Carnegie Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Flesh and Blood

  Chapter 2: Odyssey to America

  Chapter 3: $1.20 a Week

  Chapter 4: The Scotch Devil

  Chapter 5: Tree of Knowledge

  Chapter 6: Blood Money and Black Gold

  Chapter 7: An Iron Coup

  Chapter 8: Many Hands, Many Cookie Jars

  Chapter 9: Bridges to Glory

  Chapter 10: Epiphany of Legend

  Chapter 11: Template for Domination

  Chapter 12: Rekindling the Flame

  Chapter 13: War against the Steel Aristocracy

  Chapter 14: An Attack on Britain

  Chapter 15: Bleeding Hearts and Bleeding Newspapers

  Chapter 16: Patronizing the Peasants

  Chapter 17: The Pale Horse and the Gray Dress

  Chapter 18: Gospel of Conscience

  Chapter 19: Rewards from the Harrison Presidency

  Chapter 20: Prelude to Homestead

  Chapter 21: The Homestead Tragedy

  Chapter 22: The Great Armor Scandal

  Chapter 23: Seeking a Measure of Peace

  Chapter 24: Illegal Rebates and a Fight with Rockefeller

  Chapter 25: A Point of Disruption and Transition

  Chapter 26: The Crusades

  Chapter 27: UnCivil War

  Chapter 28: The World’s Richest Man

  Chapter 29: Tainted Seeds

  Chapter 30: Human Frailty

  Chapter 31: The Peace Mission Begins

  Chapter 32: The Metamorphosis of Andrew Carnegie

  Chapter 33: Covert Deal with Taft

  Chapter 34: The Last Great Benefaction

  Chapter 35: House of Cards

  Chapter 36: The War to End All Wars

  The Carnegie Legacy

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright © 2002 by Peter Krass. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Krass, Peter.

  Carnegie / Peter Krass.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-471-38630-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-471-46883-5 (paper : alk. paper)

  1. Carnegie, Andrew, 1835–1919. 2. Industrialists—United States—Biography. 3. Philanthropists—United States—Biography. 4. Steel industry and trade— United States—History. I. Title.

  CT275.C3 K73 2002

  338.7′672′092—dc21

  2002010162

  For Diana

  Preface

  Like many men working in the hellish Carnegie mills, my great-grandfather William Danziger imbibed quantities of beer and liquor to soothe his pains and to make him feel alive again. He didn’t reach sixty years of age, while Carnegie lived to the ripe age of eighty-four. In the summer of 2001, I visited my great-grandfather’s gravesite in a cemetery not far from his old frame house in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. I found a congested cemetery bordered by busy streets. There was no peace there. I also visited Andrew Carnegie’s grave in the bucolic Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Tarrytown, New York. Carnegie has a spacious corner lot, nestled among evergreens and fern. It appears he has found a measure of peace. The contrast of the two gravesites raises one of the poignant themes to be explored in reconstructing the complicated life of a titan who came to power in America’s Gilded Age: the unequal distribution of wealth that marked that era in our history.

  To gain perspective on that theme, we should join Carnegie on his commute from his home to the iron and steel mills. At one time in the mid-1860s, Carnegie lived in the elite Homewood suburb of Pittsburgh with its grand Federal-style and Victorian homes. He and his affluent neighbors had toilets, hot-and-cold running water, forced-hot-air furnaces, gas lighting, and iceboxes, which were not only status symbols, but means to healthy living and relative longevity. Upper-class areas like Homewood also had sewers, paved roads, and garbage incineration. The paved roads were courtesy of the city council, which funded them with bonds, a debt that was paid by poor and rich alike, although the poor districts received not one paved road, and wouldn’t for at least another decade. On the streets of Homewood, Carnegie encountered fashionably dressed men—or dandies, as they were called— smelling wonderful thanks to a discreet sachet. Style demanded creaseless trousers, coats buttoned high on the chest, bowlers or stovepipe hats, pomaded hair, thick mustaches, and Dundreary whiskers rippling to their chests. If not too early in the day, he passed a lady or two in polonaise and bonnet and holding a fringed parasol overhead.

  As Carnegie approached the mills and the adjacent tenement buildings, he left the paved roads for those of dirt—roads where horse droppings and human refuse became putrefied in the hot summers. There were few water lines accessible to flush the stinking excrement and garbage, because in a bout of perfect logic, the Pittsburgh City Council’s Water Commission had decided that the size of the water pipe being laid on a given street would be determined by the amount of potential revenue it would bring; in other words, big pipes were laid in the rich neighborhoods, while the poor tenement districts in desperate need of water were granted smaller pipes that fed communal outlets. Keeping a clean house and washing the men’s grimy clothes were impossible chores under such conditions.

  The Pittsburgh Board of Health declared the tenement homes “the filthiest and most disagreeable locality within the limits of the city,” where people were renting “the merest apologies for houses,” the structures characterized as “tumble down houses in rows.”1 Most were dilapidated brick or frame buildings that provided no ventilation in the hot summers and were cold and damp in the winters. The neighborhoods around the mills were populated with churches, taverns, and brothels; every imaginable spirit was available in a number of forms. Carnegie woul
d have had to notice the churches’ cemeteries were cluttered with tombstones. One-fifth of all Pittsburgh men, most in the prime of their life, died due to accidents—a large majority were in the iron, steel, railroad, and construction industries—and the rate was probably even higher as many accidents went unreported.2 Thousands of men also fell to typhoid over the years, when, to quench their thirst after a hot day in the mills, they drank directly from Pittsburgh’s polluted Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers.

  To ease their pain, the workers did have a good number of taverns and brothels to select from, and after work many of the men slipped into the tavern, sidled up to the bar, and, with a foot on the rail, ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer. Whiskey was considered medicinal by the workers looking to clear the dust from their throats and to soothe their aching muscles and bruised bones. The working men might have a round or two, then play some cards, or head home, or perhaps visit a brothel. Some brothels served the well-to-do; however, after hours, Carnegie was more likely to find his wealthy peers in one of the city’s chophouses or oyster grills. Other favorite evening pastimes of the rich included dancing—the polka, the valse, and the mazurka—or playing charades, twenty questions, and backgammon. Surprise parties were the rage.

  As Carnegie approached the mills, hundreds of smoking furnaces, poking and bleeding the sky black, rose above him; showers of soot swept down; and ammoniacal air wafting from the stables mingled with acrid fumes from the mills. The mill buildings themselves, warehouselike with as many as ten smokestacks each, offered no aesthetic pleasure. Once inside he encountered ambivalent men in patched cotton trousers and sweat-stained shirts open at the collar. Dark lines of soot marked the creases in the skin around their mouth and eyes as they gazed at him with vague, desperate looks.3 All the men in the mill had reason to be ornery characters, because, in addition to contending with the heat and the physical strain, the incessant roaring furnaces added immeasurable stress. There was no time for rest and relaxation. They worked seven-day weeks, and the only holidays granted by the mill owners were Christmas and the Fourth of July. Meanwhile, Carnegie took months to gallivant across Europe.

  Adding to the mill workers’ sour temperament was the constant worry about money. While Carnegie made well in excess of $100,000 a year (in 1870 dollars), his rollers earned $1,200 to $2,000 a year, puddlers and other skilled workers $600 to $1,000, and unskilled workers $300 to $550.4 On payday, Friday, regardless of the amount, they would take out a portion for tobacco and the taverns, and the remainder was handed over to their wives. The wife was in charge of the budget and did her food shopping on Saturdays, before the money disappeared. While the laborers struggled to meet daily needs, Carnegie amassed a fortune of over $300 million (in 1900 dollars).

  Was Carnegie just another robber baron who squeezed every penny he could from his men before they dropped dead, like my great-grandfather? Or was there more to this man who considered himself a lord of creation, a trustee of civilization, who gave away his fortune? It is too easy to execrate Carnegie as a robber baron or to extol him as the hero of the exemplary Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story. In taking on this biography—not the first, nor the last, to be written on Carnegie—I needed to better understand what inspired this man, how he justified his great wealth while his men starved, and whether it was possible to reconcile the differences between capital and labor. He left behind thousands of letters for those with questions about his life, and, as I sifted through them, a man who wore many masks emerged from the pages. Before me arose a titan I both disdain and respect. Carnegie’s sanctimoniousness is repulsive at times, but his extreme loyalty to family and boyhood friends is highly admirable. He is full of internal conflict and contradiction. I came to think of him as a flawed Shakespearean protagonist—a Macbeth, a King Lear, a Prospero.

  Not until I traveled to Scotland and watched my children play in Carnegie-funded parks and traveled to Pittsburgh and watched my children soak in the displays of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History did I begin to fully appreciate what Carnegie achieved. Both purposefully and unwittingly he planted seeds for civilization. While trampling asunder thousands of workingmen, he ultimately uplifted millions of people in the future. With this hindsight, I can begin to justify Carnegie’s fantastic fortune, as well as those amassed by Rockefeller, Morgan, and America’s other gilded titans. I don’t think my great-grandfather or his wife, Bertha Danziger, would have entertained such forgiving thoughts; but perhaps, if they had understood the great internal conflicts Carnegie the man suffered, they would have mustered a degree of empathy.

  Notes

  1. S. J. Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills: Working-Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870–1907 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), pp. 74, 86.

  2. Ibid., p. 29.

  3. In 1870, the composition of the male iron and steel workforce was 50 percent native-born white, 20 percent British, 21 percent Irish, 8 percent German, and 1 percent other. U.S. Census Bureau, Ninth Census, 1870, vol. 1, p. 795.

  4. Kleinberg, p. 19.

  CHAPTER 1

  Flesh and Blood

  On a bleak twenty-fifth day of November in 1835, a quixotic clan gathered in the one-room ground floor of a weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, to await the arrival of its newest member. That day, Andrew Carnegie—or Andra as his relatives would call him—was born into a large family of political activists, radicals, and eccentrics. These blood relations, with all their passions and idiosyncrasies, would inspire and haunt Andra; they would infuse him with proletarian social and political convictions that would create merciless internal conflict as he came to embody the quintessential American rags-to-riches story.

  The first in the family tree on record to protest the British monarchy and the oppressive living conditions suffered by the working class was James Carnegie, Andra’s great-grandfather, who was of Celtic blood.1 A shadowy figure in family lore, James had settled in Pattiemuir, just north of Edinburgh, where he leased land for farming and took up weaving. The village encompassed about a dozen cottages with red-tiled or thatched roofs nestled among softly rolling pastureland. During the Meal Riots of 1770, which followed a bad harvest, he was arrested for sedition against the local gentry who controlled the land and bore the blame for the food shortages. While he was in prison, a mysterious lady visited him and gave him a jewel-encrusted snuffbox, which prompted rumors that the Carnegie lineage was of a more exulted rank than mere peasant weaver. The earls of Northesk and of Southesk both bore the name Carnegie, but the family proudly denied any connection. Although James escaped conviction and quietly returned to his family, the name Carnegie, a Gaelic compound word meaning “fort at the gap,” would be forever associated with the radical element.

  James’s oldest son and Andra’s grandfather, Andrew Carnegie, was more of an eccentric than a radical. Also a natural leader, he was more blithe than his father and lived by the Scottish proverb “Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead”—a trait he bequeathed to Andra, who later reflected, “I think my optimistic nature, my ability to shed trouble and to laugh through life, making ‘all my ducks swans,’ as friends say I do, must have been inherited from this delightful old masquerading grandfather whose name I am proud to bear.”2 Grandfather Carnegie relished consorting with the hamlet’s men either at the smithy or the Black Bull Inn. In order to instigate political and social debate, he founded Pattiemuir College, which was no more than a single-room cottage in the village center where the men gathered weekly to argue over the important issues of the day.3 Grandfather Carnegie was dubbed the Professor, as were most of his cohorts, and considering that the so-called professors far outnumbered the students, whispers in town that rumored the college to be “a drinking place” were not unfounded.4

  To initiate the meetings, Grandfather Carnegie would climb upon his throne and, lifting his dram of malt whiskey, toast the common man’s king of poets, Robert “Rabbie” Burns, or some other Scottish icon. Although the temperan
ce movement was actively attempting to put an end to public and private drinking, the ability to imbibe, otherwise known as “quaffing the goblet” or “chasing the rosy hours,” said a good deal about a man, and these men had much to say. After a benedictory toast, he would instigate heated debate by reading the news from either the London Times or the Edinburgh Scotsman. Topics ranged from theological matters to corruption in Parliament to factory reform. Regardless of the issue, whether national or foreign, Professor Andrew proved to be the expert. He was celebrated for his power of persuasion, his passion for debate, his skilled storytelling, his devotion to democratic ideals, and his righteous indignation (particularly true after a few drams at the college)—all traits that later manifested themselves in Andra, who would become renowned for his grandiloquence and derive exceptional pleasure from startling people with his wild stories and radical ideals.5

  As a second-generation weaver, Grandpa Carnegie accompanied his father, James, to cities such as Dunfermline and Edinburgh to sell their linens. During one such excursion to the nearby coastal town of Limekilns, he became smitten with Elizabeth Thom, the daughter of a customer. Their courtship began in earnest, but there was a major obstacle: Elizabeth’s wealthy father, a sea captain and shipowner, wanted his precious daughter to have nothing to do with a village weaver who offered no sign of being “specially successful in the acquisition of worldly gear.”6 (Here the characters of Grandpa Carnegie and his namesake Andra diverged completely; Andra would prove himself a prodigal capitalist.) Despite the wizened captain withdrawing Elizabeth’s dowry, she and Andrew married for love, eventually producing ten children.

  Andrew and Elizabeth’s seventh child was William, born on June 19, 1804, the future father of the world’s most rapacious steel master. The flaxen-haired boy with blue eyes bright against his milk-pale skin became a third-generation weaver and eventually specialized in damask, a craft involving the use of a lustrous fabric such as cotton, linen, or silk to create flat patterns in a satin weave. The patterns were intricate and beautiful, and William produced spectacular tablecloths as his feet worked the treadles and his hands deftly moved the shuttle from side to side. At that time, Dunfermline, two miles north, was the center for the damask trade. William, realizing an independent life in Pattiemuir would put few shillings in his pocket, journeyed there circa 1830, his father to follow.7 It was a brave act moving from a mere hamlet to a burgh of more than ten thousand people, but William was young and ambitious.