Carnegie Read online

  First published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This paperback edition first published in 2006

  Reprinted 2006

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Raymond Lamont-Brown, 2005, 2013

  The right of Raymond Lamont-Brown to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9510 1

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Preface: The Making of Andrew Carnegie

  1.

  The Tree of Radicalism

  2.

  The Weaver’s Boy

  3.

  Voyage to America

  4.

  The Industrious Apprentice

  5.

  The White-haired Scotch Devil

  6.

  War Clouds and a Silver Lining

  7.

  Bridging Gaps

  8.

  European Interlude

  9.

  New York and the Wolves of Wall Street

  10.

  Round the World

  11.

  Romance and the Charioteer

  12.

  Friendships Sweet and Sour

  13.

  Two Deaths and a Wedding

  14.

  A Honeymoon

  15.

  The Homestead Affair

  16.

  Fraud and Fraction

  17.

  A Daughter and a Dwelling

  18.

  A Rich Rector of St Andrews

  19.

  Pathway to Peace: Descent to War

  20.

  The Road to Sleepy Hollow

  Epilogue: The Conundrum of Andrew Carnegie

  Appendix I: The Development of the Carnegie Trusts

  Appendix II: Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum

  Appendix III: The Carnegies’ Farewell to Skibo

  Family Tree

  Notes

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This volume has been enhanced by a review of the biographical work done on Andrew Carnegie by three writers in particular. The ‘official’ biography, The Life of Andrew Carnegie (1932), was written by Burton Jesse Hendrick, and remained the key work until the appearance of the biography Andrew Carnegie (1970) by Professor Emeritus Joseph Frazier Wall; Wall also wrote a study of Carnegie’s Scottish home at Skibo (1984). In more recent times Peter Krass’s Carnegie (2002) has added and expanded biographical research on Carnegie. Funded by Carnegie’s daughter Margaret Carnegie Miller, Burton J. Hendrick wrote a biography of Mrs Carnegie, Louise Whitfield Carnegie (1950), which was completed after Hendrick’s death by Daniel Henderson. In 2000 Linda Thorell Hills, great-granddaughter of Andrew Carnegie, edited the journals of Carnegie’s daughter for private circulation. Simon Goodenough produced an important work on Carnegie’s trusts and foundations in The Greatest Good Fortune: Andrew Carnegie’s Gift for Today (1985). To each of these writers I offer my gratitude for a sight of their research.

  Much assistance has been given in compiling the book by the following, all of whom receive my indebtedness: Mrs Lorna Owers, Administration Manager, Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum; the Earl of Elgin & Kincardine, KT; Mr M. Farmer, Principal, Kilgraston School, Perth; The Carnegie Dunfermline & Hero Fund Trustees, and the Carnegie Trust, both at Dunfermline. Mr Angus McLaren, Club Captain of the Carnegie Club, Skibo, Sutherland, has also rendered important assistance on Carnegie’s Scottish ‘heaven on earth’. A special thank-you goes to Mr William Thomson, great-grandson of Andrew Carnegie, for information and advice on the Carnegie family past and present. A particular appreciation is expressed to my wife Dr E. Moira Lamont-Brown, who has acted as companion and helper on my tours of Scotland in search of Carnegie’s ‘Scottishness’.

  Illustrations: Each is identified in situ for ownership. Grateful thanks are offered to Laura Whitton of the Picture Library, National Portrait Gallery, London, for tracing and identifying images.

  Copyrights: Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of works quoted in the text, although the death of authors and reversion of rights often makes this difficult; however, each quote is sourced in the notes. Thanks for granting permission to quote from their copyright works are due to Peter Krass, Linda Thorell Hills and William Smith of Oxford University Press Inc., New York, on behalf of the Joseph Frazier Wall volumes. In 1986 Northeastern University Press (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Boston, produced a new edition of Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography. Carnegie’s original publisher – Charles Scribner’s Sons – is now a part of Simon & Schuster Trade Division, New York.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1835

  25 November. Andrew Carnegie born at Dunfermline, Fife.

  1840

  Carnegie begins informal education alongside his cousin Dod with uncle George Lauder.

  1843

  Carnegie attends Robert Martin’s Lancaster School, Rolland Street, Dunfermline.

  1847

  Father William Carnegie’s handloom weaving business fails.

  1848

  17 May. Carnegies leave for America.

  6 July. Arrival at New York and journey to Pittsburgh.

  Andrew Carnegie begins work as bobbin boy.

  1849

  Carnegie starts work as messenger at O’Reilly Telegraphs.

  1850

  Carnegie progresses to telegraph operator.

  1853

  Carnegie becomes personal telegraph operator and private secretary to Thomas A. Scott, Superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  1855

  2 October. Death of father, William Carnegie.

  1856

  Carnegie purchases stock in the Adams Express Co.

  1858

  Carnegie signs deal with the Woodruff Sleeping Car Co.

  1859

  21 November. Carnegie becomes Superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co.

  1861

  12 April. American Civil War breaks out; Carnegie organises railroads and telegraph communications on a war footing.

  1862

  Carnegie and his mother visit Scotland.

  1865

  26 April. American Civil War ends.

  May. Carnegie departs on ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe.

  1866

  Returns to America.

  1867

  April. Carnegie and others organise Keystone Telegraph Co. Carnegie and his mother move to St Nicholas Hotel, New York.

  1870

  1 December. Carnegie, Kloman & Phillips manufacture steel.

  1871

  Carnegie in Europe.

  1872

  5 November. New company formed to forge steel.

  1875

  Trip to Dunfermline.

  1878

  24 October. Carnegie takes trip around the world aboard SS Belgic.

  1879

  Midsummer
, back in America.

  1880

  Carnegie meets Louise Whitfield.

  1881

  1 April. Carnegie Bros & Co. Ltd formally established.

  1 June. Carnegie makes coach trip through Britain.

  1884

  Coach trip to Europe.

  Breaks engagement with Louise Whitfield.

  Invests in London Echo, and is re-engaged to Louise.

  1885

  Trip to Britain.

  1886

  October. Carnegie gravely ill with typhoid fever. Death of only brother Tom Carnegie.

  10 November. Death of mother, Margaret Carnegie.

  1887

  22 April. Marriage to Louise Whitfield. Leases Kilgraston House, near Perth.

  1888

  Leases Cluny Estate, near Kingussie.

  1892

  1 July. Foundation of Carnegie Steel Co.

  1897

  30 March. Birth of Carnegie’s only child, Margaret.

  Carnegie buys the mansion of Skibo and 22,000 acres of Sutherland.

  1899

  23 June. Foundation stone laid of new part of Skibo.

  1900

  Carnegie Co. established.

  1901

  Carnegie and family tour Mediterranean sites.

  1902

  Christmas Eve. Carnegie purchases the entire Pittencrieff estate, Dunfermline.

  1903

  3 August. Creation of Carnegie Dunfermline Trust.

  1911

  Carnegie Corporation of New York founded.

  1919

  22 April. Margaret Carnegie marries Roswell Miller.

  9 August. Carnegie contracts pneumonia.

  11 August. Death of Andrew Carnegie.

  PREFACE

  THE MAKING OF ANDREW CARNEGIE

  It’s a God’s mercy I was born a Scotchman, for I do not see how I could ever have been contented to be anything else. The little dour devil, set in her own ways, and getting them, too, level-headed and shrewed, with an eye to the main chance always and yet so lovingly weak, so fond, so led away by song or story, so easily touched to fine issues, so leal [faithful], so true. Ah! you suit me, Scotia, and proud am I that I am your son.

  Our Coaching Trip, 1882, p. 152

  Andrew Carnegie created more millionaires than anyone before or since. He sold his business for $480 million and gave away tens of thousands of dollars every day. Newspapers even ran prize competitions to gather suggestions on how best he might spend his money. Today his name remains one of the most famous in the world, and from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the thousands of libraries he endowed, his memorials in stone outstrip all comers. Born in poverty, he walked with kings and statesmen and knew the great and good of his days from Theodore Roosevelt to Rudyard Kipling, from Mark Twain to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

  But who was Andrew Carnegie? How did he become rich? Many books have been written about Andrew Carnegie, but for many he remains a shadowy figure whose money – he was dubbed ‘the richest man in the world’ – masks what he was really like. He was born into poverty, raised in a small two-roomed Dunfermline cottage and only went to school for four years in his life, but he challenged penury and advanced education through the provision of libraries and colleges as no one before him had done. Carnegie was a complex character; of no religious bent he nevertheless endowed thousands of church organs. He was known as ‘the King of Steel’, but personally he knew little about its actual manufacture. He had no diplomas in management, but succeeded in having hundreds of people working for him. In truth, he never really worked hard in his adult life: instead he travelled and socialised while others made money for him.

  Whence did Andrew Carnegie obtain his golden touch, or his restless energy and sleepless ambition? Who influenced his life the most? This book seeks some answers. He admitted that he received his ‘brains’ from his domineering mother, and said that one of the driving forces of his life and spectacular career was his devotion to her. He even promised never to marry while she was alive. But the basis of Andrew Carnegie’s success rested on more than his mother’s character, and we go in search of these other folk and events.

  In charting the life of Andrew Carnegie from poor Dunfermline weaver’s boy, through telegraph operator, railway developer, iron and steel manufacturer, oil magnate, banker and miscellaneous entrepreneur, we seek the real man behind the name. But he laid many false trails. He could be capitalist and socialist in the same breath, republican and democrat in the same sentence. Was he the true philanthropist that his remarkable trusts would suggest, or the robber baron of leftist academe? Was his promotion of ‘self-help’ a disguise for his own greed? Was he a naive fool, in self-appointedly pursuing international peace and, as has been pointed out, acting as a blinkered ‘ambassador extraordinary’ for the rapacious Kaiser Wilhelm II before the First World War? Did his competitive spirit only harm the workers he purported to champion? In looking at Andrew Carnegie’s life in new areas, and following different slants and angles, some further answers will be sought. As fellow-Scot Sir James Barrie said in his play What Every Woman Knows, ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.’

  ONE

  THE TREE OF RADICALISM

  A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations.

  Autobiography, 1920

  Pattiesmuir lies on the southern edge of what was the boundary of the old parishes of Dunfermline and Inverkeithing in the Kingdom of Fife.1 Today, as when Andrew Carnegie’s forebears lived there, Pattiesmuir – or ‘the hamlet of the muir’ – hardly seems a likely centre of revolutionary thought. Yet two hundred years ago it seethed with secessionism and radicalism.2 Once a part of the lands of the Benedictine Abbey of Dunfermline, Pattiesmuir fell within the policies of the Earls of Elgin & Kincardine, and it developed in the lee of the hill that slopes southward to the Firth of Forth.

  Writing in 1793, the Presbyterian minister of Inverkeithing, Andrew Robertson, commented that the folks hereabouts were in general ‘sober, industrious, and attentive’; he saw them as ‘kind and hospitable’ and ‘much given to company and entertainments in each others houses’. They were, said the Revd Robertson, ‘united in the same political sentiments and views’, but he regretted that, ‘Burgh politics, and the election of members of Parliament, had an unhappy influence upon the morals of the people’. The minister greatly disapproved of the ‘animosity’ engendered at election times.3

  Old Rosyth churchyard contains the unmarked Carnegie graves4 and the burial places of the local folk described by the Revd Robertson, and the whole area, where the King of the Gypsies once had a palace, was later overshadowed by the nearby town and naval base of Rosyth established in 1903–9. Before that no principal highways came directly to Pattiesmuir, although the main route from the Queensferry Passage on the Forth to the north-west was nearby; nevertheless the hamlet enjoyed a vigorous life of its own.

  Within this late eighteenth-century weaving society evolved Andrew Carnegie’s paternal roots. The Carnegies were a Lowland family and were property owners in Fife; the county was then called Fifeshire (usually with the suffix NB for North Britain). Their surname was derived from a Gaelic place name – Caither an eige, ‘fort at the gap’ – and appears in Fife charters from the late sixteenth century. At that time, one Magister David Carnegie of Kinnaird married Elizabeth Ramsay of Colluthie, in the north Fife parish of Moonzie; his second wife Euphame Wemyss was the mother of David, 1st Earl of Southesk, and John, 1st Earl of Northesk, and of the founders of the principal branches of the Carnegie family in Scotland.5 Nevertheless the not well-off Carnegies of Pattiesmuir asserted no kindred to their wealthy namesakes, nor would they have wished to, although their rich descendant Andrew Carnegie was a friend of the noble Carnegies.

  As far as Andrew Carnegie was concerned, his closest ancestor was his great-grandfather, sometime tenant farmer and weaver James Carnegie, who had moved from
his ancestral Kincardineshire to set up home at Pattiesmuir around the year 1760, when the Hanoverian Prince William George Frederick, Prince of Wales, ascended the throne of Great Britain as George III. The new king’s Scottish titles included the dukedoms of Rothesay and Edinburgh, and as he got to grips with the reins of government, James Carnegie tackled the problem of earning a living, and married a Fife woman called Charlotte Walker. Records of the Elgin estates show that James Carnegie had the right of ‘turf and divet’ – that is, the right to build for his own use a sod house at Pattiesmuir from local materials.6

  Something of a rebel, James Carnegie played a prominent part in the Meal Riots of 1770 and was jailed on a charge of seditious incitement as a result. Nevertheless he earned enough to raise a large family. Customers for his linen came from all classes of society – even Martha, Lady Elgin, wife of the 5th Earl, bought linen from Carnegie.7

  James’s eldest son Andrew followed his father’s craft of weaving. Being self-employed and constrained to sell their own wares, the weavers were more mobile than their agricultural neighbours who rarely, if ever, left their home milieux, even in the longest lifetime. So young Andrew – who would be the rich Andrew Carnegie’s grandfather – knew Fife well, from the cobbled wynds of Culross to the old ecclesiastical capital of Scotland at St Andrews. And at nearby Limekilns he would encounter romance.