Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and American Pedagogy

An unbroken progression leads from the symmetry of gift exchange to the asymmetry of the conspicuous redistribution that is the basis of the constitution of political authority.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

If you were to approach the south wall of Bucknell University’s Carnegie Building, you would see four names inscribed above its lintels: Charlemagne, Alfred, Washington, Lincoln (see Figure 1).¹ The building, originally a library, was among thousands built with a library grant from Andrew Carnegie between 1886 and 1917, the years when the steel magnate was pouring the bulk of his wealth into philanthropic projects and when Anglo-Saxon studies was beginning to burgeon in the US. In this context, the connection between Charlemagne and Alfred, Washington and Lincoln seems unsurprising, in that it invokes myths of racial and national origins extremely popular in those decades, and it monumentalizes the idea, advocated by Thomas Jefferson and long a mainstay of Anglo-Saxon studies, that the Teutonic tribes of Europe first conceived of democracy, the principles of which were then transported to England and refined by the Anglo-Saxons. According to this early American historiography, Charlemagne and Alfred were the forebears of Washington and Lincoln, who carried out the destiny of the freedom-loving race.² The medievalist historicism of this political genealogy, which substitutes a European past for an indigenous one and which provided ideological support for territorial expansion under the banner of “manifest destiny,”³ sits comfortably within the more encompassing, world-historical sequences of the names visible on the other three walls: two for literature (Vergil–Dante–Milton; Homer–Shakespeare–Goethe), one for philosophy (Plato–Aristotle–Kant–Hegel), and one for science (Newton–Laplace–Franklin) (see Figures 2–4).

Fig. 1.

South Wall: Charlemagne, Alfred, Washington, Lincoln.

Fig. 2.

East Wall: Vergil, Dante, Milton.

Carnegie’s library program blazed the trail for corporate philanthropy. After amassing enormous, virtually unspendable wealth in his business ventures, Carnegie retired, declaring that he would thenceforth devote himself to giving his entire fortune away. Departing from the personal, direct, overtly paternalistic forms of

Fig. 3.

North Wall: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel.

Fig. 4.

West Wall: Newton, Laplace, Franklin.

philanthropy then predominant, he developed a program of library-giving that operated as a business, effectively institutionalizing the socioeconomic principles motivating his philanthropy. In this essay I take it as obvious that the philanthropy of wealthy men like Carnegie produces symbolic capital, along the lines of the process described by Pierre Bourdieu as “the conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital, which produces relations of dependence that have an economic basis but are disguised under a veil of moral relations” (123). As I will discuss below, Carnegie himself describes the process only slightly differently, stating that a millionaire’s wealth is a sign of his superiority, and that he has a moral responsibility to administer this wealth on behalf of the poor according to his best judgment. My concern in this essay is to investigate the relationship between the medievalist historicism attested in the genealogy on Bucknell’s Carnegie Building and the processes by which Carnegie, among others, institutionalized philanthropy and thereby established an impersonal, self-perpetuating mechanism for redistributing economic capital into symbolic capital at a crucial moment in the history of US labor relations.

1. Genealogy and Philanthropy

Carnegie himself may never have known about the names chiseled on the walls of the Bucknell Carnegie Building. In his early years of library-giving, beginning in the mid-1880s, Carnegie bestowed lavish gifts upon communities with which he had a personal association, following the paternalistic model of late-nineteenth-century philanthropists such as George Peabody (Van Slyck 10–11; Jones 7).⁴ He would later classify this as his “retail” stage. These buildings tended to be monumental, ornate, and often Romanesque, clearly advertising Carnegie’s wealth to those who worked in or lived near his steel mills. By 1903, however, when Bucknell...