VIANDREW CARNEGIE
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, 1835Died in Lenox, Massachusetts, 1919
The little town of Dunfermline in Scotland has for centuries been famous for its weaving. For generations have the sturdy inhabitants devoted their lives to the looms. And here, in this quiet and humble corner of the busy world, was born, on the twenty-fifth of November, 1835, a small baby whom his parents named Andrew, who was destined to become one of the richest men that the world has seen, a citizen of the United States, a world philanthropist, and a true captain of industry. So simply was Andrew Carnegie born into the tremendous nineteenth century.
Andrew’s father was a weaver of damasks, as had been his father and grandfathers for generations back in the Carnegie history; and the boy was doubtless expected by his parents to carry on the established vocation of the family. But, as so often happens, circumstances unforeseen and impossible to anticipate abruptly changed the whole life-work of a community, and in the change the small boy’s life was directed into a new channel which was destined to bring him the greatest material rewards. The Carnegies wove with hand-looms. Suddenly, invention gave the power-loom to the world. Gone immediately was thedemand for the now more costly product of skilled and patient fingers. The swift machines destroyed a trade to build an industry, and in the destruction the Carnegie family was swept into new work and a new environment.
With his only means of earning a living destroyed, necessity compelled the elder Carnegie to seek occupation somewhere beyond the limits of the quiet Scotch town. Across the Atlantic a great new republic was just reaching its young manhood. Its fast-sailing clippers had made the Stars and Stripes of its flag known on every sea, and tales of the daring Yankee skippers had brought to complacent England a rude awakening from her peaceful sense of maritime supremacy. Within its boundaries even greater developments were taking form under the firm hands of the Americans. A rich inland empire was disclosing wealth beyond dreams of men: mines of iron and coal and various metals, forests unexplored and seemingly limitless, millions of rich acres unturned by the ploughshare and destined in time to come to feed the world. Already minds of vision were organizing railroads to bring together these riches and to make them accessible to the nation as a whole. All over the world people were turning from war-scarred and time-worn nations oppressed by the rule of kings to this free land of promise. Men and women and little children crossed the broad Atlantic to live happily in a country where men ruled themselves by self-imposed laws, and where education gave to all an equal opportunity. And with these went also theCarnegie family, to add their sturdy strength to the great Republic.
Andrew Carnegie (signature)
Andrew Carnegie (signature)
Andrew Carnegie (signature)
There were four in the little family—the father, mother, and two boys, Andrew and Thomas. Andrew was thirteen years old and his brother four when this great life-changing event occurred—too young to realize its significance or to find in it much else but the romance and adventure of a sea-voyage and the excitement of seeing new places and strange faces. There was a considerable cotton manufacture in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, and there the Carnegie family settled, in a neighborhood known as Barefoot Square in a part of the city called Slabtown. Andrew was old enough to work, and money was needed to meet the higher costs of living in this new land; so both father and son found work in the same cotton mill, Andrew as a bobbin-boy at a wage of $1.20 a week.
This was the first step in Andrew’s career, and other steps came with what seemed a marked rapidity. But it was not that unusual opportunities confronted the lad; on the contrary, nothing could have seemed to offer a more slender promise than the arduous and elementary work which he gladly accepted. The promise lay rather in the boy; and, as is ever the case, Andrew was in those early years proving the old truism that the right kind of a boy rises above adversity and grows strong by battling with discouragement.
Andrew was soon promoted, at a slight increase in pay, to be engineer’s assistant in the factory. For twelve long hours each day he shoveled coal under theboilers and ran the engine. His pay was now $1.80 a week, and all of it went into the family purse; for not only was all the money earned by father and son required for the household expenses, but Mrs. Carnegie added her mite by taking in washing from the neighbors. And it is interesting to recollect that of these neighbors one named Phipps, a shoemaker, had a son Harry, a chum of Andrew’s, who also, in later years, became a man of wealth and importance in the nation’s business affairs.
A year later Andrew again made an advance; for, leaving his work in the cellar of the factory, he took a job as district messenger boy for the telegraph company, at $3.00 a week. Now came an opportunity which his conscientious study enabled him to grasp. Ever since he had obtained his job with the telegraph company he had studied telegraphy and spent all his spare time in practice. “My entrance into the telegraph office,” he once said, “was a transition from darkness to light—from firing a small engine in a dirty cellar into a clean office with bright windows and a literary atmosphere; with books, newspapers, pens, and pencils all around me, I was the happiest boy alive.” One morning, before the telegraph operator reached the office, a message was signaled from Philadelphia. Andrew was always early at work, and although the boys were not supposed to know anything about the instruments or allowed to touch them, he jumped to the receiver and took down the message with accuracy. His resourcefulness and willingness to assume responsibility were immediately recognized,and he was promoted to operator, at a salary of $300 a year.
In addition to his study of telegraphy Andrew, during this period, became a constant reader of good books. A gentleman living in the neighborhood had opened his private library to Andrew and a few other boys every week-end, and gave them permission to take certain books home with them. Andrew made full use of the opportunity. “Only he who has longed as I did for Saturdays to come,” he said in after years, “can understand what Colonel Anderson did for me and the boys of Allegheny. Is it any wonder that I resolved, if ever surplus wealth came to me, I would use it imitating my benefactor?”
The boy’s earnest attention to his work was not long unnoticed, and the divisional superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, hearing of his quickness and enthusiasm, appointed him railway operator in his own office, increasing his salary to $35 a month. A second opportunity to assume responsibility occurred. During the superintendent’s absence from the office early one morning, an accident was reported on one of the lines, which tied up the road and threatened a costly blockade. Andrew at once took charge of the situation, and knowing exactly what the superintendent would do in such a situation, wrote out the necessary orders, to which he signed the superintendent’s name, to set the trains again in motion, and straightened out the whole difficulty. When his chief arrived, Andrew reported what he had done. The superintendent said nothing to him, but to the presidentof the railroad he wrote that he “had a little Scotchman in his office who would run the whole road if they would only give him a chance.”
When Andrew was sixteen his father died, and the boy became the head of the family; and it was at this time that he made his first investment, although it was necessary, with his mother’s help, to borrow the required money.
“One day Mr. Scott [the superintendent of his division], who was the kindest of men and had taken a great fancy to me, asked if I had or could find five hundred dollars to invest.... I answered promptly:
“‘Yes, sir, I think I can.’
“‘Very well,’ he said, ‘get it. A man has just died who owns ten shares in the Adams Express Company, that I want you to buy. It will cost you sixty dollars a share. I will advance the remaining hundred dollars.’
“The matter was laid before the council of three that night and the oracle spoke. ‘Must be done. Mortgage our house. I will take the steamer in the morning for Ohio and see uncle and ask him to arrange it. I am sure he can.’ Of course her visit was successful—where did she ever fail?
“The money was procured; paid over; ten shares of Adams Express Company stock was mine, but no one knew our little home had been mortgaged ‘to give our boy a start.’
“Adams Express then paid monthly dividends of one per cent, and the first check arrived....
“The next day being Sunday, we boys—myself and my ever-constant companions—took our usualSunday afternoon stroll in the country, and sitting down in the woods I showed them this check, saying, ‘Eureka! I have found it.’
“Here was something new to all of us, for none of us had ever received anything but from toil. A return from capital was something strange and new.”
Concentrating his entire efforts on his work, Andrew learned all that there was to know about train-dispatching and began to improve on the existing methods. Time passed, and Colonel Scott becoming vice-president of the railroad, Andrew promptly stepped into the position of division superintendent which Colonel Scott vacated. Carnegie was now twenty-eight years old and by careful saving and investment he had acquired a tidy capital. A chance to invest in one of the first sleeping-car companies had been accepted by him, and a large profit was ultimately made out of the investment, although at the time Carnegie had to borrow the money for the stock of a banker in Altoona and repay the loan at the rate of $15 a month. A fortunate speculation in oil, which his savings permitted him to make, gave him his first real profit, and put him immediately in a position to play with larger affairs in a larger way.
In the year 1865 Carnegie was thirty years old. As division superintendent of the Pennsylvania he had won for himself a place from which he could view a wider horizon; a large field of opportunities was visible. Also, he had saved his money; he was in a position to seize an opportunity when it appeared.
During the great Civil War Carnegie had been putin charge of the government telegraph and had done well the important work which fell to him. But with the close of the war and the beginning of the period of reconstruction, he saw a greater field for the exercise of his business abilities. Iron was in great demand. Carnegie had already been active in the foundation of a mill for the production of structural iron; for three years the company had stood on the brink of failure; but Carnegie was not a “quitter,” and he hung on to his faith. Now, with his brother and several other partners, he formed the Union Iron Mills. The profits were enormous. Vast railroad development throughout the country required rails and structural iron. Steel rails were worth from $90 to $100 a ton. The manufacture of steel seemed to offer even greater prospects than iron.
In 1868 Carnegie visited England. In the early days of the nineteenth century England controlled the iron business of the world; and when Carnegie made his first trip abroad, there were fifty-nine Bessemer Steel plants in Europe and only three in the United States. To-day, the United States produces over two fifths of all the steel and iron in the world, and the beginning of this great American industry can be found in the enterprise of the son of the poor Scotch weaver.
Carnegie had faith in steel. By the Bessemer process steel of high quality was economically produced by decarbonizing cast iron by forcing a blast of air through the mass of metal when it is in a molten condition. Carnegie saw the merits of this process, brought the idea home with him, and adopted it in hismills. The vindication of his faith was immediate. In an incredibly short time he had obtained control of seven great plants in the vicinity of Pittsburgh: the Homestead, the Edgar Thomson, the Duquesne Steel Works and Furnaces, the Lucy Furnaces, the Keystone Bridge Works, the Upper and Lower Union Rolling Mills. In the town to which he had come a poor lad from a foreign land, Carnegie was now assuming the proportions of a giant of industry.
Nothing was too good or too costly for the perfecting of the industry. “Carnegie was the first steelmaker in any country who flung good machinery on the scrap heap because something better had been invented. He was the first to employ a salaried chemist, and to appreciate science in its relation to manufacturing. In his early days he was the biggest borrower in Pennsylvania; and when the profits grew large they were poured back, to fertilize the soil from whence they grew.... So it is clear that, primarily, the aim of Andrew Carnegie was not to make large dividends or to sell stock, but to establish a solid and enduring industrial structure. First of all, he was a business builder; and the present unequaled prosperity in our iron and steel trade is largely due to the fact that American steel-makers have adopted the Carnegie policy of ranking improvements above dividends.”
To protect the supply of coal which his vast steel manufacture now required, in 1889 Carnegie joined forces with Henry C. Frick, who dominated the coke-making industry. As a result, his companies soon “owned and controlled mines producing 6,000,000tons of ore annually; 40,000 acres of coal land, and 12,000 coke ovens; steamship lines for transporting ore to Lake Erie ports; docks for handling ore and coal, and a railroad from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh; 70,000 acres of natural-gas territory, with 200 miles of pipe-line; nineteen blast furnaces and five steel mills, producing and finishing 3,250,000 tons of steel annually. The pay-roll of the year exceeded $18,000,000.”
Gradually consolidating his interests, Carnegie formed in 1890, the Carnegie Company, with a paid up capital of $160,000,000, and in 1899 his interests were merged into the Carnegie Steel Company. Although still as active in affairs as ever, Carnegie now determined to retire from active business. In an address delivered at Pittsburgh he gave his reasons. “An opportunity to retire from business came to me unsought, which I considered it my duty to accept. My resolve was made in youth to retire before old age. From what I have seen around me, I cannot doubt the wisdom of this course, although the change is great, even serious, and seldom brings happiness. But this is because so many, having abundance to retire upon, have so little to retire to. I have always felt that old age should be spent, not as the Scotch say, in ‘making mickle mair,’ but in making good use of what has been acquired; and I hope my friends will approve of my action in retiring while still in full health and vigor, and I can reasonably expect many years of usefulness in fields which have other than personal aims.”
The “opportunity” to which Carnegie referred was the merging, in 1901, of the Carnegie Steel Companyinto the United States Steel Corporation. For his personal interest Carnegie received $420,000,000.
Freed from business, the iron-master turned to follow the paths to which his idealism had constantly called him. Always a reader and a student of books, he now found himself able to make, through public libraries, books everywhere available, and in various cities and towns he contributed for library buildings more than $60,000,000. Still further to advance education and bring its advantages to all who sought it, he made other gifts, consisting of $24,000,000 to the Institute at Pittsburgh, $22,000,000 to the Carnegie Institute in Washington, and $10,000,000 to the Universities of Scotland. At the time of his death in 1919, it was estimated that he had given away to education and other worthy causes over $350,000,000.
Behind this generous distribution of his great wealth was a desire to distribute his fortune before his death. “The day is not far distant,” he once said, “when the man who dies leaving behind him available wealth which was free to him to administer during life, will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung,’ no matter to what use he leaves the dross that he cannot take away with him. Of such the public verdict will be: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’”
Many other worthy causes held Carnegie’s interest from his retirement from business to his death. Of all his public activities, he took perhaps greatest interest in the cause of world peace. He believed in arbitration instead of war, and aided in the organization of various leagues and commissions to that end.
But although Carnegie was one of the world’s most generous givers he had no desire to abolish poverty. “We should,” he said, “be quite willing to abolish luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious, self-denying poverty would be to destroy the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher civilization than it now possesses.” Not to help men were his millions given, but to help men to help themselves. In his long list of philanthropies, education is the goal. “Nothing for the submerged,” was his motto; but for the boy or man who honestly strove to force his way upward Carnegie would give all.
During the latter years of his life honors came to him. He was made Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, in 1903, and received from the same university the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1905. In 1907 France made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in the same year the Queen of Holland conferred on him the Order of Orange-Nassau. By his adopted country he was held in high regard, and among other honors was made an honorary alumnus of the University of Princeton.
Simple, as his parents had been before him, in spite of his vast wealth which opened the world to him, Carnegie desired that the world should know his pride in his own hard struggle and in the poverty of his birth. On the crest which he designed for himself is a weaver’s shuttle, indicating his father’s occupation, and there is a coronet turned upside down, surmounted by a liberty cap, and supported by American andScots flags. The motto is “Death to Privilege.” To radical minds there is food for thought in this strange crest and its motto, for they who cry death to privilege often mean death to ambition, and without ambition the son of the weaver would never have become the world benefactor who made himself able to give wealth by the hundreds of millions for the good of humanity.
On the day following his death, in the summer of 1919, a great New York newspaper began an account of his life with these paragraphs, a final tribute to an American by adoption:—
“Andrew Carnegie, the outstanding figure of nineteenth-century industrialism, will go down through the ages as the very personification of ‘Triumphant Democracy.’
“Overcoming almost insuperable obstacles by his unusual energy and sheer tenacity of purpose, Andrew Carnegie rose from a humble messenger-boy to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He rose from obscurity to a unique position in the world.
“Yet despite the tremendous effort put into everything he undertook, Andrew Carnegie’s meteoric rise was due entirely to the opportunity offered to all in a land of freedom and of free speech. This fact he emphasized in all his writings, and in all his speeches. Moreover, it had a profound effect upon the course he adopted for the administration of his vast fortune, for the development of mankind, and the furtherance of science.”