Emily Post, the doyenne of American etiquette, once commented upon a phenomenon that occurs among the very wealthy:
Why a man, because he has millions, should assume that they confer omniscience in all branches of knowledge is something which may be left to the psychologist to answer, but most people thrown much into contact with millionaires will agree that an attitude of infallibility is typical of a fair majority.
Some contemporary examples might readily spring to mind.
In 1899, M.F. and J.C. Campbell published Anti-Carnegie Scraps and Comments, a scurrilous little booklet that attacked Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist who was then beginning a new career as a pacifist and anti-imperialist.
Carnegie was an obvious target: his widespread generosity had already made him a public figure – he would eventually build 1,500 of his eponymous libraries in the United States – and in 1889 he explained the philosophy behind his charity in The Gospel of Wealth. When he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901, establishing U.S. Steel, he would become the richest man in America.
Born in 1835, Carnegie was also old enough to remember the carnage of the American Civil War. While he never served in the armed forces, his time in the US Military Telegraph Corps and his efforts in organizing troop movements and communications exposed him to the logistics and costs of modern warfare as well as its collateral damage. For example, beyond its battlefield casualties, the war’s single largest loss of civilian life occurred in 1862, when the Allegheny Arsenal exploded in Pittsburgh, less than five miles from his childhood home.
In Carnegie’s opinion, pacifism – once only the spiritual purview of Quakers and Mennonites – could be reconceived in rational administrative terms whereby conflicts between nations would be arbitrated legally rather than militarily. After he retired, Carnegie would turn his full energies towards promoting peace, funding the construction of the Peace Palace in the Hague, which still houses the International Court of Justice, as well as establishing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But first there was the small matter of the Spanish-American War.
By the 1890s, Spain’s colonial holdings in the Western Hemisphere had attenuated, with the empire losing virtually all its South American and central American colonies (including Mexico) during the first half of the 19th century. Cuba had been an exception, but by the 1890s, liberation movements on the island had gathered force with the explicit encouragement of the United States commercial interests. As Cuba became more volatile politically, the case for US intervention grew, and in January 1898, President McKinley sent the USS Maine to Cuba into to protect American citizens (and their bottom line).
On February 15, the Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, killing over two hundred sailors and crew. Like later conflicts whose casus belli become less clear over time – the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 or the allegations concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction that preceded the 2003 American intervention in Iraq, for example — later boards of inquiry would be inconclusive: a mine may have sunk the Maine or its own ordinance may have exploded spontaneously. In any case, the American government imposed a naval blockade and Spain declared war.
Meanwhile, newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were competing for circulation in most major cities and nothing sold papers faster than armed conflict, particularly one that was less than a hundred miles away. Theodore Roosevelt – who had initially become a celebrity as the reforming President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners – resigned his position as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and helped formed the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalryor the “Rough Riders” (their nickname was inspired by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show), and set out for Santiago, where the Spanish Fleet was moored. After American victories at San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill, the ships sailed home and an armistice was signed in August.
In December, the Treaty of Paris ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States, and while Cuba would remain nominally independent, it became an integral part of an American archipelago that policed the Caribbean basin and, with the Hawaiian Islands, Midway Island and American Samoa, stretched west to Asia.
In response to colonial expansion, The American Anti-Imperial League was founded in 1898. Fundamentally, the League argued that subjected people had the right to self-determination and governance rather than living under colonial rule; its supporters included Carnegie, Mark Twain, and William Jennings Bryan. The proponents of colonialism reinterpreted the trope of Manifest Destiny – that Americans could keep expanding across the Pacific – and had a moral responsibility to civilize the Filipino peoples, an idea encapsulated in the poem “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling, for example. At one point, Carnegie was serious enough to propose personally reimbursing the United States the $20 million dollars it had paid Spain for the Philippines, an offer quickly rejected by McKinley.
The Campbell’s preface pretty much sets the tone of Anti-Carnegie:
This little volume is a veritable history of the anti-imperial craze, which was started in Pittsburg, November 1898, by Andrew Carnegie. The writers noted it from the first ripple, and the source from whence it came. Does Andrew Carnegie stand by the flag of this country? He has expressed sympathy for and given encouragement to the armed bands of Filipinos, but he has neither for our American soldiers who are now engaged in the final conquest of the Philippines, to prevent our flag from being “hauled down” from where it has been planted. The flag that shrouds the forms of our dead heroes. The flag that only waves over the land of the free.
And in the time-honored tradition of hatchet jobs, the Campbells use every bit of available evidence to discredit Carnegie, regardless of its relevance:
Is he truly an American citizen? In an early example of birtherism, they suggest that there was no documentary evidence to support that claim and therefore that he had no right to comment on American policy. Is he charitable? Carnegie may have built libraries, but he leaves their operating costs to individual municipalities. Is he a devout Christian? Then why do millworkers labor on the Sabbath, depriving them of rest and piety? Does he care about the welfare of those who are left widowed by the mills? Then “[w]hy does not Andrew Carnegie build free homes for old people?” If he believes in freedom, then why does he have so many servants? Does he truly believe in Jeffersonian principles, when Jefferson himself presided over the expansion of the nation by the Louisiana Purchase? Are the Filipinos our equal? “If they have the same feelings we have, why do they not want civilization?”
These kinds of unsubstantiated allegations drag on for a hundred pages, and it’s debatable whether any of the arguments stuck. After the Campbells had the book published in Pittsburgh they apparently peddled the book to influential Republicans: Theodore Roosevelt – who came to loathe Carnegie – received one and his staff politely acknowledged it receipt. The copy in the Posner Center’s collection at Carnegie Mellon University was apparently earmarked for Mark Hanna, a US Senator from Ohio and McKinley’s close confidant and campaign manager. There is, however, no discernable evidence that the Campbells advancing in public life or politics.
Whatever limited impact that Anti-Carnegie Scraps and Comments had, it demarcated a fundamental change in the country’s role in the world as an imperial power. The Anti-Imperial League would dissolve in 1920. Theodore Roosevelt, elevated to the Presidency in 1901 after McKinley’s assassination, and would become an advocate of overseas power, eventually helping to broker a peace between Russia and Japan in 1905 and winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. While the Phillipino-American War would officially conclude in 1902, insurgents would continue hostilities until 1913, turning the “splendid little war” between Spain and the United States into America’s first forever war, stretching over a decade and halfway around the world. The United States would occupy the Philippines and not fully withdraw from the islands’ governance until 1946.
Andrew Carnegie’s quest for peace went unfulfilled in his lifetime. Realizing how the imperial powers of Europe were jockeying over their overseas possessions, Carnegie asked Roosevelt to intercede with King Edward VII of Great Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, but the negotiations stopped upon Edward’s death in 1910. Carnegie himself would die in August 1919, a month after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending the Great War between Germany and the Allied nations.
The role of great wealth in American politics has never been successfully adjudicated. Carnegie was neither elected nor appointed to office but influenced policy through his philanthropic endeavors and legacies. His opponents attempted to minimize his influence as naïve, misguided, or immature, but nevertheless, the role of fortune and celebrity allowed Carnegie – and the industrial barons who followed him – an outsized influence in determining American policy.
At least one of the Campbells’ assertions is demonstrably wrong. While they believed that “This book is a waif [and] it never can enter the doors of the Carnegie Libraries,” it can now be found in the Posner Memorial Collection at Carnegie Mellon.
