Abstract
ANDREW CARNEGIE was born on November 25, 1835, the son of a hand-loom weaver of Dunfermline. A centenary commemorative volume bears the title “Andrew Carnegie: the Trusts and their Work”. There is a peculiar fitness in the close association of his name with the word ‘trust’, for the notion of trust was fundamental in the creed which dictated his disposition of the vast wealth he controlled. He believed that great private wealth was a public trust; that the increment of large fortunes was socially created and should be redispensed to the society that had created it. In conformity with this “gospel of wealth”, as he called it, nine-tenths of his public benefactions were designed to promote the welfare of the people of the United States of America, the country of his adoption (he emigrated to America with his parents in 1848), and the earliest of the series of great foundations which have immortalised his name and ideals was for the creation of a cultural centre in Pittsburgh, the city where he had laid the foundations of his career and his fortune.
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The Carnegie Trusts. Nature 137, 37–38 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137037a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137037a0