Worth noting Carnegie did this when faced with massive strikes and growing radical movements around the country. 1886 was the same year as Haymarket. His business partner/enforcer was literally shot by an anarchist.
Public libraries are great but he and his ilk funded them because they were scared.
TIL Andrew Carnegie believed that public libraries were the key to self-improvement for ordinary folk. In the years between 1886 & 1917, Carnegie financed the construction of 2811 public libraries. Ironically this is the same reason rich people are now trying to defund libraries. Knowledge is power
If society executed one random billionaire on the hour (ten per day) Monday through Friday until stuff was fixed, how long until a plan to fix things was agreed to?
8 AM
9 AM
10 AM
11 AM
noon
1 PM
2 PM
3 PM
4 PM
5 PM
and he wanted self-improvement in order to create an aspirational managerial class, rather than class-conscious workers who might unionize or otherwise engage in collective action!
lol for real but also I like my Carnegie library. I’m in a red state and they are keeping all the gay content on the shelves.
Anyway. Make billionaires afraid again
I never realized one of the most useful classes I'd take to understand United States in the 2020s would be the high school history class America 1850-1920. (And reading The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman helped)
In Pittsburgh, we always say he built a library in every neighborhood he screwed over. There are a lot of Carnegie libraries in the city.
Tangentially, Frick's house is very nice and open for tours. His daughter Helen gave away a lot of his fortune after he died to salvage the Frick name.
Every bit of charity from Carnegie, Rockefeller, and all the rest was basically them trying to bribe their way out of angry mobs coming for them. Guess we need to bring back the angry mobs if we want billionaires to stop fucking around.
Carnegie endowed a trust in his name that is still doing a lot of really good things to this day. I'm not buying that he gave so much because he was scared.
*full disclosure, at one stage I worked with (not for) Carnegie Trust on projects to improve social housing.
Wasn't implying that Frick's shooting happened same year as Haymarket, just listing some examples of how rage against oligarchs like Carnegie helped scare them enough that they poured cash into things like libraries. Ah, character limits
Not noting that Carnegie's prior actions resulted in an arming of his factory and the deaths of a dozen or more people seems a bit disingenuous. His business partner sent armed mercenaries (Pinkertons) against his factories workers, and then National Guard troops.
