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Andrew Carnegie
This masterful biography of a giant of American industry--the first full life of Andrew Carnegie in more than a generation--triumphantly reveals every aspect of the man's complex personality and fabulous career. So varied were Carnegie's activities in industry, politics, education, philanthropy, and pacifism that his life encompasses much of the general history of the United States and of Great Britain down to the outbreak of World War I. Professor Wall is particularly successful in capturing the excitement of America's dynamic period of business expansion in the generation after the Civil War.
Carnegie the man remains at the center of the book--impulsive, haughty, idealistic, warm, loyal, and shrewd--and the drama of his life from telegraph boy to millionaire philanthropist is emphasized. His Scottish background is thoroughly investigated: Professor Wall is concerned throughout with Carnegie's attempts to reconcile his spectacular business success and position in the American plutocracy with the egalitarian and Radical Chartist ideas of his family and youth.
Carnegie's letterbooks and early business files, in the possession of the United States Steel Corporation and until now inaccessible to historians, were made available to the author. This vital and valuable collection of records is unsurpassed in its revelation of how Carnegie's own corporations operated, and also as an actual example of the development of a great American industry. Dr. Wall also consulted the huge collection of Carnegie material in the Library of Congress and the papers of Carnegie's business secretary, Robert Franks. Carnegie's daughter, Mrs. Roswell Miller, was kind enough to allow Professor Wall to read the private correspondence between Andrew Carnegie and his wife Louise, also not previously available to scholars.
The epic, highly-charged relationship between Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick emerges brilliantly, and the story of Carnegie's ventures in oil, railroad building, telegraphy, and iron and steel is clearly and fully presented. The book gives place also to a myriad of fascinating figures in America and Europe, including William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and Herbert Spencer in England, and J. P. Morgan, George Pullman, Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, and Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson in America. It has much to say also about the impact of the Civil War on American industrialism, industrial statesmen and robber barons, and the influence of Social Darwinism on the business community.
This rounded, honest biography, while compassionate, does not hesitate to call Carnegie to task for some of his financial dealings, his often arbitrary personal relationships and his occasional hypocrisy, or to show him at his worst--when dealing with the tragic Homestead strike of 1892. But the reader takes from the book a full understanding of why to so many Americans Carnegie's death meant the end of an era in American history.
Carnegie the man remains at the center of the book--impulsive, haughty, idealistic, warm, loyal, and shrewd--and the drama of his life from telegraph boy to millionaire philanthropist is emphasized. His Scottish background is thoroughly investigated: Professor Wall is concerned throughout with Carnegie's attempts to reconcile his spectacular business success and position in the American plutocracy with the egalitarian and Radical Chartist ideas of his family and youth.
Carnegie's letterbooks and early business files, in the possession of the United States Steel Corporation and until now inaccessible to historians, were made available to the author. This vital and valuable collection of records is unsurpassed in its revelation of how Carnegie's own corporations operated, and also as an actual example of the development of a great American industry. Dr. Wall also consulted the huge collection of Carnegie material in the Library of Congress and the papers of Carnegie's business secretary, Robert Franks. Carnegie's daughter, Mrs. Roswell Miller, was kind enough to allow Professor Wall to read the private correspondence between Andrew Carnegie and his wife Louise, also not previously available to scholars.
The epic, highly-charged relationship between Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick emerges brilliantly, and the story of Carnegie's ventures in oil, railroad building, telegraphy, and iron and steel is clearly and fully presented. The book gives place also to a myriad of fascinating figures in America and Europe, including William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and Herbert Spencer in England, and J. P. Morgan, George Pullman, Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, and Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson in America. It has much to say also about the impact of the Civil War on American industrialism, industrial statesmen and robber barons, and the influence of Social Darwinism on the business community.
This rounded, honest biography, while compassionate, does not hesitate to call Carnegie to task for some of his financial dealings, his often arbitrary personal relationships and his occasional hypocrisy, or to show him at his worst--when dealing with the tragic Homestead strike of 1892. But the reader takes from the book a full understanding of why to so many Americans Carnegie's death meant the end of an era in American history.
1168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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February 17, 2021
Few people exemplify the “rags-to-riches” ideal of the American success story as well as Andrew Carnegie. Born to poverty in Scotland, after emigrating to the United States he built a fortune that made him one of the wealthiest Americans in history. That his name lives on today is because of what he did with his wealth, as he spent his retirement giving away his millions through gifts, endowments, and bequests to a variety of causes in which he fervently believed.
Carnegie lived a long life that was filled with controversy, conflict, and achievement. Telling it in full is a formidable task, yet it is one which Joseph Frazier Wall accomplishes admirably with this book. Over the space of a thousand pages he details the span of Carnegie’s life, from his impoverished childhood in Dunfermline through his final years as a transatlantic philanthropist and peacemaker. It’s a task that requires him to explain not just Carnegie’s activities, but the context in which they took place, providing a history of the times in which he lived – and affected profoundly.
None of this seemed possible, let alone likely, during Carnegie’s early years in Scotland. His father, Will, a handloom weaver, fell on hard times as automated looms increasingly made his skills unnecessary. Though the family emigrated to the United States in 1848, William proved as unable to make a success of his trade in the New World as he was in the old one. Forced to find work at a cotton mill in Pittsburgh, he was soon joined by his son who worked as a bobbin boy before gaining a promotion as a clerk to the mill’s owner – the start of his meteoric rise in business.
Much like Horatio Alger’s central characters, Carnegie benefited throughout his early years from catching the attention of important people. Yet Wall demonstrates that Carnegie’s work ethic was the key to his rise. Abandoning mill work for a job as a telegraph boy, his commitment to his duties led to swift promotion, followed by a position as a telegrapher and personal secretary to Thomas Scott, a rising executive in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. By the age of 24 “Andy” was superintendent of the railroad’s entire Western Division, and when Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War in 1861 Carnegie joined him in the War Department, where he was placed in charge of military transportation.
George McClellan’s centralization of Union Army operations in his own staff led Carnegie to return to Pittsburgh, where he engaged in a range of business activities. Wall recounts these in detail, yet in a way that makes the operations never less than interesting. His ability to draw the personal relationships and personality conflicts from the dry minutes of board meetings is a real asset, one that highlights the conflicting approaches of Carnegie and his partners to their business operations. This allows him to show Carnegie’s gifts, particularly his ability to manage people, his sense for opportunity, and his aptitude for dealmaking. For all of the success of his subject’s activities during this period, though, Wall notes as well Carnegie’s growing dissatisfaction with his success and a desire to do more.
By the early 1870s this dissatisfaction led Carnegie to focus his attention on steel manufacturing, then a rapidly growing manufacturing sector thanks to the introduction of the Bessemer process and other innovations. Over the next quarter century Carnegie built a company that dominated the market. Carnegie’s success soon made him one of the nation’s leading industrialists, giving him a social prominence that made it possible for him to associate with authors and educators on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process, Carnegie became one of the foremost apostles of Herbert Spencer’s theories of Social Darwinism, of which he regarded himself as a prime example. To this he tied his belief that his burgeoning fortune should be used for public uplift, and he increasingly engaged in a variety of charitable activities.
Carnegie straddled the twin worlds of business and philanthropy until he sold his company to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With a fortune that now numbered in the hundreds of millions (at a time when the average yearly wage for men was less than $600), Carnegie dedicated the remainder of his life to giving it all away. Wall chronicles the breadth of Carnegie’s activism during these years, from his funding of library construction to the equipping of churches with organs and the providing of pensions for worthy individuals. Yet the cause most dear to Carnegie proved that of world peace, and he used his millions and his range of personal connections to achieve it. His hopes of its enduring attainment were dashed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, however, and while Carnegie survived to see its end and the promise of a League of Nations, it remains the ongoing work of the institutions he financed in the hope of realizing it in his lifetime.
Wall’s achievement with this book is impressive. In it he relates the full scope of Carnegie’s life in a way that entertains as well as informs. The many details never overwhelm the text, and though laudatory his narrative fully addresses his subject’s failures and flaws as well, from his harsh usage of his younger brother Tom to his role in the bloody Homestead Strike that forever marred his public image as a benevolent businessman. Moreover, in the process of recounting Carnegie’s activities Wall supplies his readers with an insightful account as well of the times in which he lived and some of the key figures of the era, many of whose activities intersected with those of Carnegie. Taken together it makes for a magnificent biography, one that should be read by everyone interested in Carnegie, the Gilded Age, or the history of big business in America.
Carnegie lived a long life that was filled with controversy, conflict, and achievement. Telling it in full is a formidable task, yet it is one which Joseph Frazier Wall accomplishes admirably with this book. Over the space of a thousand pages he details the span of Carnegie’s life, from his impoverished childhood in Dunfermline through his final years as a transatlantic philanthropist and peacemaker. It’s a task that requires him to explain not just Carnegie’s activities, but the context in which they took place, providing a history of the times in which he lived – and affected profoundly.
None of this seemed possible, let alone likely, during Carnegie’s early years in Scotland. His father, Will, a handloom weaver, fell on hard times as automated looms increasingly made his skills unnecessary. Though the family emigrated to the United States in 1848, William proved as unable to make a success of his trade in the New World as he was in the old one. Forced to find work at a cotton mill in Pittsburgh, he was soon joined by his son who worked as a bobbin boy before gaining a promotion as a clerk to the mill’s owner – the start of his meteoric rise in business.
Much like Horatio Alger’s central characters, Carnegie benefited throughout his early years from catching the attention of important people. Yet Wall demonstrates that Carnegie’s work ethic was the key to his rise. Abandoning mill work for a job as a telegraph boy, his commitment to his duties led to swift promotion, followed by a position as a telegrapher and personal secretary to Thomas Scott, a rising executive in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. By the age of 24 “Andy” was superintendent of the railroad’s entire Western Division, and when Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War in 1861 Carnegie joined him in the War Department, where he was placed in charge of military transportation.
George McClellan’s centralization of Union Army operations in his own staff led Carnegie to return to Pittsburgh, where he engaged in a range of business activities. Wall recounts these in detail, yet in a way that makes the operations never less than interesting. His ability to draw the personal relationships and personality conflicts from the dry minutes of board meetings is a real asset, one that highlights the conflicting approaches of Carnegie and his partners to their business operations. This allows him to show Carnegie’s gifts, particularly his ability to manage people, his sense for opportunity, and his aptitude for dealmaking. For all of the success of his subject’s activities during this period, though, Wall notes as well Carnegie’s growing dissatisfaction with his success and a desire to do more.
By the early 1870s this dissatisfaction led Carnegie to focus his attention on steel manufacturing, then a rapidly growing manufacturing sector thanks to the introduction of the Bessemer process and other innovations. Over the next quarter century Carnegie built a company that dominated the market. Carnegie’s success soon made him one of the nation’s leading industrialists, giving him a social prominence that made it possible for him to associate with authors and educators on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process, Carnegie became one of the foremost apostles of Herbert Spencer’s theories of Social Darwinism, of which he regarded himself as a prime example. To this he tied his belief that his burgeoning fortune should be used for public uplift, and he increasingly engaged in a variety of charitable activities.
Carnegie straddled the twin worlds of business and philanthropy until he sold his company to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With a fortune that now numbered in the hundreds of millions (at a time when the average yearly wage for men was less than $600), Carnegie dedicated the remainder of his life to giving it all away. Wall chronicles the breadth of Carnegie’s activism during these years, from his funding of library construction to the equipping of churches with organs and the providing of pensions for worthy individuals. Yet the cause most dear to Carnegie proved that of world peace, and he used his millions and his range of personal connections to achieve it. His hopes of its enduring attainment were dashed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, however, and while Carnegie survived to see its end and the promise of a League of Nations, it remains the ongoing work of the institutions he financed in the hope of realizing it in his lifetime.
Wall’s achievement with this book is impressive. In it he relates the full scope of Carnegie’s life in a way that entertains as well as informs. The many details never overwhelm the text, and though laudatory his narrative fully addresses his subject’s failures and flaws as well, from his harsh usage of his younger brother Tom to his role in the bloody Homestead Strike that forever marred his public image as a benevolent businessman. Moreover, in the process of recounting Carnegie’s activities Wall supplies his readers with an insightful account as well of the times in which he lived and some of the key figures of the era, many of whose activities intersected with those of Carnegie. Taken together it makes for a magnificent biography, one that should be read by everyone interested in Carnegie, the Gilded Age, or the history of big business in America.
October 27, 2016
I picked this up impulsively at a book sale. Although very long, it was well worth taking the time to read it.
February 1, 2025
Joseph Frazier Wall's monumental biography of one of the nineteenth century's wealthiest and most impactful U.S. industrialists is a prime example of top notch nonfiction writing.
The book begins with a look at Andrew Carnegie’s childhood in Dunfermline, Scotland. Both his maternal (the Morrisons) and paternal sides of the family were active in the country’s weaving industry, and from a young age Andrew was imbued with the Chartist principles being bandied about. He was raised with a healthy dislike of the British monarchy that he would carry with him throughout his lifetime.
He did not, however, adopt the heavily Calvinist worldview of predeterminism in which he was raised. Carnegie would remain skeptical in adulthood of the dour, judgmental elements of overt religiosity in any form.
Watching his father struggle had an impact on his own approach toward success in life. In the words of author Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew’s dad Will was a “tired and defeated man” by his early forties, a mindset brought on by technological advancements which had made his handloom practices not only unprofitable but borderline obsolete.
Andrew’s mother Margaret was made out to be the more hard charging parent and eventually the driving force behind their 1848 move to Pittsburgh, where her two sisters lived, when Andrew was thirteen. The fact that the Carnegies made the transatlantic journey with such uncertain prospects and financial distress made the ultimate outcome for Andrew Carnegie quite unlikely.
The first seventy pages of the book are devoted to discussions of Andrew pre-America time in Scotland, with analyses of Brits like William Cobden and Robert Peel filling in the gaps of Andrew’s preteen years of experience.
The portion discussing their ultimate arrival in Pittsburgh from Scotland were written with the flourish that made Wall’s book such a tour de force. Since there were no direct route from where they docked in New York City, the Carnegies were forced to take a weeks-long journey. This included a trip up the Hudson River, ten days on the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, a trip down the Ohio and Erie Canal to Cleveland and Akron, before finally traveling east again to Beaver, Pennsylvania and via steamer to Pittsburgh.
The book notes that the Carnegies were essentially penniless when they settled into the already smog-choked industrial city on the Monongahela River. Their desperate state caused a brief questioning of whether the move to America was even the correct one, and Andrew quickly takes up employment at a textile mill alongside his father Will.
Andrew found his first work for $1.20/week as a bobbin boy. His first two jobs in this craft were provided by a Mr. Blackstock and then a John Hay (for $2.00 a week), two diaspora Scotchmen manufacturers in the Allegheny area.
It was through his connections to Mr. Hay that a fourteen-year-old Andrew was hooked up with the manager of a Pittsburgh telegraph office. David Brooks was looking for a messenger boy, and Andrew’s name was passed along. It would be through this employment that the book shows Andrew making business acquaintances in the area and being granted more and more front office administrative work as managers saw competence and ability.
His growth as a persistent and tireless worker took off during his time working for the O’Reilly Telegraph Office in the early 1850s.
Andrew Carnegie, which is well over 1,000 pages in length, is a masterpiece in biography. It is abundantly clear that Wall spent ample time researching his subject and the era in which he lived, and he grants so much insight into Carnegie’s business, social, and political views. There is little likelihood readers will close its final chapter without having learned a lot of new information from the book's observation's and anecdotes.
An exchange of letters in the 1850s with his nephew Dod at the behest of his Uncle Lauder, both of whom were still in Scotland, provided a look at Andrew’s views of his newly adopted country. In these, Andrew extolled the economic system of America and commented at length on the issues with monarchy and his problems with slavery in the pre-Civil War years. (He was an unabashed supporter of the Union, supporter of the Republican Party, and opponent of chattel slavery.)
While he was always proud of being from the country of Wallace, Bruce, and Burns, he viewed the United States as a land wide open when it came to freedom of entrepreneurial opportunity.
It is with railroads that Carnegie breaks through big time, and Wall spends a lot of time discussing his relationship with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Executive Thomas A. Scott became a crucial benefactor of the young Andrew, and the two of them would enjoy decades of connection during Andrew’s time as a business magnate. By 1859, the twenty-four-year-old Carnegie was Superintendent of the Pennsylvania's Western Division. This allowed Andrew and his mom, who into his forties seemed to dominate his social life, to move from sooty Pittsburg to the cleaner air of Altoona.
He also became involved with Piper and Shiffler, a company which created iron bridges. This tied into the expertise he was gaining in the country’s new railroads.
Edwin’s Drake’s experience with oil in western Pennsylvania during the late 1850s set off a speculative craze that Carnegie-with the exception of involvement with the Columbia Oil Company-remained aloof from.
But this craze for oil did end up becoming a boon for his railroad investments.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Carnegie worked overtime when it came to the company’s railroads and telegraph lines. He ended up working for a time in Washington’s War Department Building, where Scott had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of War.
Andrew would suffer a bad gash while repairing telegraph lines cut by Confederates as well as a sunstroke while working in Virginia repairing a railroad bridge. He later paid a substitute to take his place when, somewhat to his surprise, his number came up in the draft lottery.
He eventually asked for, and got, permission from Scott to move back to Pittsburgh and continue valuable work from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s offices there.
Carnegie would base a lot of his operations in the Pittsburgh and Braddock areas. The Edgar Thomson Steel Works and their blast furnaces would be an early powerhouse powering his rapid accumulation of wealth.
Wall holds the steel baron up as a man who was willing to try new things and pursue potential dead ends that had enough payoff. (He only became more conservative, according to the book’s telling, in later years.)
For example, Carnegie would become an early American backer of Britain’s Bessemer method of steel production at his works. English chemist Sidney Gilchrist-Thomas Thomas’s basic process was a technological advancement in steel production in the 1880s which Carnegie also jumped all over, as it allowed Bessemer steel to be made without as much concern over the initial ore’s phosphorus content.
Carnegie's obsession with labor costs is also analyzed. While he liked to boast about paying the highest wages of any company in the steel industry, the book frequently notes how he pressed managers to squeeze labor costs and to emphasize keeping these low so as to better weather inevitable down times in the demand for the company’s product. He also was not a fan of paying dividends or high salaries for underlings, instead pushing to plow this back into technological innovation that would ensure cost savings and remaining on the cutting edge of competition.
The author recounts a trip back to Scotland which Carnegie took during the war. Much to his surprise, many of his family and compatriots back in Scotland-some of them working men who he felt would be sympathetic to the Republican Party’s causes-showed sympathy for the Confederacy. This angered Carnegie, who was an outspoken supporter of the Union’s cause from start to finish.
Carnegie’s combination with coke producer Henry Clay Frick ended up with Carnegie bringing together his disparate industrial interests under the umbrella of the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited in the early 1890s. This blended Carnegie Brothers & Company and Carnegie, Phipps, and Company into one corporation whose combined capitalization would be $25,000,000 (Carnegie held 53% of this from the get-go).
The book covers Carnegie’s ill-fated 1880s attempt to break into the British penny press as an investor in anti-monarchical newspapers. He had criticized the British political system in his travel work Round the World, but then, armed with a massive amount of wealth, he began to buy papers in Britain. Carnegie purchased papers like the Midland Counties Guardian, the Hampshire telegraph, and the London Echo (among fourteen others) and used them to back Reform efforts against the Conservative government.
Unfortunately for the Reformers back in his native country, Carnegie got out of this business fairly quickly when it proved unprofitable and seemed to, in his mind, only be preaching to the choir.
Vertical integration of company organization was just becoming a thing in the late nineteenth century. Wall does great work demonstrating how Carnegie sought to do this by dipping his toe into a venture he had initially resisted: buying iron ore mines so as to integrate this portion of the steel production process into his company. There had been excitement over iron ore deposits found in the Michigan peninsula as well as across Minnesota, and Carnegie and Frick saw to it that the company brought the Gogebic Range’s Norrie mines as well as the Pioneer mines onto the company’s balance sheet.
With his eye for detail, Wall delves into the financial machinations with Harry Oliver’s Oliver Company and even John D. Rockefeller while acquiring these mines.
The book also includes a lot of his letters back and forth with John Morley, an acquaintance from back in Britain and a member of the British government who also spent time as Secretary to India. Once he began to attain wealth, Carnie loved to travel and the book holds him up to be a man who eschewed a lot of the provincial and closed-minded views of his day. He was a major correspondent with Herbert Spencer, a proponent of the new theory of evolutionary biology. He also was a frequent critic of imposing on other cultures, criticizing movements ranging from attempts to force Christianity into China via meddling missionaries as well as policy toward restricting Filipino independence and trying to enforce changes at bayonet point.
The 1892 Homestead Strike did a lot to damage Carnegie’s reputation both in the U.S. and around the world. The July 6th, 1892, clash between striking workers at the Homestead steel works and the Pinkerton guards which had been called in to guard the property occurred while Carnegie was away on a trip to the Highlands of Scotland.
Henry Clay Frick had been left in charge of handling union negotiations, and it was Following the expiration of a three-year contract without a new one in place, a strike was called by the Amalgamated Association over issues with Carnegie’s company over outstanding labor issues. Wall retells this tragic story with a super eye for detail, and he seems like more of the blame in Frick’s lap for how the deadly situation was ultimately (mis)handled.
But Carnegie, who had been sensitive to his public image as a humanitarian man of great wealth, was lambasted following the clash between striking union members and Pinkerton guards. The Dunfermline Journal noted that his workers had “a perfect right to refuse to submit to a reduction” in their pay.
Also in his native Great Britain, the St. James’s Gazette did not let slide the preaching attitude Carnegie had adopted toward the social and political system on their side of the pond as opposed to the capitalistic Garden of Eden he had held up the United States as. The paper said in their editorial: “...A strike is one thing, and we know what a strike is; but armed private mercenaries are another, and they are a thing which in this effete old country we emphatically would not tolerate…”
U.S. media did not go much lighter on the steel mogul. The St. Louis Dispatch editorialized: “...Three months ago Andrew Carnegie was a man to be envied. Today he is an object of mingled pity and contempt. In the estimation of nine-tenths of the thinking people on both sides of the ocean he had not only given the lie to all his antecedents, but confessed himself a moral coward…(Carnegie) runs off to Scotland out of harm’s way to await the issue of the battle he was too pusillanimous to share. A single word from him might have saved bloodshed-but the word was never spoken….”
Superintendent of the Homestead Works John Potter was sacked after the botched response to the lockout. But this allowed for the promotion of future company president of both Carnegie and U.S. Steel, Charles Schwab, a man whose savvy and business instincts at the time Carnegie admired possibly only second to Frick’s.
But the final falling out with Frick occurred in 1901. The book documents this situation, which took place in a time during which Frick was being approached by J.P. Morgan about buying out his interests in the Carnegie steel empire (a deal which, when completed, would result in the formation of U.S. Steel).
A clash took place between Carnegie and Frick over what price would be set for the provision of coke and a provision known as the Iron Clad agreement, which dealt with the setting of each shareholder’s interests in the corporation. Their final falling out took place in Carnegie’s office during their last face-to-face meeting, during which Frick told Carnegie “that there is not an honest bone in (your) body” and that he was a “thief” before slamming the door on an exiting Carnegie.
By early 1901, J.P. Morgan bought out Carnegie for $480 million and then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, a combination of Carnegie Company, the National Steel Company, American Steel & Wire Company, and the American Tin Plate Company. By that point, the book makes it seem like the sixty-five-year old Andrew was ready to relax and devote his mind to his own exact science of philanthropic giving full-time; by mid-March of 1901 Andrew and his family were sailing on the Kaiseren Theresa for a tour of the Mediterranean.
A number of U.S. philanthropic organizations blackballed Carnegie in the aftermath of Homestead, and many felt it contributed to the electoral defeat of Republican Benjamin Harrison in the election held four months later.
But both before and after this Carnegie became a trailblazer in the field of philanthropy.
Carnegie was of the belief that the best usage which a massive amount of individual private wealth like his own could be put to was the giving back to society of monetary gifts which uplifted the intellectual lives of communities: Universities, free libraries, hospitals, and parks were four things he felt worthwhile to donate large amount of money or seed money to in order to provide community uplift while leaving the helping of the extremely destitute to churches and local governments.
He also became, somewhat surprisingly given his Robber Baron reputation, an advocate of progressive income taxes, especially on the ultra-wealthy, as a way to break up the sort of family fortunes he felt robbed capitalistic democracies of their vitality.
An intriguing evolution which took place in the book was Carnegie’s evolving relationship with William Jennings Bryan. Carnegie strongly opposed his prairie populism during the 1896 and 1900 presidential matchups against McKinley. He gave large sums to the Republican’s campaign and was an outspoken opponent of Bryan’s pro-silver populist views.
But the two slowly warmed up to one another, largely over the issue of international peace. Wall spends a lot of time discussing how Carnegie, in the years following his retirement from steelmaking, made the pursuit of ending war forever through abritrarian treaties and donations to various foundations the capstone of his life’s work. To read about how optimistic both Carnegie and the international peace movement was even during the months prior to World War One breaking out in August 1914 made for heartbreaking reading.
Carnegie and Bryan had found common ground in opposing U.S. policy in the Philippines post-Spanish-American War under William McKinley, and their activism continued to overlap as Carnegie moved into founding ventures like setting up the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace.
By the time Bryan was Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Carnegie had become a huge admirer of the Nebraska populist Democrat.
He also had gone more and more against the grain after leaving Carnegie Steel in 1901. He supported the Wilsonian style federalism interventions in things like banking and regulating major trusts like steelmaking and railroads.
The book details how Carnegie also sought to give away nearly all of his wealth by the time of his death, and in this he was essentially successful. He gave it away to causes ranging from the international peace movement to annual pensions for everyone from former employees to former presidents and prime ministers to former First Ladies; universities and Cooper Union and the hundreds of Carnegie Libraries planted across the country were the exact legacies of learning and betterment he wanted to leave behind after his death in 1919.
The book includes a good bit about Carnegie’s personal life as well. He was actually in his early 50s by the time he married Louise, and they would only have one child (Margaret). They enjoyed taking annual trans-Atlantic trips to Skibo Castle, a countryside estate which Andrew had had built in his home country of Scotland.
He comes across as a man who was as devoted to familial life as to building his companies, and the book creates a portrait of a man who prized his family and creating a better future above and beyond the amassing of wealth for wealth’s sake.
Andrew Carnegie is such a well-rounded biographical work.
Carnegie's flaws and positives come through, as does the elements of his character which set him apart from many of the era's materialistic-0bsessed business moguls. His philanthropic impulses and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to work toward world peace and League of Nations-style international understandings underscored that he wanted to leave an impact beyond the mere acquisition of things.
This book deserves five stars. It is chock full of information presented in such a readable way that it is hard to think of ways in which it could have been improved.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
The book begins with a look at Andrew Carnegie’s childhood in Dunfermline, Scotland. Both his maternal (the Morrisons) and paternal sides of the family were active in the country’s weaving industry, and from a young age Andrew was imbued with the Chartist principles being bandied about. He was raised with a healthy dislike of the British monarchy that he would carry with him throughout his lifetime.
He did not, however, adopt the heavily Calvinist worldview of predeterminism in which he was raised. Carnegie would remain skeptical in adulthood of the dour, judgmental elements of overt religiosity in any form.
Watching his father struggle had an impact on his own approach toward success in life. In the words of author Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew’s dad Will was a “tired and defeated man” by his early forties, a mindset brought on by technological advancements which had made his handloom practices not only unprofitable but borderline obsolete.
Andrew’s mother Margaret was made out to be the more hard charging parent and eventually the driving force behind their 1848 move to Pittsburgh, where her two sisters lived, when Andrew was thirteen. The fact that the Carnegies made the transatlantic journey with such uncertain prospects and financial distress made the ultimate outcome for Andrew Carnegie quite unlikely.
The first seventy pages of the book are devoted to discussions of Andrew pre-America time in Scotland, with analyses of Brits like William Cobden and Robert Peel filling in the gaps of Andrew’s preteen years of experience.
The portion discussing their ultimate arrival in Pittsburgh from Scotland were written with the flourish that made Wall’s book such a tour de force. Since there were no direct route from where they docked in New York City, the Carnegies were forced to take a weeks-long journey. This included a trip up the Hudson River, ten days on the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, a trip down the Ohio and Erie Canal to Cleveland and Akron, before finally traveling east again to Beaver, Pennsylvania and via steamer to Pittsburgh.
The book notes that the Carnegies were essentially penniless when they settled into the already smog-choked industrial city on the Monongahela River. Their desperate state caused a brief questioning of whether the move to America was even the correct one, and Andrew quickly takes up employment at a textile mill alongside his father Will.
Andrew found his first work for $1.20/week as a bobbin boy. His first two jobs in this craft were provided by a Mr. Blackstock and then a John Hay (for $2.00 a week), two diaspora Scotchmen manufacturers in the Allegheny area.
It was through his connections to Mr. Hay that a fourteen-year-old Andrew was hooked up with the manager of a Pittsburgh telegraph office. David Brooks was looking for a messenger boy, and Andrew’s name was passed along. It would be through this employment that the book shows Andrew making business acquaintances in the area and being granted more and more front office administrative work as managers saw competence and ability.
His growth as a persistent and tireless worker took off during his time working for the O’Reilly Telegraph Office in the early 1850s.
Andrew Carnegie, which is well over 1,000 pages in length, is a masterpiece in biography. It is abundantly clear that Wall spent ample time researching his subject and the era in which he lived, and he grants so much insight into Carnegie’s business, social, and political views. There is little likelihood readers will close its final chapter without having learned a lot of new information from the book's observation's and anecdotes.
An exchange of letters in the 1850s with his nephew Dod at the behest of his Uncle Lauder, both of whom were still in Scotland, provided a look at Andrew’s views of his newly adopted country. In these, Andrew extolled the economic system of America and commented at length on the issues with monarchy and his problems with slavery in the pre-Civil War years. (He was an unabashed supporter of the Union, supporter of the Republican Party, and opponent of chattel slavery.)
While he was always proud of being from the country of Wallace, Bruce, and Burns, he viewed the United States as a land wide open when it came to freedom of entrepreneurial opportunity.
It is with railroads that Carnegie breaks through big time, and Wall spends a lot of time discussing his relationship with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Executive Thomas A. Scott became a crucial benefactor of the young Andrew, and the two of them would enjoy decades of connection during Andrew’s time as a business magnate. By 1859, the twenty-four-year-old Carnegie was Superintendent of the Pennsylvania's Western Division. This allowed Andrew and his mom, who into his forties seemed to dominate his social life, to move from sooty Pittsburg to the cleaner air of Altoona.
He also became involved with Piper and Shiffler, a company which created iron bridges. This tied into the expertise he was gaining in the country’s new railroads.
Edwin’s Drake’s experience with oil in western Pennsylvania during the late 1850s set off a speculative craze that Carnegie-with the exception of involvement with the Columbia Oil Company-remained aloof from.
But this craze for oil did end up becoming a boon for his railroad investments.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Carnegie worked overtime when it came to the company’s railroads and telegraph lines. He ended up working for a time in Washington’s War Department Building, where Scott had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of War.
Andrew would suffer a bad gash while repairing telegraph lines cut by Confederates as well as a sunstroke while working in Virginia repairing a railroad bridge. He later paid a substitute to take his place when, somewhat to his surprise, his number came up in the draft lottery.
He eventually asked for, and got, permission from Scott to move back to Pittsburgh and continue valuable work from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s offices there.
Carnegie would base a lot of his operations in the Pittsburgh and Braddock areas. The Edgar Thomson Steel Works and their blast furnaces would be an early powerhouse powering his rapid accumulation of wealth.
Wall holds the steel baron up as a man who was willing to try new things and pursue potential dead ends that had enough payoff. (He only became more conservative, according to the book’s telling, in later years.)
For example, Carnegie would become an early American backer of Britain’s Bessemer method of steel production at his works. English chemist Sidney Gilchrist-Thomas Thomas’s basic process was a technological advancement in steel production in the 1880s which Carnegie also jumped all over, as it allowed Bessemer steel to be made without as much concern over the initial ore’s phosphorus content.
Carnegie's obsession with labor costs is also analyzed. While he liked to boast about paying the highest wages of any company in the steel industry, the book frequently notes how he pressed managers to squeeze labor costs and to emphasize keeping these low so as to better weather inevitable down times in the demand for the company’s product. He also was not a fan of paying dividends or high salaries for underlings, instead pushing to plow this back into technological innovation that would ensure cost savings and remaining on the cutting edge of competition.
The author recounts a trip back to Scotland which Carnegie took during the war. Much to his surprise, many of his family and compatriots back in Scotland-some of them working men who he felt would be sympathetic to the Republican Party’s causes-showed sympathy for the Confederacy. This angered Carnegie, who was an outspoken supporter of the Union’s cause from start to finish.
Carnegie’s combination with coke producer Henry Clay Frick ended up with Carnegie bringing together his disparate industrial interests under the umbrella of the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited in the early 1890s. This blended Carnegie Brothers & Company and Carnegie, Phipps, and Company into one corporation whose combined capitalization would be $25,000,000 (Carnegie held 53% of this from the get-go).
The book covers Carnegie’s ill-fated 1880s attempt to break into the British penny press as an investor in anti-monarchical newspapers. He had criticized the British political system in his travel work Round the World, but then, armed with a massive amount of wealth, he began to buy papers in Britain. Carnegie purchased papers like the Midland Counties Guardian, the Hampshire telegraph, and the London Echo (among fourteen others) and used them to back Reform efforts against the Conservative government.
Unfortunately for the Reformers back in his native country, Carnegie got out of this business fairly quickly when it proved unprofitable and seemed to, in his mind, only be preaching to the choir.
Vertical integration of company organization was just becoming a thing in the late nineteenth century. Wall does great work demonstrating how Carnegie sought to do this by dipping his toe into a venture he had initially resisted: buying iron ore mines so as to integrate this portion of the steel production process into his company. There had been excitement over iron ore deposits found in the Michigan peninsula as well as across Minnesota, and Carnegie and Frick saw to it that the company brought the Gogebic Range’s Norrie mines as well as the Pioneer mines onto the company’s balance sheet.
With his eye for detail, Wall delves into the financial machinations with Harry Oliver’s Oliver Company and even John D. Rockefeller while acquiring these mines.
The book also includes a lot of his letters back and forth with John Morley, an acquaintance from back in Britain and a member of the British government who also spent time as Secretary to India. Once he began to attain wealth, Carnie loved to travel and the book holds him up to be a man who eschewed a lot of the provincial and closed-minded views of his day. He was a major correspondent with Herbert Spencer, a proponent of the new theory of evolutionary biology. He also was a frequent critic of imposing on other cultures, criticizing movements ranging from attempts to force Christianity into China via meddling missionaries as well as policy toward restricting Filipino independence and trying to enforce changes at bayonet point.
The 1892 Homestead Strike did a lot to damage Carnegie’s reputation both in the U.S. and around the world. The July 6th, 1892, clash between striking workers at the Homestead steel works and the Pinkerton guards which had been called in to guard the property occurred while Carnegie was away on a trip to the Highlands of Scotland.
Henry Clay Frick had been left in charge of handling union negotiations, and it was Following the expiration of a three-year contract without a new one in place, a strike was called by the Amalgamated Association over issues with Carnegie’s company over outstanding labor issues. Wall retells this tragic story with a super eye for detail, and he seems like more of the blame in Frick’s lap for how the deadly situation was ultimately (mis)handled.
But Carnegie, who had been sensitive to his public image as a humanitarian man of great wealth, was lambasted following the clash between striking union members and Pinkerton guards. The Dunfermline Journal noted that his workers had “a perfect right to refuse to submit to a reduction” in their pay.
Also in his native Great Britain, the St. James’s Gazette did not let slide the preaching attitude Carnegie had adopted toward the social and political system on their side of the pond as opposed to the capitalistic Garden of Eden he had held up the United States as. The paper said in their editorial: “...A strike is one thing, and we know what a strike is; but armed private mercenaries are another, and they are a thing which in this effete old country we emphatically would not tolerate…”
U.S. media did not go much lighter on the steel mogul. The St. Louis Dispatch editorialized: “...Three months ago Andrew Carnegie was a man to be envied. Today he is an object of mingled pity and contempt. In the estimation of nine-tenths of the thinking people on both sides of the ocean he had not only given the lie to all his antecedents, but confessed himself a moral coward…(Carnegie) runs off to Scotland out of harm’s way to await the issue of the battle he was too pusillanimous to share. A single word from him might have saved bloodshed-but the word was never spoken….”
Superintendent of the Homestead Works John Potter was sacked after the botched response to the lockout. But this allowed for the promotion of future company president of both Carnegie and U.S. Steel, Charles Schwab, a man whose savvy and business instincts at the time Carnegie admired possibly only second to Frick’s.
But the final falling out with Frick occurred in 1901. The book documents this situation, which took place in a time during which Frick was being approached by J.P. Morgan about buying out his interests in the Carnegie steel empire (a deal which, when completed, would result in the formation of U.S. Steel).
A clash took place between Carnegie and Frick over what price would be set for the provision of coke and a provision known as the Iron Clad agreement, which dealt with the setting of each shareholder’s interests in the corporation. Their final falling out took place in Carnegie’s office during their last face-to-face meeting, during which Frick told Carnegie “that there is not an honest bone in (your) body” and that he was a “thief” before slamming the door on an exiting Carnegie.
By early 1901, J.P. Morgan bought out Carnegie for $480 million and then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, a combination of Carnegie Company, the National Steel Company, American Steel & Wire Company, and the American Tin Plate Company. By that point, the book makes it seem like the sixty-five-year old Andrew was ready to relax and devote his mind to his own exact science of philanthropic giving full-time; by mid-March of 1901 Andrew and his family were sailing on the Kaiseren Theresa for a tour of the Mediterranean.
A number of U.S. philanthropic organizations blackballed Carnegie in the aftermath of Homestead, and many felt it contributed to the electoral defeat of Republican Benjamin Harrison in the election held four months later.
But both before and after this Carnegie became a trailblazer in the field of philanthropy.
Carnegie was of the belief that the best usage which a massive amount of individual private wealth like his own could be put to was the giving back to society of monetary gifts which uplifted the intellectual lives of communities: Universities, free libraries, hospitals, and parks were four things he felt worthwhile to donate large amount of money or seed money to in order to provide community uplift while leaving the helping of the extremely destitute to churches and local governments.
He also became, somewhat surprisingly given his Robber Baron reputation, an advocate of progressive income taxes, especially on the ultra-wealthy, as a way to break up the sort of family fortunes he felt robbed capitalistic democracies of their vitality.
An intriguing evolution which took place in the book was Carnegie’s evolving relationship with William Jennings Bryan. Carnegie strongly opposed his prairie populism during the 1896 and 1900 presidential matchups against McKinley. He gave large sums to the Republican’s campaign and was an outspoken opponent of Bryan’s pro-silver populist views.
But the two slowly warmed up to one another, largely over the issue of international peace. Wall spends a lot of time discussing how Carnegie, in the years following his retirement from steelmaking, made the pursuit of ending war forever through abritrarian treaties and donations to various foundations the capstone of his life’s work. To read about how optimistic both Carnegie and the international peace movement was even during the months prior to World War One breaking out in August 1914 made for heartbreaking reading.
Carnegie and Bryan had found common ground in opposing U.S. policy in the Philippines post-Spanish-American War under William McKinley, and their activism continued to overlap as Carnegie moved into founding ventures like setting up the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace.
By the time Bryan was Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Carnegie had become a huge admirer of the Nebraska populist Democrat.
He also had gone more and more against the grain after leaving Carnegie Steel in 1901. He supported the Wilsonian style federalism interventions in things like banking and regulating major trusts like steelmaking and railroads.
The book details how Carnegie also sought to give away nearly all of his wealth by the time of his death, and in this he was essentially successful. He gave it away to causes ranging from the international peace movement to annual pensions for everyone from former employees to former presidents and prime ministers to former First Ladies; universities and Cooper Union and the hundreds of Carnegie Libraries planted across the country were the exact legacies of learning and betterment he wanted to leave behind after his death in 1919.
The book includes a good bit about Carnegie’s personal life as well. He was actually in his early 50s by the time he married Louise, and they would only have one child (Margaret). They enjoyed taking annual trans-Atlantic trips to Skibo Castle, a countryside estate which Andrew had had built in his home country of Scotland.
He comes across as a man who was as devoted to familial life as to building his companies, and the book creates a portrait of a man who prized his family and creating a better future above and beyond the amassing of wealth for wealth’s sake.
Andrew Carnegie is such a well-rounded biographical work.
Carnegie's flaws and positives come through, as does the elements of his character which set him apart from many of the era's materialistic-0bsessed business moguls. His philanthropic impulses and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to work toward world peace and League of Nations-style international understandings underscored that he wanted to leave an impact beyond the mere acquisition of things.
This book deserves five stars. It is chock full of information presented in such a readable way that it is hard to think of ways in which it could have been improved.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
July 21, 2007
The first business biography I ever read. A very good and well researched book that has been recently superseded in quality by David Nasaw's new book. Thoroughly enjoyed Wall's observations on the motives and business decisions for all involved. The author struck a perfect balance between business history and personal history, although it helped that Carnegie was pretty much focused on nothing but business until he was done with his career. A very good book.
February 23, 2021
I have wanted to read this book ever since taking a class with its author. They had copies in the college book store, but I was too busy and too poor in those days to buy it, much less to read a 1047 book not on a class reading list. Then when I finally had enough free time and money, it was out of print and not readily available. So for years it was on my To Buy And Read. The only book left on that list.
Then in searching for another out-of-print book for one of my book groups, I thought I might just as well check to see if my used book supplier of choice had this one, and Lucky Me! So now I'm on page 307. Only 740 pages to go, and I'll be finished with it.
The weird thing is that my other book group is reading a John Le Carre, and as good as that is, I'm having trouble getting to it because this book is so good I'd rather read it.
Then in searching for another out-of-print book for one of my book groups, I thought I might just as well check to see if my used book supplier of choice had this one, and Lucky Me! So now I'm on page 307. Only 740 pages to go, and I'll be finished with it.
The weird thing is that my other book group is reading a John Le Carre, and as good as that is, I'm having trouble getting to it because this book is so good I'd rather read it.
March 14, 2023
I don’t know what it is about Spring Break and the beach with my reading historical times, but during last year’s “snowbirding,” I read Chernow’s Rockefeller biography and this year it’s Iowa’s renowned historian, Joseph Frazier Wall’s biography of another captain of industry, Andrew Carnegie…Like Chernow, Wall identifies the curious, repeating nature found in our history…Plenty of parallels that could be applied to today’s problems and issues…A lot of reading, but worth it!
September 18, 2017
Mind blown.
February 16, 2018
Great biography of one of the greatest businessman/ investors of all time.
March 16, 2017
This is a fabulous biography both of the man, his business career, his philanthropic efforts, his political activities, and of his character and public opinions.
Very highly recommended.
Very highly recommended.
July 6, 2012
I finally had to give up on this book. I have no doubt the Author knows the subject matter. But the writing style was just too scattered, and assumed the reader had too much knowledge in the time period, for me to follow what he was writing about. For my tastes, the author wondered off on side topics so often, and so suddenly that narrative was difficult to follow.
Again, I'm sure the Author knows his subject, and this book might be appropriate for someone that already know the time period well. It's just not for me.
I think I will try to round up David Nassw's book on Carnegie.....
Again, I'm sure the Author knows his subject, and this book might be appropriate for someone that already know the time period well. It's just not for me.
I think I will try to round up David Nassw's book on Carnegie.....
February 16, 2014
I have three main problems with this book:
1) The author explores the social critiques of Carnigie's life in detail and seems to side with a leftist point of view.
2) The author dwells on the personal side of Carnigie's life to the detriment of the business side of his life.
3) The first two issues result in a long tedius book to read.
I definitely would not suggest buying this book. I finally gave up on the book about 2/3 of the way through it.
It would be nice to read a book on Carnigie by someone who understands, business, capitalism and freedom.
1) The author explores the social critiques of Carnigie's life in detail and seems to side with a leftist point of view.
2) The author dwells on the personal side of Carnigie's life to the detriment of the business side of his life.
3) The first two issues result in a long tedius book to read.
I definitely would not suggest buying this book. I finally gave up on the book about 2/3 of the way through it.
It would be nice to read a book on Carnigie by someone who understands, business, capitalism and freedom.
Read
November 24, 2018A very detailed biography written in 1970. I do not feel that the author was biased in his analysis of Carnegie, which is tough considering the controversy surrounding his life. This book was recommended by Peter Kaufman and Charlie Munger. I learned a great deal from reading this, and I highly recommend it to individuals with interests in industry, finance, or philanthropy.
160 libraries in the state of Indiana were funded by Andrew, more than in any other state. More than 1500 libraries in the USA exist today because of him.
160 libraries in the state of Indiana were funded by Andrew, more than in any other state. More than 1500 libraries in the USA exist today because of him.
February 29, 2012
Far too much contextual historical background for my taste, but very thorough coverage.
August 26, 2013
very well done biography. interesting and good correlative history.
July 25, 2014
A very readable cradle to grave biography of this rags to riches success story.
December 7, 2016
Comprehensive book about the life of Andrew Carnegie. Well researched, showing both the good and bad sides of this 19th century robber baron and his later philanthropy.
November 11, 2021
A well written capsule of his life.
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