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Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Spencer: A Special Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John White
John White
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies, University of Hull, Hull, Humberside, HU6 7RX.
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Extract

Andrew Carnegie, as he never tired of informing his readers and audiences, was an avowed and fervent admirer of the British railway engineer turned evolutionary cosmic philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie frequently addressed Spencer as “ My Dear Master,” entitled one chapter of his Autobiography “ Herbert Spencer and His Disciple,” and liked to say that Spencer had had an even greater influence on him than either Burns or Shakespeare. Certainly in Carnegie, Spencer had one of his warmest American friends and a generous admirer, and the two men remained in close contact from the time of their first meeting sometime during the early 1880s until Spencer's death in 1903. An examination of their friendship yields some valuable insights into the reception of Spencer's ideas by the outstanding — if atypical — spokesman of the American business class during the Gilded Age. It reveals Carnegie's much-vaunted evolutionism to have been instinctive rather than intellectual, derived not from study and uncertainty but from innate optimism and heuristic observation. Again, despite Spencer's promotion by some historians as the patron saint of industrial capitalism, his writings and his relationship with Carnegie indicate that Spencer was highly critical of American competitive mores, monopolistic practices and pervasive materialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1979 , pp. 57 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 For the wider reception of Spencer's thought in America see: White, John, “The Americans on Herbert Spencer: Some Reactions to His Social and Evolutionary Thought, 1860–1940” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 1975)Google Scholar. The best recent intellectual biography of Spencer is Peel, J. D. Y., Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Carnegie's latest biographer is Wall, J. F., Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

2 Carnegie, Andrew, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (London, 1920), p. 338Google Scholar.

3 Spencer, Herbert, An Autobiography (London, 1904), 2, 396Google Scholar.

4 According to Carnegie: “Spencer liked good stories and was a good laugher. American stories seemed to please him more than others, and of those I was able to tell him not a few, which were usually followed by explosive laughter.” Carnegie, , Autobiography, p. 338Google Scholar. Spencer, however, remembered only that the Atlantic crossing was “without noteworthy incident. Of entries in my diary, one made after only four days at sea, shows my constitutional impatience – ‘Getting very much bored.’” Spencer, p. 387.

5 Hendrick, B. J., The Life of Andrew Carnegie (London, 1933). p. 208Google Scholar.

6 Carnegie, p. 337.

7 Ibid., p. 336.

8 Spencer's Delmonico's address is reprinted in Youmans, E. L., ed., Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer (New York, 1883)Google Scholar. In his Autobiography, Spencer notes: “my address was mainly devoted to a criticism of American life as characterized by over-devotion to work” (2, 406–07).

9 Quoted in Hendrick, p. 240.

10 Duncan, David, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1908), p. 305Google Scholar. In his Autobiography, Spencer offers more characteristic reflections on the episode. “When two years ago, Mr. Carnegie presented me with a piano, I made arrangements with a professional lady to give me an hour's performance upon it weekly; but two experiments sufficed to cause desistance. I got no sleep afterwards on either occasion” (2, 453).

11 Hendrick, p. 619.

12 Carnegie, pp. 334–35.

13 Hendrick, pp. 620–21.

14 Ibid., pp. 624–25.

15 Carnegie to Spencer, 14 Sept., 1903. Herbert Spencer Papers, Athenaeum Collection, University of London Library.

16 Hendrick, p. 627.

17 Carnegie, pp. 337–38.

18 First Principles, 2 (London, 1910), 321Google Scholar.

19 The completed Synthetic Philosophy comprised First Principles (1862); The Principles of Biology (1864–67); The Principles of Psychology (1872); The Principles of Ethics (1879–1883); The Principles of Sociology (1876–96).

20 Social Statics (New York, 1954), p. 338Google Scholar.

21 Reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London, 1883), 2, 146–47Google Scholar.

22 See especially Loewenberg, Bert J., “Darwinism Comes to America,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 28 (1941), 339–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Hendrick, pp. 629–30. Carnegie did not, however, include this passage in the actual address. See Carnegie, Andrew, Rectorial Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (Edinburgh, 1902)Google Scholar.

24 Carnegie, , Autobiography, p. 339Google Scholar.

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28 Wyllie, I. G., “Social Darwinism and the Businessman,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 103 (1959), 631Google Scholar. See also Wyllie, , The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, N.J., 1954)Google Scholar.

29 For two brief but judicious estimates of Carnegie's thought see McCloskey, R. G., American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kirkland, E. C., Business in the Gilded Age: The Conservatives' Balance Sheet (Madison, 1952)Google Scholar.

30 Carnegie, “Gospel of Wealth” in Kirkland, ed., pp. 80–81.

31 Carnegie, , Autobiography, p. 22Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., pp. 208–09.

33 Bridge recalled that he was well-received by Carnegie as “I was just the man he was looking for … he was about to write a history of the material development of the US during the preceding fifty years.” Bridge, J. H., Millionaires and Grub Street: Comrades and Contacts in the Last Half Century (New York, 1931), p. 157Google Scholar.

34 Walter Troughton, Spencer's secretary from 1883–1903, remembered reading passages of Inside History to Spencer that left “an uncomfortable impression,” since Spencer “had always looked upon Mr. Carnegie as standing apart from the great mass of American millionaires bent only on accumulating wealth – as a man of liberal ideas as well as liberal disposition.… Had he been convinced that Mr. Carnegie had come by his wealth in reprehensible ways, he would not have hesitated to dissociate himself from him, but the reading of Bridge's book … did not lead to any definite conviction on which such a resolution as this could be based.” “Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer” (1903?), Herbert Spencer Papers.

35 Bridge, p. 35.

36 Carnegie, , The Gospel of Wealth in Kirkland, , ed., pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

37 Carnegie, , Problems of Today (New York, 1908), p. 4Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Wall, p. 392.

39 Carnegie, , The Gospel of Wealth in Kirkland, , ed., p. 49Google Scholar.

40 See Mosier, R. D., Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, and Weiss, Richard, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

41 Carnegie, “The Road to Success: A Talk to Young Men,” an address delivered to students of Curry Commercial College, Pittsburgh, 23 June 1885. Reprinted in Carnegie, , The Empire of Business (New York, 1902), pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

42 Carnegie, , Triumphant Democracy (New York, 1886), p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Spencer to Carnegie, 18 May, 1886. Quoted in Hendrick, pp. 240–41.

44 Quoted in Wall, p. 825.

45 Hendrick notes that “Carnegie was one of the friends whom Spencer requested to be notified of his death, and there was considerable discussion of a suitable keepsake. A brass-bound writing desk was ultimately decided on” (p. 626).