En Passant: Carnegie Library – Andrew’s legacy

EVERY NOW and then I get asked if the Carnegie Library building on the corner of Mark and Landdrost streets has anything to do with me or my family. It hasn’t, except that we share the name, so there’s no point in you asking me to build you a library (or any other structure, for that matter). Besides, Doris would be very annoyed if I built you a library when our own bathroom badly needs painting.

No, the Carnegie Library here in Vryheid was built thanks to a grant from the Scottish-American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (“Handy Andy” to his cronies down at Joe’s Bar & Grill). He and my ancestors came from Scotland, but whereas he ended up in the United States of America with more money than you can shake a stick at, I’m in the southern part of Africa and still driving an old Cortina bakkie with a dodgy speedometer.

Andrew Carnegie’s money built just over two-and-half-thousand libraries between 1883 and 1929, most of them in the USA. In South Africa there are Carnegie Library buildings in 12 towns – Barberton (1911), Benoni (1913), Germiston (1915), Harrismith (1907), Hopetown (1908), Krugersdorp (1917), Moorreesburg (1911), Muizenberg (1909), Newcastle (1913), Potchefstroom (1912), Standerton (1911) and Vryheid (October 15, 1906). The dates are when the grants were approved, and in Vryheid’s case the grant was $7,300, which in 1909 was probably quite a lot of money.

At the time, Vryheid, as the recipient of a library grant, had to:

1. Demonstrate the need for a public library;

2. Provide the building site;

3. Undertake annually to provide ten percent of the cost of the library’s construction to support its operation; and,

4. Make the library service free to all.

Andrew Carnegie had grown up incredibly poor, even by the standards of the time in Scotland. Poo-rer that a wee kirk moose, as he might have said in his Scots accent. He was born in 1835 in a one-room cottage, probably about the size of a RDP house in Bhezuzulu. His father, William, was a weaver, and in 1848 he moved the family to Pennsylvania in the USA. Andrew’s first job, aged 13, was changing spools of thread in a cotton mill,12 hours a day, six days a week, at $1.20 per week.

When he retired in 1901, 53 years later, he sold his business interests in steel for $225,639,000, which in 2014 terms amounts to around $6.4 billion. Not to put too fine a point on it, Andrew Carnegie was not short of a bob or two; he was not short of two brass farthings to rub together; he could have bought you a nice lunch.

He then proceeded to give most of it away – $7,300 of it to Vryheid.

He really did. He is reported to have given away around 90% of his wealth “with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education and scientific research.” Among other things, he built Carnegie Hall in New York, and founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York,Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

And it was part of Andrew’s library formula that allowed the public for the first time to have access to the books they were to borrow. Up until then, lending libraries had what was called a “closed stacks” policy. You entered the library, went up to the counter and said the the librarian, “Sorry to bother you, old chap, but may I possibly borrow The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander”, and the librarian would toddle off to find it, return to the counter, and after the necessary paperwork was completed, hand it over.

Patrons could not browse through the books available, could not read the blurb on the cover, I suppose they wouldn’t have even known what books were available. The stacks of books were closed to the public.

Andrew Carnegie changed all that. He created what was for the time a revolutionary concept of open shelves and self service for the reader. It wasn’t solely for the benefit of the public as much as it was a cost-saving tactic. One librarian at a desk near the exit could spend time checking in and out books rather than running back and forth, looking for an obscure treatise on the sexual habits of the aardvark, or the History of Concrete, or I don’t know the book’s title but it’s by, you know, by old whasthisname, ag man you know, also wrote that thing about us being descended from monkeys, ha-ha, you should see my mother-in-law? I mean, a librarian in a closed stack environment had pressures, you know, which open stacks eliminated.

But for all his generosity, Andrew Carnegie, when he died in August 1919 in Massachusetts, did not in his will make provision for a very, very, very distant uncle’s sixteenth cousin, four times removed, living at the bottom of Africa, driving an old Cortina bakkie with a dodgy speedometer in 2014.

Nah, he left me nothing in his will, so I’m leaving him nothing in mine.