- Antone Pierucci
- Posted On
This Week in History: A rags-to-riches story
America loves a good rags-to-riches story. In fact, they’re some of our most treasured myths, the foundation stones of American identity.
On this day in history, an important event occurred in the storyline of one of our most favorite rags-to-riches tale.
If you’ll forgive the impertinence, I’ve written a rendition of the myth myself. Can you tell who the story is about?
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In a land of mist and shadow, of ash and heather and oak and willow, there once lived a boy. An ordinary boy he was, from a family of ordinary people.
The people of this land, which was named Dunfermline, were known the world over for their homespun cloth.
When the boy’s grandfather was a boy, Dunfermline was a prosperous town. But the coming of coal, of steam and iron and smoke put an end to that.
In hushed tones, the once-proud weavers now spoke of the behemoth, the end of their livelihood, and “Industry” they called it. One by one, Industry put the weavers out of business.
When it came for the boy’s family, his father resisted, and spoke at length and with passion about the masters of industry, the landed gentry. It was they, he said, who unfairly profited from the destruction of Dunfermline prosperity. The landed gentry were not used to being confronted, and lashed out spitefully.
The boy and his family fled in exile far across the ocean, to a city named Allegheny in a land of once sylvan mountains, owned long ago by a family named Penn. Here, too, the behemoth industry had made its mark.
The boy and his family struggled in their new land, his father unable to conform to the new reality of a world driven by Industry. He failed time and again, each failure sending his family further into debt.
The plight of his family drove the boy, now 13 years old, to find work. The only jobs around, of course, were for Industry. Facing starvation on the one side, and the behemoth on the other, the boy bent his head and accepted the lesser of two evils.
Starting as a bobbin boy, he worked dawn until dusk running needles from one sewing machine to the other in a nearby cotton mill. He made $1.20 each week. After a time, he was hired as a messenger boy for the nearby telegraph office, but that too didn’t pay much.
His father looked on in sadness, knowing where the path his son was on would lead him. Industry swallowed men whole, pushed them, beat them and squeezed every ounce of energy from their muscles. After a time, when they were no longer of use, the behemoth cast aside the dried husks and sought new fuel for its production.
This was the normal life for immigrants like the boy.
But then one day, the boy discovered a secret place; a cool, dry clean place where children of working families were welcomed. No ordinary place, this house – because it was indeed a house, although the boy hadn’t seen one so large in his life – contained a library of books on every topic imaginable.
Invited in by the owner, a kind gentleman who once was a Colonel in the military, the boy picked up a book and read. He read in the early mornings before work. He read right after work before supper and he read after Sunday services.
Every waking moment he was not working, he was reading, learning more and more about the world around him. This knowledge gave the boy an edge over the other factory workers who didn’t know about the secret place, and never learned to read. The boy soon got a job as a telegrapher at a local train station.
A few years later, he rose to the rank of superintendent. Then one day, his supervisor came to the boy – now a grown man – with a proposal. Would he like to buy into a new type of Industry, one that could make him lots of money?
Something in the man quavered. He knew what this meant. He knew it from somewhere in his bones, a place where the echo of the mist and shadow, the ash and heather and oak and willow of Dunfermline remained. He stood at a crossroads, one way towards the normal path of immigrants, and another towards the oak-paneled rooms of the landed gentry.
Scraping together the money, the man invested in his supervisor’s Industry, and so made his decision.
Years went by. The man made lots of money from that first investment scheme. He continued making good investments, eventually buying shares and owning some of the biggest Industries in his adopted land.
He ran a steel company that employed thousands of immigrants in its factories. He was unimaginably wealthy. He had established himself as one of the leaders of the Landed Gentry, and all his fellows clapped him on the back, proud to see him among their numbers.
But they were soon deceived.
The man, now an old man, began writing essays and books and giving speeches about what it meant to be a member of the landed gentry. His fellows looked askance at him. What was he up to, they wondered.
Then, the old man wrote a book, The Gospel of Wealth. In this book, the old man claimed that the landed gentry should live without extravagance, that they should provide only moderately for their families, and that the bulk of their wealth should not go back to feeding industry. Rather, they should spend most of their money on improving the welfare and happiness of everyone.
At this, his fellows scoffed angrily, shocked to discover a Marxist under a capitalist’s clothes. But, the old man ignored his naysayers and when he sold his biggest Industry for $480 million, the old man put into practice what he had been preaching.
Starting back where he began, he built a cool, dry, clean place in Dunfermline. This place was not secret, like the house of the kind colonel from his boyhood, but it too was full of the most wonderful of books.
Years later, after spending most of his wealth on building public libraries, the old man died peacefully, content in the knowledge that he had sown the seeds of a more equitable future.
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If you haven’t figured it out by now, the above story is about the life of Andrew Carnegie. It has historical elements, to be sure.
Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. His father was a political activist who fled the country and took his family to Pennsylvania.
Carnegie did make wise and profitable decisions in his life and on March 24, 1900, he incorporated his steel company, which a year later he sold for $480 million.
His philanthropy is well known. Some of his over 2,000 libraries the world-over are still standing today, like the one in Lakeport, Calif.
But we often forget that that wealth was made on the backs of thousands of unskilled laborers who worked long hours under grueling conditions for 14 cents an hour.
Carnegie ordered his plant manager in Homestead, Pennsylvania to call out 300 Pinkerton agents to brutally quash a labor strike in 1892 (which failed, but the arrival of the state militia turned the tide). Carnegie had actually become the very type of man his father had railed against.
But who am I to ruin a good story?
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.