Carnegie Page 2
Nicknamed “Auld Grey Toun” because all the buildings were constructed of gray sandstone, the seemingly dour Dunfermline nevertheless had a certain romantic lure that pervaded the inhabitants’ spirits, including that of Andra. It stood on high ground overlooking the Firth of Forth, a long, narrow bay backed by the silhouette of the Pentland Hills beyond, and had once been the capital of Scotland. Rich with tradition and treasure, at the start of the fourteenth century Dunfermline’s “Abbey and Monastery buildings stood unrivalled in Scotland for their extent and ‘noble adornments,’” according to town historian Ebenezer Henderson.8 On his death in 1329, King Robert the Bruce was buried in the center of the abbey, surrounded by past kings and queens, including Queen Margaret, the patron saint of Scotland. But in the mid-1400s, the capital was relocated to Edinburgh, a far more powerful military seat, with its imposing fortress and ability to protect the royal family. When William Carnegie made his way to Dunfermline, the majestic monastery and royal palace were but ruins, though the air of nobility and pride remained, the noble ghosts of William Wallace and the Robert the Bruce alive in the streets.
William rented half of a cottage duplex on the corner of Moodie Street and Priory Lane, paying between $15 and $20 a year. He set up his loom on the main floor, the room’s dimensions a mere eight paces by six, and his living quarters in the cramped attic above. He shared the stairs with the other renters, along with the privy out back. While Captain Thom had thumbed his nose at William’s father, in Dunfermline the damask handloom weaver was considered aristocracy, the nobility of the working class and relatively prosperous, in stark contrast to the suffering tenant farmers, coal miners, and factory workers who were paid starvation wages.9
Recognized as a sober and skilled weaver, William Carnegie quickly made friends, including the Morrison family, who lived up the street. He became smitten with Margaret Morrison, who was born on June 19, 1810, the third of six children. Her father, Thomas, was a political activist, reminding William of his own radical heritage. Like all Morrison women, Margaret had a stout body and strong, dark facial features, her square chin and high cheekbones prominent in what was otherwise a plain face. As a polite Scotsman would say, she was a “wiselik” girl, or “She’s better than she’s bonny.” In other words, she was a woman with character. Considering her mother died when Margaret was just four, she had little choice but to become strong-willed, and it was her penetrating eyes with heavy, almost seductive lids that first captivated William. No fool, he recognized an efficient woman of good stock, and in December 1834 he took her hand in marriage. Although Andra was named after his paternal grandfather and had his father’s blond hair and blue eyes, he would inherit his mother’s resoluteness and tenacity, as well as the fiercely independent fighting spirit of his maternal ancestors.
The Dunfermline, Scotland, cottage in which Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835. The Carnegie family shared “the duplex” with another family. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)
The bellicose Morrison spirit was due to their Norse blood, their Viking ancestors having invaded northern Scotland and conquered the people there in the ninth and tenth centuries. They then migrated south. Some seven hundred years later found Thomas Morrison’s father, John, to be a prosperous leather merchant in Edinburgh. Thomas married Ann Hodge, the daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh merchant, and was running the family’s leather business when, according to family legend, he made some speculative investments and lost both the business and his wife’s inheritance.10 He moved the family to Dunfermline to begin anew, to rebuild his life. There he became a respectable cobbler, a trade he had learned as a boy.
Although a widower since 1814, Thomas found the time to pursue political activities, and derived great satisfaction in haranguing audiences about his favorite topic, land reform. It was time for the monarchy, the lords, and the privileged few to relinquish the land they had controlled since the beginning of the feudal system. In one torrid lecture, “Rights of Land,” he delivered his core doctrine: “Our rule is Each shall possess; all shall enjoy; Our principle, universal and equal right; and our ‘law of the land’ shall be Every man a lord; every woman a lady; and every child an heir.”11 His brooding black eyes would stare out at the crowd, and his wild outcropping of sable hair would shake as he gestured wildly with each point he shouted, his strong jaw jutting outward. His extravagant use of body language—a thrown-out chest, rollicking lips, violent hand motions—were so identically reproduced in Andra that it unnerved his relatives. As for Thomas Morrison’s politics, they were embraced by the entire clan, including Andra, who came to despise inherited privilege and aristocratic tendencies in any form.
To further his political agenda, Morrison organized a Dunfermline political union of fellow radicals in the 1820s, which had the adopted battle cry “Agitation is the order of the day—the night of monastic ignorance is passed.”12 He also founded The Precursor, a newspaper “devoted to the interests of the Tradesmen and Mechanics in particular,” but it was considered so provocative that only a radical printer in Edinburgh would set it in type.13 Whether it was a readership too timid to buy the paper or the cost of sending each manuscript the sixteen miles to Edinburgh via horse-drawn carriage, the newspaper was declared defunct after just three issues. Enthusiasm unabated, Morrison took up his pen against the district’s representative to Parliament, the Tory nobleman Lord Dalmeny, and in an audacious stream of correspondence he advised and criticized Dalmeny on everything from his support of the monarchy to his grammar. A land reform evangelist until the end, Thomas Morrison died on the road in 1837, haranguing the public and collecting money to continue his mission.
There was good cause for Morrison’s land reform agitation, as well as the general desire for revolution that pervaded Britain’s working class: the country’s deteriorating economic and living conditions had become unbearable. While Andra was yet too young to comprehend his immediate world, he was a creature of his environment, and these threads of history would be woven into the fabric of his soul. Social conditions, now and in the future, would shape his moral convictions.
No longer ignorant, voiceless peasants taking swipes at the monarchy by poaching deer on the nobility’s properties, the members of the disenfranchised working class were becoming more vocal, organizing themselves into trade unions, demanding reduced work hours and reasonable wages, and their leaders were inserting themselves into the political fray. Several issues in particular stirred the public’s ire, but, foremost, the middle and lower classes demanded the seemingly basic rights to vote, which would give them representation in Parliament, and to own property. Another thorn was the Corn Laws, which artificially supported the price of corn and wheat to benefit the farmers. The majority of the working class, however, lived in factory and mining towns where they couldn’t grow their own food and were forced to pay the artificially inflated prices or face starvation. It became difficult to earn a living wage and conditions continued to deteriorate, a situation described so depressingly well by Charles Dickens in such classics as Oliver Twist (1838). These problems were not just political; they were also the side effects of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that was beyond the control of politicians.
Great Britain had taken an early lead in the Industrial Revolution. The isles, with rich coalfields to provide fuel for steam engines, many natural waterways for cheap transportation, and a booming international trade with its colonies, was ideally suited for a transformation from an agricultural-based economy to a manufacturing-based economy, from a handicraft system to a factory system. As country folk, in search of steady jobs, migrated to the cities in increasing numbers, the transition proved painful because already poor living conditions in urban centers were exacerbated by a population explosion. Contributing to this unprecedented growth were the Irish, who, seeking work, arrived in waves. Thus, employers had such a large labor pool to select from that they were able to dictate low wages and long hours, further suppressing the working poor.14 Di
sillusioned and embittered, the working class formed both trade and political unions to exert pressure, and activism increased dramatically.
Nationalistic-minded Scotland raised a collective cry of protest as industrial towns such as Dunfermline, Glasgow, and the mining towns that sprang up around the expansive central coalfields suffered more than most. The police superintendent of Glasgow, reporting on his own city streets, observed, “There is concentrated everything that is wretched, dissolute, loathsome, and pestilential. These places are filled by a population of many thousands of miserable creatures. The houses in which they live are unfit even for sties . . . dunghills lie in the vicinity of the dwellings; and from the extremely defective sewerages, filth of every kind constantly accumulates.”15 Thirty-nine miles to the northeast of Glasgow, Dunfermline was certainly not immune to the pestilential conditions. In the coalfields that ringed the town, visitors discovered the squalid conditions of Glasgow, with women and girls working alongside men and boys in the pits. Sanitary conditions were deplorable. Not only was clean water scarce, but miners were creatures of superstition and preferred not to bathe, perhaps hoping their filth would keep death at a distance.
On the more immediate outskirts of Dunfermline, tenant farmers were equally destitute. A prominent radical activist and friend of the Morrison family, William Cobbett, described the living conditions of the farmer he encountered on his way to visit to the Morrison household: “I found the ‘bothie’ to be a shed, with a fire-place in it to burn coals in, with one doorway, and one little window. The floor was the ground. There were three wooden bedsteads nailed together like the berths in a barrack-room, with boards for the bottom of them. The bedding seemed to be very coarse sheeting with coarse woolen things at the top; and all seemed to be such as similar things must be when there is nobody but men to look after them. . . . There was no backdoor to the place, and no privy.”16 A wry observation made more than once was that the cows were housed as well as the men and the pigs ate better. The factories in Dunfermline proper also offered horrific scenes; even government commissions found them filthy and ill ventilated.17 As in the coal mines, here, too, children labored. One commission inspector reported on eleven-year-old Margaret Methven, whose “feet and legs often swell and give her pain” from the long hours, her workday beginning at a quarter before 6 a.m. and lasting until 8 p.m., with half an hour for dinner.18
Cholera and typhus were a constant threat in the overpopulated town of Dunfermline, with its narrow streets and inadequate housing. When a cholera epidemic swept across Europe in 1832, the townspeople fearfully tracked its progress in the newspapers. The disease found its way to northeastern England in February of that year, and on September 2 it struck its first Dunfermline victim.19 Not long after, the dead cart rumbling through the streets became a familiar sight, but behind it trailed no mourners for fear of being infected. Such were the conditions of the new industrial society, characterized by glorious advances in technology and mass production, overcrowding, squalor, and an acute sense of mortality—for the working class, a bleak, Dickensian place that held out little hope to their children. This was the world, country, and town into which Andrew Carnegie was born.
The boy was the offspring of Celtic and Norse blood, and from both the Carnegie and the Morrison sides little Andra would take a piece for himself. From his mother and father, his aunts and uncles he would learn of family traditions and legends, some more embellished than others. Fate would play a prominent role in his own legend, too, for that cold, foggy November day of his birth was a day for Shakespeare’s witches to rule on the heath, stirring their cauldron and prophesying the future as they did for the ambitious Scotsman Macbeth. “All hail, Macbeth,” they cried, “that shalt be king hereafter!”20 The seed was planted for Macbeth to kill his king, and a battle between determinism and freewill ensued. Carnegie would face the same battle for control, reckoning with forces that began with his birthplace. “No bright child of Dunfermline can escape the influence of the Abbey, Palace, and Glen,” he reflected. “These touch him and set fire to the latent spark within, making him something different and beyond what, less happily born, he would have become.”21 He believed in fate, and fate would indeed light that “latent spark within.” The stage was set.
At the pulpit in the austere church in Dunfermline, the minister spoke of sin. His stern voice lost in its profundity, he preached the standard Calvinistic doctrine that mankind is spiritually incapacitated by sin, having been born into the original sin of Adam and Eve. He used these thorny words: infant damnation. Will Carnegie could take no more of this Presbyterian diatribe—how could his slaphappy baby, his wee Andra, be living in sin?—and he admonished the minister, declaring, “If that be your religion and that your God, I seek a better religion and a nobler God.” That was the family story of Will’s break with the church, a story Andra cherished his entire life.22 It would also lead to young Andra growing up in a house divided on religious matters. As a result, he would become devoutly agnostic, preferring to seek immortality in his temporal life than concerning himself with theological thereafters.
Will’s rejection of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which was based on John Calvin’s doctrines, was not unusual; most radicals of that time considered the church to be part of the Tory-Anglican establishment that had opposed voter reform in 1832. Another factor influencing Will was that Calvin’s God was not a benevolent God, nor a particularly judicious one in light of the fact that Calvinism denies the will of the individual, as well as blesses and condemns people indiscriminately. Will did not want his child growing up handicapped by such deterministic principles. No doubt, Margaret was pleased by her husband’s choice because her family had forsaken the church years ago, and she herself was taken with the impassioned William Ellery Channing, the American minister who wrote a biography of Henry David Thoreau and advocated Unitarianism. (This Protestant sect believes that God is one person, not part of a Trinity, and trusts in the moral abilities of the individual.) Although Unitarianism had existed in Transylvania since the 1560s, it was Channing who did much to popularize the church’s beliefs in the early 1800s. Not only did Channing preach that the Calvinist God was corrupt, which was welcomed by the radical Morrisons, but he greatly elevated mankind’s state from depravity. He believed that man and woman followed a divine pattern in their own spiritual evolution, and the greatest good was that mankind could “hold intellectual and moral affinity with the Supreme Being.”23 Margaret took delight in this viewpoint, and she imagined such greatness for her Andra; he would not submit to the Calvinist’s wanton deity, but walk with God. Still, she did not attend any Unitarian church services, not with housework and cooking to be done; as a Scottish woman, she could never shirk her Calvin-based puritan streak.
Not convinced Unitarianism was the answer, Will elected to join the Swedenborgian church, a very small congregation attended by other members of the Carnegie and Morrison families. The church was based on the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, theosophist, and mystic, who, after a tranquil career of studying mathematics and the natural sciences, experienced a mystic illumination in 1745. Based on his vision, he constructed three realms of existence: the divine mind, the spiritual world, and the natural world, corresponding to love, wisdom, and use, respectively. And each could be found in both God and humankind. Life was a shared experience with God, according to Swedenborg, who believed divinity equated to eternal love. This was the benevolent God Will sought, regardless of whether Swedenborg was a theosophist quack with delusions of being a prophet. Truth be known, Will was a bit of a dreamer, too, who was liable to forsake the loom for religious meditation. Neighbors referred to him as a “thawless chiel” on occasion, suggesting he was dreamy and impractical.24
Although both churches believed humankind was not born in a depraved state, nor were individuals predestined for salvation or damnation, Will and Margaret didn’t share the other’s enthusiasm for their respective religions. Impressed upon Andr
a were beliefs from each religious practice, which would manifest themselves later in life; and while the Carnegie family denied the Presbyterian Church a place in their lives, Calvinism was so strong in Scotland that its spirit pervaded the family’s soul, a spirit that included moral austerity and family piety, thrift, industry, and sobriety. Andra recalled that “the stern doctrines of Calvinism lay as a terrible nightmare upon me,” but the nightmare later faded.25 Faded, but not forgotten, especially when Andra achieved wealth and fame, for he came to believe he was one of Calvin’s blessed, a sanctified trustee for all of civilization.
Now a confident master weaver, Will decided to take on apprentices and add looms; with the small, half cottage on Moodie Street no longer adequate, he moved the family to larger quarters on Edgar Street, overlooking a park and lush green. On the bottom floor of the Edgar Street home Will installed four looms; the family still lived above the workshop, but this time in a spacious apartment, not a cramped attic. Far more driven than her husband by material gain, a temporarily satisfied Margaret looked forward to the time when they would reach the social status of others in the Morrison clan, especially her older sister Seaton, who had married George Lauder, a well-to-do merchant with a shop on High Street. At Edgar Street, Andra found new entertainment for himself besides flinging porridge about: he discovered money. When allowed, he would take all the pennies his mother had diligently saved in her cash box and stack them up, only to swat them down. A neighborhood lad, John Kirk, who used to baby-sit occasionally for Margaret, later recalled the game: “The ploy he seemed to like best was tae get haud o’ as mony pennies as he could, build them up on the tap o’ each ither, an’ then knock them o’er wi’ his haund.”26