The Gospel of Carnegie

Did success author Napoleon Hill ever meet the world’s richest man?

Success author Napoleon Hill described his first encounter with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie — “the richest man that the richest nation on earth ever produced” — in terms that brought to mind Moses receiving the tablets on Mount Sinai. Hill said that he interviewed the industrialist in 1908 and received marching orders to codify a philosophy of success, which formed the basis for his 1928 book The Law of Success and the wealth-building classic that followed nine years later, Think and Grow Rich.

Whatever impression Hill left on Carnegie, the industrialist made no mention of the younger man in his writings. Nor did Hill begin making references to the fateful meeting until nearly a decade after Carnegie’s death in 1919.

Critics question whether the encounter ever took place. I am agnostic on the point. Hill was working that year for Bob Taylor’s Magazine, an inspirational and general-interest monthly published by the former governor of Tennessee who continued the magazine as a U.S. senator.

The journal featured up-by-the-bootstraps stories of millionaires — a staple of the day’s popular literature — and the job (and Taylor’s position) could have facilitated contact between journalist and subject. In December 1908, under his birthname “Oliver Napoleon Hill” (one of the last times he would use that byline), Hill wrote a regional essay on “Mobile and Southern Alabama” accompanied by an author photo, seen above, of the bow-tied young writer. No interview with Carnegie ever appeared, nor have I located any further byline for Hill in magazine.

In any case, Carnegie’s memoirs do paint the image of a man who enjoyed discussing the metaphysics of success. In his autobiography, published posthumously in 1920, Carnegie recalled that as an adolescent he “became deeply interested in the mysterious doctrines of Swedenborg.” A Spiritualist aunt encouraged the young Carnegie to develop his psychical talents, or “ability to expound ‘spiritual sense’.”

Carnegie was eager to be taken seriously as an author and he reveled in probing whether there exist natural laws of money and accumulation. In June 1889, Carnegie published his essay “Wealth” for the North American Review, which might have been forgotten if not for its near-immediate republication by England’s evening newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette under the more alluring title by which it became internationally famous and is reprinted here: “The Gospel of Wealth.”

Taking a leaf from the neo-Darwinian views of philosopher Herbert Spencer, Carnegie described a “law of competition,” which he believed brought a rough, necessary order to the world:

While the law may be sometimes hard to the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial but essential for the future progress of the race.

Although contemporaneous success authors such as Ralph Waldo Trine and Wallace D. Wattles extolled creativity above competition, Carnegie welcomed “laws of accumulation” as a necessary means of separating life’s winners from losers. At his steel mills, the magnate sometimes backed his belief through ruthless and, by way of surrogates and business partners, brutal labor practices. Seven of his workers were killed by Pinkerton guards during the Homestead Strike of 1892.

Yet Carnegie’s essay had a surprising wrinkle. He emphasized that great wealth — which he attributed chiefly to raw materials, real estate, utilities, and inventions (the manufacturer disdained financial speculation) — was the product of the community. And should ultimately be returned to it.

Wealth, Carnegie argued, is amassed as a passive result of an industrialist or investor benefiting from mass shifts in demography, migration, and public needs. The world’s reputedly richest man wrote that wealth should be restored to the community rather than passed down through family inheritance.

In a sentiment that would win him few admirers among radicals and reformers, Carnegie counseled that millionaires should electively dispense their money in acts of philanthropy during their lifetimes. He called that the legitimate culmination of success. In essence, Carnegie argued that monopolistic capitalism should be leavened by voluntary largesse or noblesse oblige.

But the millionaire’s sense of volunteerism had its limits. If the rich didn’t find a way to disperse their fortunes through philanthropy, Carnegie called for a nearly 100 percent estate tax to settle the matter for them.

“The Gospel of Wealth” proved so popular that Carnegie issued two sequels in the North American Review — the first in December 1889 called “The Best Fields for Philanthropy” and the second seventeen years later in December 1906 called “The Gospel of Wealth II.” Although Carnegie wrote a handful of related pieces in response to his critics, his earlier essays provide a more or less complete perspective on his views of how wealth is generated — and how it should be dispensed.

Whether one agrees with Carnegie on every point — and I do not — it is worth noting that he followed through on his statements with wide-ranging acts of structured philanthropy. In so doing, the industrialist helped presage the nonprofit field as it exists today.

His business advice is for each individual to assess, but of one point he leaves no doubt: great fortunes accrue due not primarily to the ability of their holders but to ancillary events and circumstances that emerge from public need and growth.

This article is adapted from the author’s abridgment of Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth.