harvard”)
* Initial capital and board for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a pension fund for college professors, from which in 1917 emerged the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association
* Initial capital for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910. Its Palace of Peace in the Hague was completed three years later
* The Central American Court of Justice in Costa Rica, completed and destroyed shortly after by an earthquake in 1910
* $125 million toward the foundation of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whose board was mandated to “promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge among the people of the United States”