Andrew Carnegie

Look at that.

Andrew Carnegie.

Yeah, so

it's named after him.

There are great gaps of unfilled need between.

And through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, givers comes that colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure going to and fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he sowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational value if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with books.

Anon he appalls the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast and uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure.

Anon he precipitates the library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. Morley.

But evasion, they told me in Chicago, was simple and easy.

New York, too, can show by its statute books that my drowsy nocturnal messenger boy was illegal and impossible.

This is the bottommost end of the scale that at the top is on the lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew Carnegie.

Equally with these things, it is an unpremeditated consequence of an inadequate theory of freedom.

And this methodology ties directly back to the historical anxieties of the ultra wealthy.

If you look back at the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in human history, famously feared that large inheritances would utterly ruin the recipient.

He wrote extensively about this in The Gospel of Wealth.

Carnegie understood human nature.

It was a promissory note, a written, signed promise to pay someone a specific sum of money, either on demand or at a set future date.

It was made out for the sum of $2 million, and it was signed by Andrew Carnegie himself.

The woman appeared flustered that the banker had seen it.

She begged him to keep what he had seen a secret.

And then, in the manner of someone confessing a burden she could no longer carry alone, she told him the truth about herself.

She was, she said, the secret illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.

The great man, wracked with guilt over the circumstances of her birth, had been quietly providing for her for years and stood to leave her a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars upon his death.

She swore the banker to absolute secrecy.