Carnegie

Peter Krass

Description

One of the major figures in American history, Andrew Carnegie was a ruthless businessman who made his fortune in the steel industry and ultimately gave most of it away. He used his wealth to ascend the world's political stage, influencing the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. In retirement, Carnegie became an avid promoter of world peace, only to be crushed emotionally by World War I.

In this compelling biography, Peter Krass reconstructs the complicated life of this titan who came to power in America's Gilded Age. He transports the reader to Carnegie's Pittsburgh, where hundreds of smoking furnaces belched smoke into the sky and the air was filled with acrid fumes . . . and mill workers worked seven-day weeks while Carnegie spent months traveling across Europe.

Carnegie explores the contradictions in the life of the man who rose from lowly bobbin boy to build the largest and most profitable steel company in the world. Krass examines how Carnegie became one of the greatest philanthropists ever known-and earned a notorious reputation that history has yet to fully reconcile with his remarkable accomplishments.
Preface.

1. Flesh and Blood.

2. Odyssey to America.

3. $1.20 a Week.

4. The Scotch Devil.

5. Tree of Knowledge.

6. Blood Money and Black Gold.

7. An Iron Coup.

8. Many Hands, Many Cookie Jars.

9. Bridges to Glory.

10. Epiphany of Legend.

11. Template for Domination.

12. Rekindling the Flame.

13. War against the Steel Aristocracy.

14. An Attack on Britain.

15. Bleeding Hearts and Bleeding Newspapers.

16. Patronizing the Peasants.

17. The Pale Horse and the Gray Dress.

18. Gospel of Conscience.

19. Rewards from the Harrison Presidency.

20. Prelude to Homestead.

21. The Homestead Tragedy.

22. The Great Armor Scandal.

23. Seeking a Measure of Peace.

24. Illegal Rebates and a Fight with Rockefeller.

25. A Point of Disruption and Transition.

26. The Crusades.

27. UnCivil War.

28. The World's Richest Man.

29. Tainted Seeds.

30. Human Frailty.

31. The Peace Mission Begins.

32. The Metamorphosis of Andrew Carnegie.

33. Covert Deal with Taft.

34. The Last Great Benefaction.

35. House of Cards.

36. The War to End All Wars.

The Carnegie Legacy.

Notes.

Selected Bibliography.

Acknowledgments.

Index.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Charity
• History of the United States
• Philantropy
• Gilded Age
• Carnegie
• Andrew Carnegie
• Pittsburgh

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 23 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781118208571
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

CARNEGIE
CARNEGIE
Peter Krass

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5
For Diana
Contents
Preface
1 Flesh and Blood
2 Odyssey to America
3 $1.20 a Week
4 The Scotch Devil
5 Tree of Knowledge
6 Blood Money and Black Gold
7 An Iron Coup
8 Many Hands, Many Cookie Jars
9 Bridges to Glory
10 Epiphany of Legend
11 Template for Domination
12 Rekindling the Flame
13 War against the Steel Aristocracy
14 An Attack on Britain
15 Bleeding Hearts and Bleeding Newspapers
16 Patronizing the Peasants
17 The Pale Horse and the Gray Dress
18 Gospel of Conscience
19 Rewards from the Harrison Presidency
20 Prelude to Homestead
21 The Homestead Tragedy
22 The Great Armor Scandal
23 Seeking a Measure of Peace
24 Illegal Rebates and a Fight with Rockefeller
25 A Point of Disruption and Transition
26 The Crusades
27 UnCivil War
28 The World’s Richest Man
29 Tainted Seeds
30 Human Frailty
31 The Peace Mission Begins
32 The Metamorphosis of Andrew Carnegie
33 Covert Deal with Taft
34 The Last Great Benefaction
35 House of Cards
36 The War to End All Wars
The Carnegie Legacy
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
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 would 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 own ers 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, an