History focus - August 11

History Focus for August 11

A short focus on a person or event associated with this day in History.

Jerry Falwell -

Jerry Falwell, was born in Lynchburg, Virginia on August 11,1933. In high school he was an outstanding student and athlete. He entered Lynchburg College in 1950 to study engineering but in 1952 transferred to the Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. He graduated in 1956 and was ordained by the Baptist Bible Fellowship. Upon ordination he returned to Lynchburg and founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church. Soon after starting the church he began radio and television broadcasts of his popular "Old Time Gospel Hour."

In 1971 Falwell founded Lynchburg Baptist College, and in 1979 he set up the secular conservative political organization Moral Majority, Inc. As a political activist, Falwell is regarded to have been a key figure in the election victories of Ronald Reagan and other conservative Republicans.
His stands against abortion, gay rights, and pornography have made him a subject of national controversy. Falwell replaced scandal-ridden evangelist Jim Bakker in 1988 as head of the PTL television ministry but soon resigned that post. Since that time he has been less active in politics and has concentrated his efforts on his ministry.

Sources: Microsoft(R) Encarta(R)

Andrew Carnegie -

Andrew Carnegie was born at Dunfermline near Edinburgh, Scotland in 1835. In 1848 the family came to America, settling at Allegheny, Pa. (now part of Pittsburgh). The young Andrew worked first as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill earning $1.20 a week. Later he became secretary to the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pittsburgh division. By the outbreak of the Civil War he himself was superintendent. Saving his earnings, he bought an eighth interest in a sleeping-car company. The stock increased greatly in value when United States railroads adopted sleeping cars, and the young Carnegie made a great deal of money. This became the the foundation of his fortune.

During the American Civil War he served in the War Department under Scott, who was in charge of military transportation and government telegraph service. After the Civil War he could see that iron bridges would soon replace wooden structures. So he founded the Keystone Bridge Works, which built the first iron bridge across the Ohio River. He later founded a steel mill and was one of the earliest users of the Bessemer process of making steel in the U.S. Carnegie was extremely successful, acquiring a controlling interest in other large steel plants. By 1899, when he consolidated his interests in the Carnegie Steel Company, he controlled about 25 percent of the American iron and steel production. In 1901 he sold his company to the United States Steel Corp. for $250 million and retired.

At the age of 33, when he had an annual income of $50,000, said, "Beyond this never earn, make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes."Carnegie believed that it was the solemn duty of a rich man to redistribute his wealth in the public interest. That is exactly what he did. During his lifetime he gave more than $350 million to various educational, cultural, and peace institutions. He endowed nearly 1700 libraries in the United States and Great Britain, and he donated funds for the construction of the Peace Palace at The Hague, Netherlands, for what is now the International Court of Justice of the United Nations. His largest single gift was in 1911 for $125 million to establish the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The income from this fund still goes to many causes today. Carnegie was honored throughout the world during his lifetime.

By the time he died in 1919, he had given away $350,695,653. At his death, the last $30,000,000 was likewise given away to foundations, charities and to pensioners. Carnegie died at Shadowbrook, his summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, on August 11, 1919 at the age of 83.

A quotation from Andrew Carnegie:

"Man does not live by bread alone." I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth."