Tuesday, July 8, 2014
The Roots of Today's Giving Pledge
The Giving Pledge may be vogue today for many wealthy Americans, but as Forbes notes, the idea was first advanced 125 years ago when Andrew Carnegie, whose money endowed Carnegie Corporation of New York, wrote an essay encouraging other industrialists to give away their fortunes.
In the "Gospel of Wealth," published in 1889 during the height of the Gilded Age, Carnegie explained his reasons for donating the bulk of his wealth, about $350 million -- or about $4.8 billion today.
“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” he now-famously wrote....