Man of steel

IN December 1868, Andrew Carnegie sat down at his desk in a New York hotel and scratched out a memo to himself on a piece of scrap paper. He had just turned 33 and was worth $400,000, he wrote, and that was enough. (That $400,000 equals more than $75 million in today’s dollars.) He feared that to “continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares,” thinking “wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery.”

From now on, Carnegie vowed, he would reject the “idol” of “the amassing of wealth,” which he had previously worshiped, and spend whatever else he made for “benevolent purposes.” He had made his money in Pittsburgh, in oil, railroads, iron mills and bond speculation. Now he hoped to acquire the knowledge of art, music, literature and history that he’d been forced to slight in his progression from linen weaver’s son to man of property; his first step on this road to self-improvement would be to move to “Oxford & get a thorough education making the acquaintance of literary men.” Eventually, he wrote, he would settle in London, buy a newspaper and devote himself to public affairs, especially educating the poor.

Carnegie never moved to England or bought a newspaper, and he continued to enlarge his fortune many times over, eventually selling his Carnegie Steel Co. to J.P. Morgan -- and becoming, according to Morgan, “the richest man in the world.” The signal virtues of David Nasaw’s new biography of Carnegie are revealed first by his unearthing of this hitherto obscure document but even more by what he does with it. For one thing, he notes that the young bachelor omits any mention of a future wife or family -- perhaps because he felt his lack of education disqualified him as an eligible suitor. Equally interesting is the absence of any religious impulse or indeed “any external motivating force,” as Nasaw writes, a valuable key to the character of this unusually self-reliant businessman. Finally, as the author explains later, the memo refutes the familiar argument that Carnegie’s impulse toward charitable giving developed only after the notorious Homestead strike deaths in 1892 threatened to ruin his reputation.

Nasaw’s intent in this lengthy but consistently readable biography is to show, through examining Carnegie’s life afresh, that neither of the generally accepted interpretations is adequate -- and to offer his own more balanced appraisal in their stead.

The first of these accepted views is the so-called “heroic narrative” of “the Star-spangled Scotchman,” as a contemporary dubbed Carnegie. By this reading, Carnegie was a captain of industry who brought “sanity and rationality to an immature capitalism plagued by runaway competition, ruthless speculation, and insider corruption” during the second half of the 19th century, dubbed “the great barbecue” by Carnegie’s friend and admirer Mark Twain.

Nasaw persuasively demonstrates, through vivid anecdote and trenchant analysis, that Carnegie was a gigantic presence in his adopted country, despite his diminutive size (at the age of 30, he weighed 109 pounds and was about 5 feet tall). Favored by nature with intelligence, energy and remarkable personal charm, Carnegie was both a disciple and an exemplar of his friend Herbert Spencer’s hugely influential ideology of Social Darwinism, which preached, above all, the optimistic doctrine of inevitable progress powered by unfettered capitalism. His great good fortune was to be on the American scene during the explosive period that Howard Mumford Jones aptly called “the Age of Energy.” A penniless immigrant from the Scottish Highlands when he came to Pittsburgh at the age of 13 in 1848, by the time Carnegie died in 1919, he had become not only the richest man in America but also one of the most generous, having given most of his fortune -- some $350 million -- away.

The second, darker story line for Carnegie, and for his role as businessman, requires what Nasaw calls a “recitation of another muckraking expose of Gilded Age criminality.” Carnegie hired a volunteer to take his place in the Union Army during the Civil War, then made money with the other “robber barons” (e.g. Philip Armour, J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington and John D. Rockefeller Sr.) by selling Washington whatever it needed to crush the rebellion. The underlying assumption held by Carnegie critics such as Upton Sinclair was that all these men were war profiteers. The climactic moment of this rendering involves Carnegie’s complicity in the Homestead disaster of 1892, when hired goons brought in to protect scabs at the Carnegie mills clashed with striking steelworkers in one of the watershed battles of the war between labor and capital.

For his critics, then, Carnegie was a smiling hypocrite who claimed his experience in a Pittsburgh cotton factory as a boy had made him a working man at heart. Every man had a right to belong to a union, he said, even as he lowered wages, required 12-hour workdays and kept the unions at bay for as long as he could. The vast fortune he gave to charity should have gone to the workers who created it, in the form of higher wages, the critics argued.

Nasaw rejects both story lines as simplistic. As for the first, Carnegie himself seems to have recognized that the “heroic narrative” of inevitable progress ended with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. With even more passion and dedication than he had shown in funding hundreds of libraries around the country and abroad, many of which still bear his name, Carnegie had labored for many years as a peace activist. He campaigned against U.S. interventions in Latin America and opposed the acquisition of the Philippines, arguing that economic and military imperialism imperiled the country. When war erupted in Europe, Carnegie was 78 years old. His ebullient optimism vanished; he told a friend that he had built castles in the air, and that they “crashed about me like a house of cards.” His much younger wife, Louise, whom he married when he was 51, said the war “practically destroyed” his spirit.

The second interpretation, which condemns Carnegie as a capitalist exploiter in a saga of corruption and decline, is equally inadequate -- not least because Carnegie did feel things deeply. He could be ruthless, even duplicitous, in his drive to succeed. But he was also warmhearted and immensely likable, as Nasaw frequently demonstrates: “All his life, people would remark on his remarkably sunny disposition, his broad smile, and nonstop, good-natured chatter. Life was an open-ended adventure for the boy, as it would be for the man.” Even a business rival said that Carnegie “radiated warmth and light.... He was the most consistently happy man I ever knew.”

Carnegie has not lacked for attention, including earlier biographies by Joseph Frazier Wall (1970) and Peter Krass (2002). But Nasaw’s fine book incorporates what’s best in these and other books about Carnegie and his times so fully that it seems sure to be the final word on “the Star-spangled Scotchman.” *