CHAPTER 1

Sufficiently White: Carnegie Corporation’s International Reach

Frederick P. Keppel became president of Carnegie Corporation in 1923 and remained in that position until his retirement in 1941. During these years, Keppel steered the organization to fund Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) as well as its two predecessor studies, The Poor White Problem in South Africa (1932) and Lord Malcolm Hailey’s An African Survey (1938): cooperative studies in the social sciences intended by their funder and authors to help guide white policymakers address perceived problems in managing white supremacy and Black subordination in the Anglo-American world.

And yet, the idea to reinforce a white Anglo-American world order was not simply the result of Keppel’s singular preference or of his advisers’ influence on him. Rather, as this and the next chapter show, it was an approach to international order along the color line encouraged by Keppel’s board of trustees at Carnegie Corporation, where lifetime trustee James Bertram served as translator of Andrew Carnegie’s intentions as a philanthropist on the world stage.

In describing the organization that Keppel inherited in 1923, this chapter considers Andrew Carnegie’s allegiance to an English-speaking world, or, as Bertram put it, to “communities of whites” in the British Empire, and more broadly, throughout the Anglo-American world.¹ This preference for privileging the needs and interests of white Anglo-Americans would form the institutional backdrop to Keppel’s subsequent decision to fund social scientific research on white and Black people as a means of helping white policymakers reinforce white Anglo-American supremacy across the Atlantic.

1. Frederick Keppel Becomes President of Carnegie Corporation

Up until 1923, when Frederick Keppel became president of Carnegie Corporation, the organization had gone through two interim presidents and one elected president, each of whom stayed in the position no longer than a year. Keppel was thus the first president of the foundation since Andrew Carnegie’s passing in 1919 who remained in the role long enough to learn the personalities of his board members, to determine what he would like to convince them to do, and ultimately to see grantmaking initiatives develop.²

The son of two Irish immigrants, Frederick Keppel was born in Long Island and graduated from Columbia College in 1898. Upon graduation, Keppel stayed on at Columbia University, first as assistant secretary, then as secretary, and ultimately as dean of the college. During the First World War, he left for Washington, D.C., in order to assist secretary of war Newton D. Baker.

After the war, Keppel and his wife, Helen Tracey Brown, niece of J. P. Morgan, and their five sons settled in Paris, where Keppel headed the Foreign Relations Department of the American Red Cross and became the first commissioner for the United States at the International Chamber of Commerce.³

Upon their return to the United States some three years later, the Keppels resettled in the New York area. While Keppel had assumed that he would return to Columbia College, as historian Michael Rosenthal notes, Columbia University’s president at the time, Nicholas Butler, “saw Keppel’s administrative talents, popularity, and success (he rose quickly in Washington to the newly created post of third assistant secretary of war) as a threat to his own control at Columbia.”⁴ Thus prevented from returning to the university, Keppel worked instead at the Russell Sage Foundation’s New York City Regional Plan Initiative.

A year later, Carnegie Corporation’s board invited Keppel to become president of the organization.⁵ These men likely found this former Columbia College administrator, with roots in New York City, to be a reliable candidate who might stay in the organization long enough to lead it and shape its grantmaking initiatives.

Faced with an unmatched opportunity to head a prominent philanthropic organization, Keppel realized soon after his appointment that his new role did not come without some limitations. For one thing, the corporation had already earmarked funds for projects in the United States for some years to come. Thus, during Frederick Keppel’s first year as president, the corporation paid out $12.95 million of the funds allocated for projects in the United States; and of this total, $12.35 million was based upon grants voted by the corporation in previous years.⁶

In other words, previous commitments decided upon by Carnegie Corporation’s board of trustees before Keppel’s appointment left him with little if any room for new initiatives in the United States during his early years as president. Some three years later in 1926, the corporation created even greater restrictions in its U.S. fund by reducing the list of unpaid obligations and adding nearly $1.6 million of this account as protection against capital depreciation. “As a result,” Keppel reasoned in his 1931 annual report, “perhaps the widest opportunities open to the Corporation during the period have been found in the administration of the so-called Special Fund, applicable, according to the terms of Mr. Carnegie’s supplementary gift, ‘in Canada and the British Colonies.’ ”⁷ Indeed, during his first years as president of Carnegie Corporation, Keppel turned much of his attention abroad.

For funding beyond the United States and specifically in Canada and the British colonies, the organization maintained a $10 million fund, which trustees casually termed the “Special Fund.” Even though it was a relatively small sum compared to the $125 million that Andrew Carnegie had given to the organization during his lifetime and that went mainly toward its work in the United States, the Special Fund presented Keppel with an opportunity to develop grant programs of his own, and he embraced the opportunity to engage in a network of contacts and grantmaking possibilities beyond the United States.⁸

Keppel’s decision to look abroad had some precedent at the organization. In his annual report for 1921, the corporation’s former president, James Angell, had recommended that it consider financing projects in a more targeted way in other parts of the world. Angell wrote: “We now receive occasional requests for aid from Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere, but we are in no position to pass intelligently on these requests; much less have we taken the initiative, as I am disposed to think we should.”⁹ Reflecting long-standing ambiguity in the corporation’s mandate abroad, Angell included the British dominions of Australia and South Africa in his view of its potential work abroad, even though the organization’s charter specified that it only was empowered “to hold and administer any funds given to it for use in Canada or the British colonies for the same purposes … as those to which it is by law authorized to apply its funds in the United States.”¹⁰

Keppel subsequently sought to determine the geographic scope of the corporation’s charter, which referred only to the “United States, Canada, and the British colonies,” not British dominions such as Australia and South Africa. In doing so, Keppel relied at times on the foundation’s lawyers at Root, Clark, Buckner & Rowland in New York City, and at other times on the advice of James Bertram, Andrew Carnegie’s personal secretary, who had been appointed lifetime trustee and secretary of the corporation by the Gilded Age tycoon.¹¹

Bertram and the organization’s lawyers had distinct means of reasoning through the geographic expanse of the corporation’s charter. And this distinction was particularly clear in moments when Bertram and the lawyers offered overlapping advice, for example, as they did in their respective analyses of whether Carnegie Corporation could fund projects in the Philippines.

For Carnegie Corporation’s lawyers, the heart of this query was whether the U.S. territory of the Philippines could be considered part of the United States, and thus within the geographic scope of Carnegie Corporation’s charter. Confronted with this question, the lawyers argued that the corporation could not finance grants in the Philippines because the United States had never intended to incorporate the islands into its political body, “except in a matter involving international affairs.”¹² To arrive at this conclusion, the organization’s lawyers cited the Treaty of Paris, U.S. Senate resolutions, Congressional acts, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and law journal articles. What mattered to these lawyers was the wording of Carnegie Corporation’s charter—its mention of the “United States”—along with the U.S. legal community’s consensus on the scope of the geographic expanse of the United States.

Like Bertram, the lawyers would agree that the Philippines existed outside the geographic scope of the corporation, but they would reason through this logic in drastically different ways. Rather than depending on legal documents or the U.S. legal community’s general consensus on the geographic meaning of the United States, Canada or the British colonies, for example, Bertram would analyze the corporation’s charter by thinking through his personal conversations with Andrew Carnegie and particularly Carnegie’s philanthropic intentions in the Anglo-American world.

Turning to Bertram’s developing relationship with Andrew Carnegie during the steel titan’s lifetime, this next section shows how this former personal secretary of Andrew Carnegie interpreted the philanthropist’s intentions for fellow Carnegie Corporation trustees and how, as corporation secretary and trustee, Bertram evolved to become a leading voice within the organization’s board and particularly in shaping its grantmaking practices in colonial Africa during Keppel’s tenure as president of Carnegie Corporation. It begins, however, not with Bertram, but with Andrew Carnegie himself.

2. Andrew Carnegie’s Vision of Philanthropy in the “English-Speaking” World

Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie was the son of a moderately successful linen weaver, whose craft began to lose value in response to general manufacturing trends, though specifically too as Scottish manufacturers and merchants raced to lower product prices in light of a decreasing export market during The Panic of 1837. By the 1840s, historian David Nasaw writes that Carnegie’s mother, Margaret Carnegie, had “taken over the role as chief family breadwinner” by working for her brother, a cobbler, and then by setting up her own food shop at the family’s cottage.¹³ Though without a stable source of income, the family decided to follow relatives who had settled in the United States.

Arriving in Pittsburgh at the age of twelve, Andrew soon secured employment at the Anchor Cotton Mills, owned by a fellow Scotsman.¹⁴ Working at a local telegraph office some two years later, Carnegie caught the attention of the superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who then hired him to be his personal telegrapher and private secretary. Becoming a protégé of this railroad executive, Carnegie learned both about the railroad industry and how to invest his salary.

At the age of twenty-nine, Carnegie resigned from his salaried position at the railroad company and dedicated his attention to various investments, including the Pullman Palace Company and the Pacific & Atlantic Telegraph Company.¹⁵ With a relatively significant accumulation of wealth by his early thirties, Carnegie moved with his aging mother to New York City.

In the 1870s, and while residing in New York City, Carnegie would turn his attention increasingly to the steel industry in Pittsburgh, and increasingly over time too, he would rely on a fellow industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, to oversee his operations in Pittsburgh. In 1881, Frick had entered Carnegie’s business orbit when Carnegie’s associates at Carnegie Brothers & Company in Pittsburgh had found themselves with the need to secure “a steady, expandable, and relatively inexpensive supply of high-grade coke for their new blast furnaces.”¹⁶ They then reached out to Henry Clay Frick, owner of Frick Coke Company. During the next decade, the men continued to work together. By the early 1890s, Frick had convinced Carnegie to further consolidate Carnegie companies into a new company, Carnegie Steel, and to make him chairman.

Starting in the 1890s, Carnegie would rely on Frick, who managed Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Steel alongside his own Frick Coke Company, to be his eyes and ears in the local community. It was Frick, for example, who would famously keep Carnegie abreast of contract negotiations and strikes in Carnegie mills, such as the famous Homestead Strike in the summer of 1892.

By the last years of the century, however, the two men’s relationship became increasingly strained and Carnegie subsequently called for Frick’s removal as the executive head of Carnegie Steel. As part of the settlement, Frick Coke Company and Carnegie Steel merged and became Carnegie Company in April 1900, with Charles Schwab as president and chief executive officer.¹⁷ Less than a year later, Schwab informed Carnegie that J. Pierpont Morgan was eager to buy Carnegie’s shares of the company. Without negotiations, Morgan accepted Carnegie’s asking price of $480 million, the equivalent of approximately $15 billion in today’s currency.¹⁸

Sixty-five years old at the time, Andrew Carnegie already was well known in the United States and Great Britain as an advocate of philanthropy, particularly after the 1889 publication of his essay “Wealth” (also titled “Gospel of Wealth” in varying editions).¹⁹ Now that he was formally retired, and with an unprecedented amount of wealth in his hands, Carnegie became ever more devoted to philanthropic giving. Over the years, he also became a proponent of “international peace.”²⁰ Both causes came to reflect Carnegie’s developing vision for the role of an industrialist such as himself in U.S. and British societies, as well as the place of these two empires on the world stage.

Nicknamed “the Star Spangled Scotsman” by English novelist William Black, Andrew Carnegie was recognized in England for pontificating about the values of the United States; a country that, from Carnegie’s perspective, had helped him not only to amass a fortune, but also to transform him into a notable and important Scotsman in Britain.²¹ Andrew Carnegie biographer David Nasaw notes that Carnegie routinely shared his “unsolicited views on matters of domestic and international affairs with John Morley, William Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, and James Bryce in Britain, and with whoever happened to be in the White House or leading up the State Department.”²² These individuals were not always eager to hear Carnegie’s thoughts and recommendations, but they nonetheless corresponded and met with him.²³ For his part, Carnegie found value in advising these men because he was committed to and invested in the future of the U.S. and British empires. In a similar spirit, Carnegie loudly proclaimed the virtue of philanthropy both to Americans and Britons.

Over a decade before he formally retired, Carnegie had produced his first article on the topic of philanthropy, “Wealth,” published in the North American Review in 1889, which readers usually read alongside a subsequent essay he published in the same journal some months later, titled “The Best Fields of Philanthropy.”²⁴ Geared towards audiences in the United States and Britain, Carnegie began “Wealth” by describing the values of industrialization and concentrated wealth in industrializing societies such as the United States and Great Britain.

Ironically for a child from Dunfermline, Scotland, who had witnessed how his family and neighbors had found it difficult to survive as industrialization coupled with a financial crisis had made their artisanal skills much less lucrative, Carnegie argued in “Wealth” that there was not a prior, idealized world for the working classes that existed before factory work. Rather, he claimed that factory work had created better and more affordable products that workers could themselves acquire. As he wrote, “To-day the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible.”²⁵ All in all, Carnegie reasoned in “Wealth” that both capital and labor benefited from industrialization. Though as he admitted, too, industrialization was leading to greater wealth inequalities between capital and labor, and that this was a problem that the wealthy needed to address. And by the wealthy, Carnegie explained that he meant individuals with “fortunes … not moderate sums saved by many years of effort, the returns from which are required for the comfortable maintenance and education of families.”²⁶ Stressing the critical importance of addressing wealth inequality as means for preventing societal instability, Carnegie wrote in “Wealth”: “The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.”²⁷

Though rather than turning over the task of wealth distribution to state actors, as some contemporaries whom Carnegie criticized in the piece were proposing, he stressed that individuals with fortunes should take on the responsibility, “becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”²⁸ As Carnegie suggested in “Wealth,” harmony between capital and labor could be achieved in a profit-maximizing society and without disrupting capital’s vast accumulation of wealth. What was needed, Carnegie stressed, was for titans of industry to agree to surrender funds beyond those necessary for supporting their families’ comfortable maintenance and education; a personal standard that he left to fellow tycoons to determine themselves.

With this general introduction to “Wealth,” Carnegie then presented readers with various avenues for redistributing the so-called “surplus wealth” in the hands of leading industrialists. As a first option, Carnegie mentioned leaving it to descendants, but he saw this as the most “injudicious” of options, not only because doing so would strip descendants of ambition, but also, as Carnegie argued, because descendants long had proven unworthy of managing these estates and lands. Carnegie thus suggested that the wealthy should abandon this means of disposing excess wealth, in the best interests not just of their children but of the state’s as well.²⁹

A second alternative, “leaving wealth at death for public uses,” was likewise dismissed by Carnegie, who thought that the person who accumulated the wealth is the one who is best placed to redistribute it: “It is well to remember that it requires the exercise of not less ability than that which acquired the wealth to use it so as to be really beneficial to the community.”³⁰ In this vein, Carnegie proposed his third and preferred option: for “the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life.”³¹

If he could convince fellow industry tycoons to give away their excess wealth during their lifetimes, Andrew Carnegie imagined that he would be playing his part in creating a “reign of harmony” among capital and labor in industrializing societies on either side of the Atlantic. From his point of view, “We shall have an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”³² As later sections in this chapter underscore, Carnegie indeed intended to focus his attention as a philanthropist on his “race,” which he determined to be fellow white people throughout the Anglo-American world.

Believing that he had internalized the interests of both capital and labor by living the life of a worker and later of an industrialist, Carnegie stressed in “Wealth” that the working classes would prefer his proposed mode of wealth redistribution rather than higher individual salaries. “Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.”³³ From Carnegie’s perspective, the poor and working class would prefer gaining access to libraries and parks in their towns, for example, over increased wages.

At the conclusion of “Wealth,” Carnegie turned his attention once again to his wealthy peers and offered them some guidelines on how to go about redistributing their surplus wealth. In this vein, he took pains to criticize charitable giving at the time, which he argued largely created habits of dependency among the poor.³⁴ Assuming industrialists wanted to bestow a positive work-ethic (which Carnegie associated with the wealthy) among the working class (which Carnegie argued included “the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy”), he suggested that the “main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.”³⁵ And this, Carnegie explained, distinguished his gospel of wealth—his vision for philanthropy—from charity in industrializing societies. Contrary to charitable giving, he argued, philanthropic giving would redistribute wealth back to the community without stunting the very individualism and competition that helped people help themselves. In this way, he suggested that philanthropists should return their surplus wealth “to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good” by financing parks, recreation centers, art, and public institutions all of which would help “body and mind,” “give pleasure and improve the public taste,” and “improve the general condition of the people.”³⁶ With these public goods accessible to them, and likely imagining or reimagining his needs as a boy in Dunfermline and Pittsburgh, Carnegie thus argued that the poor and working class would have the necessary positive surroundings, inspirations, and resources in their local environments to educate themselves on ways to improve their status in society. In a follow-up piece published just a few months later in the North American Review, “The Best Fields for Philanthropy,” Carnegie also offered specific examples of philanthropy: funding public parks, universities, libraries, hospitals, medical colleges, laboratories, city halls, swimming baths, and church buildings.

Republished in Britain, the essays garnered a strong response there.³⁷ As Carnegie recognized, the “mother-land” was even more concerned than the United States about the “contrast between the classes and the masses, between rich and poor.”³⁸ Among such early readers were the Welsh Methodist Minister Hugh Price Hughes and Catholic Cardinal Edward Manning who, alongside British Prime Minister William Gladstone, published reviews of Carnegie’s two essays in subsequent issues of the North American Review. Hughes and Manning provided the strongest criticism, arguing that wealth inequality was an unnatural and unwelcome social phenomenon whose solution required working-class mobilization or comprehensive social reform rather than simply the voluntary giving by the elite rich. Despite offering the sharpest rebuttal, Hughes ultimately welcomed Andrew Carnegie’s suggestions for greater philanthropy among the wealthy as a useful, if only temporary, approach to wealth inequality. In contrast to the two religious leaders, Gladstone agreed with Carnegie’s argument in favor of philanthropy, although Gladstone did criticize Carnegie’s dismissal of familial inheritance, which, for Gladstone, was an important, valuable form of national tradition. These three men’s reactionary essays provide some context to the immediate reception enjoyed by Andrew Carnegie’s two essays. While Carnegie’s 1889 essays would become a founding text in modern U.S. philanthropy, they indeed met with some swift pushback early on.³⁹ And Carnegie replied.

In response to the three reviewers, Carnegie wrote an eighteen-page rebuttal, which he published in Nineteenth Century. And here, Carnegie responded to any and all criticisms of his essay, including Gladstone’s minor injection that he, unlike Carnegie, valued hereditary wealth. Carnegie was invested in the reception of “Wealth,” not only in the United States but in Great Britain as well.

Twelve years after publishing his two accompanying essays in the North American Review, and ten years after writing his response to the reviewers, Andrew Carnegie became a full-time philanthropist with the absolute mission of promulgating the value of his definition of philanthropy across the United States and Great Britain. Indeed, Carnegie’s philanthropic decisions at the time reflected his commitments to both geographic regions. Within months of selling his shares of the Carnegie Steel Company in 1901, for example, he made three significant gifts: two in the United States and one in Scotland. He transferred $5 million in U.S. Steel gold bonds to the managers of the Carnegie Company in Pittsburgh (J. P. Morgan had since consolidated Carnegie Steel Company into U.S. Steel), with $1 million earmarked for libraries in the area, and the remaining funds to finance a Carnegie Relief Fund to aid particularly capable and deserving Carnegie Steel Company employees who had been injured or killed in service, or simply “after long and creditable service, need[ed] such help in their old age.”⁴⁰ He also gave the New York City public library system nearly $5 million. In Scotland, he established the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland with a nearly $10 million bequest, in order to provide Scottish students with loans to attend university.⁴¹

A year later, in 1902, Carnegie founded a center in the United States to encourage research in the scientific fields, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with a comparable initial gift of $10 million, though “later augmented by $12 million.”⁴² The following year, he acquired a rambling family estate in Dunfermline, Scotland, and with a $2.5 million endowment founded the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust to create a park that could bring some “sweetness and light” to the lives of industrial workers in Dunfermline.⁴³

In 1904, a mining accident near Pittsburgh resulted in the death of 179 miners, many of whom were teenage boys. In response, the steel tycoon decided to endow $5 million for what became the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, which was to be responsible for recognizing persons in “peaceful vocations” who act to “preserve or rescue their fellows.”⁴⁴ In 1908, Carnegie established a similar hero fund in Great Britain with an endowment of $10 million, as well as others in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, though none of the latter enjoyed the level of wealth of their counterpart funds in the United States and Great Britain.⁴⁵

During these years, Carnegie also had his attention on teacher pensions. In 1905, for example, he established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching with a gift of $10 million, which he increased by $5 million in 1908 and an additional $1.25 million five years later. The purpose of the foundation was to “provide retiring pensions for the teachers of universities, colleges, and technical schools in our country, Canada, and Newfoundland … without regard to race, sex, creed or color.”⁴⁶ The organization’s board of directors would find it nearly impossible to finance all university professors’ pensions, so Carnegie empowered it to define the institutions that would be eligible for Carnegie pensions. In judging the relative merits of universities across the country, the foundation played a critical role as an accrediting agency in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, at least until the National Commission on Accreditation was organized.⁴⁷

During the final decade of his life, Carnegie established three more foundations, two in the United States and another in the United Kingdom: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910, Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911, and the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust in 1913. Of these, the one that stood apart—quite apart—from the rest was Carnegie Corporation of New York in terms of its wealth, scope, and management. A year before founding the organization in 1911, a seventy-five-year-old Andrew Carnegie had realized that he personally would be unable to dispose of his wealth before he died, so his lawyer, Elihu Root, had suggested that he endow a trust during his lifetime. Between 1911 and 1912, the steel magnate endowed the corporation with $125 million, making it the wealthiest foundation in the world at the time. And compared to the other foundations that Carnegie established, Carnegie Corporation was established with a rather broad mandate: “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States.”⁴⁸ During the first half of the twentieth century, its only rival in wealth and expansive mission was the Rockefeller Foundation.⁴⁹

Carnegie Corporation also was distinct from other Carnegie foundations in its management style. For one thing, Carnegie himself led the corporation. As Nasaw notes, “Carnegie named himself the corporation’s first president, arranged for all trustee meetings and business to be transacted from [his home at] Ninety-first Street [in Manhattan], and appointed his bookkeeper, Robert Franks, as treasurer, and James Bertram as secretary.”⁵⁰ Carnegie’s lawyer, Elihu Root, became the corporation’s vice president, and presidents of Carnegie’s U.S. foundations populated the other seats on the eight-member board. He also treated it as an extension of his private office until his death in 1919. Considering his personal history of making gifts throughout the United States and Great Britain, Carnegie sought to expand the geographic scope of the corporation’s charter. Approved by New York State in 1917, the new charter allowed the organization to “hold and administer any funds given to it for use in Canada or the British colonies for the same purposes in Canada or the British colonies as those to which it is by law authorized to apply its funds in the United States.”⁵¹

Although the charter introduced two new geographic regions, the trustees of Carnegie Corporation called the $10 million allocated for funding outside the United States by different names that suggested various geographic jurisdictions. Thus, in addition to the “Canada and the British Colonies” fund, they spoke of the “fund provided by Mr. Carnegie for all of the English-speaking commonwealths.”⁵² Reflecting their conflation between Canada and the British colonies and the “English-speaking commonwealths,” Andrew Carnegie and his trustees at Carnegie Corporation made grants in areas of the British Empire beyond strictly “Canada and the British Colonies,” such as the British dominions of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

During these years, James Bertram had become a loyal and constant presence in Andrew Carnegie’s life. By then, the two men had shared symbiotic daily routines for two decades, after first meeting during one of the Carnegie family’s lengthy sojourns in Europe some twenty years earlier. They had met in 1897, when Andrew Carnegie, his wife, Louise, and daughter, Margaret, were spending the winter in Cannes, France, Carnegie found himself in need of a personal secretary. A trusted Edinburgh contact informed him that Bertram had just returned to Scotland after a severe fever required him to leave South Africa where he had been working for the previous seven years, developing into a stage manager in South Africa’s railway industry and then as secretary in its mining industry.⁵³

Born in Corstorphine, Scotland, some fifteen miles from Andrew Carnegie’s own hometown of Dunfermline, James Bertram was only twenty-four years old when he started working for the sixty-two-year-old Scottish-American steel titan who was then becoming ever more committed to philanthropy. Serving as personal secretary to Carnegie throughout the rest of the steel titan’s life, Bertram subsequently assumed the role of secretary and lifetime trustee at Carnegie Corporation.⁵⁴

Bertram’s proximity to Andrew Carnegie was rather unique. Bertram arguably had more knowledge about Carnegie’s vision for philanthropy than even Carnegie’s wife or daughter, both of whom later sat on Carnegie Corporation’s board. During the 1890s and early 1900s, Bertram and Carnegie had enjoyed a daily routine of gathering in the morning. They read business reports, and Carnegie dictated letters, though with time, these business reports were replaced by donation requests.⁵⁵ And far from simply being part of Carnegie’s daily routine in New York City, Bertram traveled with him and his family during their annual treks across the Atlantic.⁵⁶ Next to Carnegie for significant moments in the philanthropist’s life, Bertram was there when Carnegie published “Wealth” and so too when he sold his shares of Carnegie Steel Company.⁵⁷

Bertram’s title as Andrew Carnegie’s personal secretary would remain the same over the years, but, in practice, he became the manager of the industrialist’s philanthropy. Bertram sifted through and decided the merits of the numerous requests that reached Andrew Carnegie’s desk. As Nasaw writes: “Carnegie trusted Bertram to make the decisions, though from time to time he would question a particular application to make sure Bertram was paying attention.”⁵⁸

Later at Carnegie Corporation, Bertram would continue to enjoy a significant role in shaping the philanthropy of the then-deceased Andrew Carnegie. Granted that with Andrew Carnegie’s passing, Bertram’s role as sole manager of Carnegie’s private philanthropy would be diluted by the presence of new individuals serving on the staff and board of Carnegie Corporation, but Bertram would maintain his influence by repeatedly determining whether the organization’s trustees and staff, such as Keppel, were financing projects that Andrew Carnegie himself would have condoned.

3. James Bertram Interprets Carnegie’s Intentions as Philanthropist

Upon assuming the presidency of Carnegie Corporation in 1923, Frederick Keppel learned that James Bertram was willing to challenge fellow trustees on Andrew Carnegie’s vision for the foundation, even in the presence of Carnegie’s widow, Louise Carnegie, who had joined the board in 1919, after Carnegie’s death.⁵⁹

During the first month of his presidency, for example, Keppel witnessed a rather dramatic moment when Bertram decided to vote against the entire board, which had decided to dedicate $3 million of the Special Fund for Canada and the British colonies toward unifying universities in the Maritime Provinces of Canada and Newfoundland. In response, Bertram argued that the “six years’ income of the fund provided by Mr. Carnegie for all of the English-speaking commonwealths, or to use the language of the Trust, ‘Canada and the British colonies,’ ” was disproportionately large for the comparatively small community of “whites” in the English-speaking world who actually lived in the Maritime Provinces of Canada.⁶⁰ The other trustees overpowered his single vote, but Bertram was unafraid of voting against the entire board, and shaming these individuals for financing projects that he thought went counter to Andrew Carnegie’s intentions.

Regarding Andrew Carnegie’s expectations for Carnegie Corporation, Keppel would soon learn that Bertram was particularly forceful about the philanthropist’s intentions to assist primarily white people in the Anglo-American world. At various moments during Keppel’s presidency, Bertram spoke of the “English-speaking commonwealths” and explained that this was the broad area that Andrew Carnegie had intended to help when he chartered Carnegie Corporation.⁶¹ Bertram also specified that the populations whom Carnegie had intended to target and help in the “English-speaking commonwealths” were white.⁶² In 1923, Bertram had tabulated these populations, noting that only over a million white people lived in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, while over seven million existed in the rest of Canada and over five million in Australia, with smaller populations in New Zealand and the Union of South Africa.⁶³

There was a difference, Bertram explained to Keppel, between the technical language of Carnegie Corporation’s charter, which specified the United States, Canada, and the British colonies as its geographic domain, and Andrew Carnegie’s intentions as a philanthropist. As Bertram put it, Carnegie’s reference to the “British colonies” was inclusive of some territories of the British Empire with the official status of “dominion” and exclusive of some with the formal status of “colony.”⁶⁴ By “British colony,” Bertram explained, Carnegie had meant “communities of whites”; a point Bertram stressed was clear in Carnegie’s own grantmaking practices in the British Empire even if Carnegie never quite wrote down his policy on paper.⁶⁵ For purposes of interpreting the charter’s language, then, Bertram suggested to Keppel that the British Empire’s own distinctions between colonies, protectorates, and dominions were insufficient. Leaning instead on a dictionary definition of “colony,” Bertram explained that Carnegie had meant to aid “settlements made by emigrants and with populations composed of emigrants or descendants of emigrants.”⁶⁶

While Bertram combined this dictionary definition of colony with his own interpretation of Carnegie’s intentions to help communities of white people throughout the British Empire, Bertram could alternatively have reasoned that Carnegie had intended that the entirety of the current and past territories of the British Empire be within the corporation’s geographic reach, given that every part of the empire had some population of white Europeans. However, the mere presence of white people did not satisfy Bertram’s idea of Carnegie’s vision. In determining whether a region of the British Empire comprised “communities of whites,” Bertram analyzed which parts of the empire could ever be dominated by white people. In this vein, he explained to Keppel that India, the Philippines, and West Africa, for example, could never be white communities, and thus, that no “Carnegie money is likely to be spent” there.⁶⁷

In his publications, Andrew Carnegie did not routinely use the word “white” as Bertram did with Keppel when describing the philanthropist’s main agenda in the Anglo-American world. Rather, Carnegie preferred categorizing white Americans and Englishmen as the “English-speaking people” or part of the “Teutonic race.”⁶⁸ But the effect was the same. White Anglo-Americans indeed were the community of people whom Carnegie sought to aid with the establishment of philanthropic foundations in the United States and Great Britain, and so too the people he sought to unite under his vision for global peace.⁶⁹

Elaborating on his vision for international order in Triumphant Democracy (1893), for example, Andrew Carnegie had suggested the possibility of a British-American Union that could help establish further stability and peace at the global level. For him, there was absolute commonality among the citizens of Great Britain and the United States, whom he described as members of the “English-speaking race”—as a people with combined cultural and biological traits.⁷⁰ He wrote: “In race—and there is a great deal in race—the American remains three-fourths purely British. The mixture of the German, which constitutes substantially all of the remainder, though not strictly British, is yet Germanic. The Briton of to-day is himself composed in large measure of the Germanic element, and German, Briton, and American are all of the Teutonic race.”⁷¹

Illustrating the biological similarities among white people in the United States and Great Britain, Carnegie also gave thought to the other parts of the British Empire that could be included in this imagined “British-American Union.”⁷² In this vein, he suggested that “Australasia,” meaning populations in Australia and New Zealand, could unite on equal terms with the rest of the “Teutonic race.”⁷³ By contrast, he argued, India could not be part of such a union because no “branch of the race now clear of any share in these [responsibilities in India] would willingly consent to become a partner in them.”⁷⁴ In other words, Carnegie imagined that Australasia fit with his racialized view of the British-American world in ways that India did not. Ultimately, Carnegie argued in Triumphant Democracy that India would “be placed upon the road to independence, and the British-American Union would guide it to this as well as the present Union of the United Kingdom.”⁷⁵

Beyond seeing commonalities among white Anglo-Americans, Carnegie also emphasized in Triumphant Democracy the value of unifying all these people and regions, reasoning that a bound white English-speaking world—a “British-American Union”—could further international peace by serving as the world’s arbiters.

To note, Andrew Carnegie was not unique among contemporaries in his ideas for an international English-speaking community or in assuming that such leadership would be white or that its further unification was essential for international order. As historian Duncan Bell observes, Carnegie was reflecting an ongoing and significant debate in the late nineteenth century about the potential unity between the United Kingdom and its settler colonies (precisely those regions Carnegie emphasized such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States).⁷⁶ Bell furthermore underscores how these conversations on a “Greater Britain” in the late nineteenth century assumed a project of uniting white Anglo-Americans, with contemporaries communicating a shared international whiteness in both cultural and biological terms: “Greater Britain was underpinned, so it was thought, by a common race, where race was defined primarily by the beliefs, traditions, institutions, and behavioral characteristics associated with being ‘English’ (or British of ‘Anglo-Saxon’). These were, in general, mutable and shaped by history rather than nature—although the space opened up by this mutability was (usually) implicitly delimited by the boundaries of ‘whiteness.’ ”⁷⁷ Much like other advocates of a united “Greater Britain” on the world stage, Carnegie imagined bringing together white English-speaking people as world leaders and thus as safeguards of global order.

And so, while Carnegie shied away from using the explicit term “white” in his discussions of an Anglo-American union at the global level, it is fair to say that Bertram offered a relatively accurate translation of Carnegie’s intention when he said that it was to unify white English-speaking regions of the world. Cherry-picking regions of the British Empire to include in his vision for a British-American Union, Carnegie had shown particular affinity for regions of the Anglo-American world such as the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Bertram added two more: South Africa and East Africa, both of which, he claimed, Andrew Carnegie would have supported as philanthropist.

As president of Carnegie Corporation, Frederick Keppel made his first grant in colonial Africa in 1925 and specifically chose Kenya, a British territory in East Africa that Bertram deemed sufficiently white, or rather, adequately populated by a governing body of white people. During the next two years, Keppel and Bertram would plan an exploratory trip to British Africa as the organization considered an expansion of its commitments on the continent. In the spirit of Bertram’s reading of Carnegie’s intentions in the Anglo-American world, the two men would limit their tour to East and southern Africa to the exclusion of West Africa.

During the next decade and up until his death in 1934, Bertram would play a leading role in defining Carnegie Corporation’s geographic scope in colonial Africa, and as the next chapter shows, its substantive grantmaking practices in these regions of British Africa that Bertram deemed likely to remain under white rule. Bertram’s influence, however, cannot simply be explained by noting his privileged position as a former personal secretary of Andrew Carnegie. This is because two other Carnegie Corporation trustees—John Poynton and Robert A. Franks—also previously had served as Andrew Carnegie’s personal secretary and financial agent. And like Bertram, Poynton and Franks later assumed staff and lifetime trustee roles at Carnegie Corporation.

So Keppel’s reliance on Bertram to define the geographic scope of the corporation’s work in the British colonies cannot simply be explained by Bertram’s personal relationship with Carnegie. Neither was it simply because Bertram had spent years living in South Africa, or because he sat on Carnegie Corporation’s board. It also had to do with Bertram’s firsthand experience leading Carnegie’s personal philanthropic giving and, equally so, his own outsized and dominating personality. To this latter point, Keppel’s assistant, James Russell, later remembered that Keppel took the corporation secretary on his first tour of West and southern Africa because he felt “that Bertram wouldn’t approve of [a grantmaking program in Africa] unless he was asked to go. Bertram was a very difficult person.”⁷⁸ James Bertram’s outsized influence on the board—and his insistence that it was Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic intention to prioritize white people in the Anglo-American world—remained an internal, rather than a publicized matter, at Carnegie Corporation during the 1920s and 1930s.

To this point, in a 1927 report to fellow Carnegie Corporation board members on their exploratory trip to Africa, Bertram and Keppel would be rather sincere about the organization’s geographic constraints, as they understood them to be. Explaining to fellow trustees why they had excluded West Africa from their tour of the continent, Keppel and Bertram underscored that the “white population is too small [in West Africa] to offer any opportunities to the Corporation.”⁷⁹

Beyond internal correspondence, though, Carnegie Corporation leaders at the time would shy away from sharing publicly their working definition of “British colonies,” though they did seem to discuss it informally at times with trusted nonstaff and trustees. In 1927, for example, when Keppel met with the London-based missionary J. H. Oldham, Oldham confirmed that the “probable interest of Mr. Carnegie himself would have been in white settlers, rather than blacks.”⁸⁰ Considering Keppel’s increasingly close relationship with Oldham during the 1920s, as the next chapters illustrate, Keppel likely had shared with him Bertram’s reading of Carnegie’s intentions to privilege the needs of white people in Africa, with Oldham confirming to Keppel the likely validity of Bertram’s analysis of this famous public figure’s intentions in the British empire.

Such moments of openness from Keppel—with people beyond staff and trustees at Carnegie Corporation—about the corporation’s explicit mandate to prioritize white communities in the Anglo-American world would be rare. For the most part, Keppel would shy away from doing so. Instead and throughout his presidency, Keppel would offer varying public explanations for the organization’s geographic foci outside of the United States and would remain coy about its explicit emphasis on white communities.

In 1934, James Bertram would pass away. Seven years later, Keppel would retire as president of Carnegie Corporation, and just a year after that, he too would pass away. The deaths of these two men would mark the end of an era at Carnegie Corporation, an era that subsequent staff and board members would bring to a more formal conclusion by formally amending the organization’s charter to exclude lifetime trusteeships. Furthermore, and showing greater anxiety about the two coexisting means of interpreting Carnegie Corporation’s geographic reach, the organization of the later 1940s also would update its charter to reflect what its staff and board members long had been doing already under Bertram’s guidance.⁸¹ In 1948, for example, Carnegie Corporation amended its charter to include the British dominions along with the British colonies within the organization’s geographic reach. In 1961, the corporation went even a step further to include past British protectorates, protected states, settlements, or trust territories.⁸²

Focusing on Carnegie Corporation of the 1920s, this next chapter illustrates how President Keppel made a cautious first grant in colonial Africa, in part by relying further on James Bertram’s reading of Andrew Carnegie’s hierarchy of funding priorities within “communities of whites” in the Anglo-American world.⁸³