“Dear Andy”
by Kenneth Benson
The waggish wits of Puck magazine took on the most powerful figures of Gilded Age America — philanthropists not exempted!
The merry satirists of Puck magazine — its title inspired by the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — took on the most powerful political figures of America’s Gilded Age. They were also more than happy to offer advice to the great philanthropists of the day, including Andrew Carnegie, whose scientific approach to giving disdained “so-called charity” as doing the needy more evil than good in the long run. Carnegie believed that in bestowing charity, “the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves.” Philanthropy addresses root causes, offering “ladders upon which the aspiring can rise,” while too often in charity “more injury is probably done rewarding vice than by relieving virtue.” In this, as critics were quick to note, Carnegie can appear unfeeling. The waggish wits of Puck are here gentler in their remonstrances.
A Christmas Reminder Criticism of philanthropists — of the causes they choose to support, of their true motives — is nothing new. A week before Christmas Day in 1901, Puck himself gestures toward an elderly couple entering the study of Andrew Carnegie, who is poring over plans for a new library before a roaring fire. Puck addresses the great philanthropist: “Books are already so cheap and libraries so abundant that even the poorest man has all the literature he wants. Now, why not provide respectable homes for the people who are too old to work and who were never able to save anything from their scanty wages; and so keep them from beggary, starvation or suicide?” On the back wall hangs a canvas of The Good Samaritan. (Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
A Word to the Grand Stand Specialists Always the troublemaker, Puck tugs at Andrew Carnegie’s coattails, asking: “You have qualified thoroughly as modern philanthropists, now why not do some good?” Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller pile bags of money before the statue of “Fame,” while symbolic representations of their philanthropy — libraries and universities — rise imposingly in the background. In 1903, Puck suggests, such great wealth would be better lavished on causes like a “Free Home for Consumptives.” The scroll features the shadowy plan of just such a home, while at lower right ordinary citizens deposit coins into a contributions box for the as yet unbuilt sanitarium. (Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Philanthropist Andy’s Latest With funds provided by its namesake, Carnegie Lake at Princeton University officially opened on December, 5, 1906, at a final cost of approximately $450,000 (about $11.3 million today). Andrew Carnegie’s largesse to the Ivy League school did not go unnoticed by the wits at Puck magazine, who here envision an avalanche of imploring letters addressed to “Dear Andy.” What are some of the “other deficiencies of nature” that Carnegie’s wealth could remedy? A mountain (for flat Chicago) … “a Palm Beach” (for the Eskimos) … “a Sun” (for smoky Pittsburgh) … “a natural bridge across the East River” (to connect Brooklyn to Manhattan) … and “a beer geyser” (for Milwaukee, which has heard that Andy is “giving away lakes”). (Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
A Christmas Sermon In this presentation on tenement housing, delivered on December 26, 1900, Puck is not making the case for charity. (Andrew Carnegie inveighed against what he called “indiscriminate charity,” considering it better to simply throw one’s money into the sea.) Rather, the usually mischievous sprite is thoroughly serious, addressing some of the great philanthropists of the day as follows: “Here is something for you generous millionaires to think about, when you are endowing schools, colleges and libraries. A chance to learn is good, but a chance to live is better. Your present plan gives more to those that already have much. Suppose you try giving something to those that have less than nothing. Provide necessities for the poor rather than luxuries for the rich. It is better to give these many thousands a chance to live clean, decent, moral lives than to give a few hundred sons of well-to-do parents a college education. While these horrible conditions exist one model tenement will do more real good than a dozen colleges. You mean well. Try do to as well as you mean.” (Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Currently editor/writer at Carnegie Corporation of New York, Kenneth Benson has written, edited, and curated print, digital, and exhibition projects for The New York Public Library, the Museum of Biblical Art, The New York Botanical Garden, and other cultural institutions.
