Carnegie, Andrew

Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919), industrial entrepreneur and philanthropist whose life embodied the rags‐to‐riches myth of the self‐made man.Born to a working‐class family in Dunfermline, Scotland, Carnegie immigrated to America in 1848 and settled near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Soon after his arrival, he began work in a textile mill for $1.20 per week. Five decades later, he stood at the pinnacle of the U.S. steel industry, the richest man in the world.

Carnegie rose rapidly, by 1853 becoming the personal assistant to Thomas A. Scott (1823–1881), the future head of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1856, Carnegie invested his savings in a sleeping‐car company that netted him five thousand dollars in annual dividends. That same year he assisted Scott in suppressing union organizers, winning for himself the superintendency of the Pennsylvania Railroad's western division.

Carnegie's investments grew throughout the 1860s. Aided by a loan from Scott, Carnegie founded the Keystone Bridge Company in 1867 and within a year controlled assets in excess of $400,000. By then, his earnings were so large that he pledged to retire from business and pursue scholarship and philanthropy because, he feared, the quest for wealth would inevitably lead to personal degradation.

But Carnegie did not keep his promise. He continued to invest heavily in the iron business he had purchased in the 1860s and by 1872 was planning the world's most advanced steel mill. Over the course of the next three decades, Carnegie competed ruthlessly against his rivals in the steel industry while also resisting the initiatives of organized labor. He became a trailblazer in reducing production costs and extending managerial control over workers. In 1875, Carnegie's new steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works near Pittsburgh, ushered in a revolution in industrial production and organization. He rid the mill of union workers and produced rails at a lower cost and earned more money than any other U.S. metal maker. The Bessemer process of steelmaking—which Carnegie was the first to use—produced vast quantities of hard, durable metal at low cost. In combining the essential stages of metal production (smelting, refining, and rolling), Carnegie achieved a new level of automation and technological integration.

Carnegie's profits, investments, and fame continued to expand during the 1880s, when he found new sources of personal fulfillment as well. He married Louise Whitfield, with whom he later had one child, Margaret; he began to dispense his wealth by donating money for thousands of Carnegie libraries; and he summed up his social thought in Triumphant Democracy (1886). In several influential essays, notably Wealth (North American Review, 1889), he defended the theoretical right of workers to join unions and proclaimed the responsibility of the wealthy to redistribute their money for the good of the community. In 1892, however, Carnegie and his close business associate Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) chose to maximize profits rather than respect their workers' right to a union. The result was the violence‐ridden Homestead Steel strike that thwarted unionism in the steel industry until the 1930s.

Carnegie paid dearly for his victory at Homestead in the arena of public opinion, but he remained active publicly. In the late 1890s, he campaigned against the Spanish‐American War and opposed the annexation of the Philippines. In 1901, he sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan for $480 million, freeing himself to pursue such philanthropic ventures as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Carnegie Hero Fund, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His total benefactions—including more than 2,800 Carnegie libraries—amounted to $350 million.

In his declining years, Carnegie served as a kind of ambassador‐at‐large for world peace. From the late 1880s on, he spent much of each year at his estate in Scotland. World War I seemed to crush his otherwise undaunted spirit, and he died in 1919 at Shadowbrook, his estate in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.
See also Gilded Age; Homestead Lockout; Industrialization; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Movements; Libraries; Peace Movements; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Railroads.

Bibliography

Burton J. Hendrick , The Life of Andrew Carnegie, 1932.
Joseph Frazier Wall , Andrew Carnegie, 1970; reprint 1989.

Paul Krause