Carnegie knew his own fortune owed much to the tariff, which he assiduously labored to keep high; but he wrote as if tariffs, subsidies, and insider dealing were the fruits of evolution. His praise of Senator Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University, as an example of how to disburse a fortune, ignored both how the fortune originated—like Carnegie’s, in public subsidies—and that the federal government was preparing to sue to retrieve the unpaid loans, which threatened to close the new university.
