The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Union glassblowers mocked Carnegie’s claim that the library was “Free to the People.” Taxes had to sustain what workers regarded as Carnegie’s monument to himself. It, like the Pinkertons, was “a challenge to the manhood of free American laborers.”49