Andrew Carnegie

Born November 25, 1835

Dunfermline, Scotland

Died August 11, 1919

Lenox, Massachusetts

Industrialist and philanthropist

"Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket."

A ndrew Carnegie stands as a symbol of the idea that immigrants could come to the United States and make a vast fortune. In Carnegie's case, he came to the United States from his native Scotland at age thirteen and worked his way from poverty to one of the great fortunes of the world based on manufacturing steel. In retirement, Carnegie gave away several hundred million dollars, a significant portion of his fortune during his lifetime. He financed public libraries throughout the United States as well as donated money to universities and bought organs for churches.

The industrial revolution

In one respect, Carnegie shared an experience with countless other Europeans who immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: His family's livelihood had been seriously affected by the industrial revolution, the historic change from a farm-based economy to an economic system based on the manufacturing of goods and distribution of services on an organized and massproduced basis. This meant that new machines powered by steam or running water (streams and rivers) took over the work of many workers using traditional methods. The new machines could do the work of several people in a day and introduced a profound change in European—and especially English—society from about 1760 until about 1940.

Carnegie's family lived in Dunfermline, an ancient capital of Scotland where Scottish national hero and king Robert the Bruce (1274–1329) was buried. There, Carnegie's father William used a hand-powered loom to weave cloth. William Carnegie worked from his small cottage that doubled as the family home, and employed three assistants. The business made the family a modest but fairly comfortable living. William Carnegie was also a local leader of the Chartists. (Chartism was a political movement in Britain between 1838 and 1848 whose members campaigned to obtain the right to vote for working people. At that time in Britain, only relatively wealthy landlords and business owners owned enough property to qualify to vote for members of Parliament. Workers like Carnegie had no way to influence political decisions. The Chartist movement campaigned to let all men vote regardless of wealth.) Andrew Carnegie's mother was Margaret Morrison, the daughter of a shoemaker who also campaigned for political and social reforms.

By 1835, when Andrew Carnegie was born, independent weavers had already been doomed by the industrial revolution. Looms for weaving and machines for spinning yarn from cotton or wool were among the first machines introduced in the long process of industrialization, starting in England in the late 1700s and continuing until the mid-1900s. A power loom, operated by one or two people, could produce more cloth in a day than twenty or more weavers using traditional hand looms. Weavers were forced either to work as employees in new textile factories, where the automated looms were situated, or to find another occupation.

When Andrew Carnegie was eight years old, a new textile mill using looms powered by a steam engine opened in Dunfermline. Any hope that William Carnegie could continue to thrive in his small textile business was wiped out with the arrival of the new factory. Five years later, with the family income steadily declining, Carnegie's mother urged that the family leave Scotland to join relatives living in the United States. The country was expanding rapidly and held out hope to thousands of families in Europe for a brighter economic future.

Carnegie was thirteen when his family immigrated to the United States in May 1848. They settled near relatives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a busy, growing city of more than forty thousand people. It seemed to offer many new economic opportunities. At first, Andrew's father tried to recreate the business he had in Scotland, weaving tablecloths on a wooden loom and selling them directly to customers. But the industrial revolution was advancing in the United States just as rapidly as in England, and Carnegie's father had to accept that he could not support his family in the traditional way. Instead, he found a job in the Blackstock Cotton Mill, which made cotton cloth using power-driven looms.

Andrew joined his father in the factory, working as a "bobbin boy," the person who put fresh spools, or bobbins, of yarn onto the rapidly moving looms. It was a job often carried out by child workers, whose nimble fingers seemed well suited to the job.

Father and son both worked twelve hours a day for six days a week. For his seventy-two hours of work, Andrew was paid $1.20 a week (the equivalent of about $25 in the early twenty-first century). Andrew's father thought factory work was depressing and soon quit. But Andrew stayed on. The family lived on his wages, plus whatever his mother could earn sewing shoes for a nearby shoemaker. When Andrew had the chance to move to another factory for $2 a week, he gladly took it. That first change of jobs for more money was just the first of many in Carnegie's long and successful career.

Telegraph messenger

The owner of Carnegie's new factory noticed that his young employee was cheerful and hardworking. He began calling Carnegie away from the factory floor to write business letters, which helped supplement the boy's brief formal education. Carnegie got a major break when an uncle alerted him to an opening as a telegraph messenger. At the time, the newly developed telegraph was an important means of rapid communication for business. Messages came into central telegraph offices, where messenger boys dashed to deliver them to their intended recipients.

Carnegie got the job at the telegraph office, along with another raise to $2.50 a week. The major break was not just the money: before the office officially opened for the day, delivery boys had a chance to practice sending and receiving messages themselves. Carnegie took full advantage of this opportunity and soon became quite adept at this process. This led to a job as a telegraph operator, which earned him $25 a month.

At the time, sending telegraph messages was a highly skilled profession. Operators translated the sound of a series of long and short clicks sent over telegraph wires into letters, using a code developed by American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872). Although the receiving device printed the clicks on paper, Carnegie was able to translate the letters as they came in simply by the sound, which made him especially fast in translating the clicks into messages. So impressive was his work that curious businesspeople would drop into the office, just to see him work. Soon, some customers requested that Carnegie send important messages. One of these was Thomas A. Scott (1823–1881), an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Working on the railroad

In one of the biggest breaks of his career, the seventeen-year-old Carnegie went to work for Scott as a general assistant in 1853. In this position, Carnegie often traveled along the railroad line between Philadelphia to the east and Pittsburgh to the west to oversee construction and maintenance. On one of his trips, a man named Theodore Woodruff (1811–1892) approached Carnegie about a new invention, the sleeping car. It looked like an ordinary railroad car on the outside, but inside, the car could be converted into a kind of rolling hotel, with sleeping spaces for passengers. Carnegie immediately realized the business potential of the new car for people who traveled long distances and showed it to the head of the railroad, who in turn decided to acquire the sleeping cars for the company. As a reward for bringing the idea to the railroad's attention, Carnegie was allowed to buy shares in the new Woodruff Sleeping Car Company, which earned him more than $5,000 in its first year (the equivalent of over $100,000 in the twenty-first century).

In 1859, Carnegie became superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad's western division. He gained a reputation for working hard to keep the trains running on schedule, which required constant maintenance of the cast-iron rails, which were brittle and prone to breaking.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–65), the focus of Carnegie's responsibilities changed abruptly. His knowledge of both the telegraph and railroads was highly valued, since the Union Army fighting for the northern states depended both on good communications and on the railroads to move its troops and supplies. In addition to working for the railroad, Carnegie also helped the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps.

Throughout his career, Carnegie invested the money he received from the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company in some of the many companies that were springing up as part of the industrial revolution. Carnegie was twenty-nine when the Civil War ended in 1865, and he already owned shares, or individual small portions of a company into which money is invested, worth a total of almost $40,000 (the equivalent of nearly $480,000 in the twenty-first century) in more than a dozen companies. Consequently, when Carnegie was offered a promotion to general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he turned down the offer. He wanted to tend to his investments.

Life as an investor

At first, Carnegie's investments were primarily related to the railroad business, which he knew from experience. When he saw a chance to merge the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company with a rival, he helped make it happen, in the

process becoming the largest single investor in the new Pullman Palace Car Company. Noting that traditional wooden railroad bridges often broke or burned, Carnegie invested in the Keystone Bridge Company to build railroad bridges made of cast iron.

On a trip to England, Carnegie toured a mill making steel with a new process developed by engineer Henry Bessemer (1813–1898). Steel is a form of iron that has been heated to a very high temperature in coal furnaces in order to reduce the amount of carbon and other impurities, such as sulfur, mixed into iron ore when it is mined. The resulting metal is strong, like iron, but not as brittle. Before Bessemer's process, small amounts of iron were converted into steel by heating the metal to the high temperature required. The old process had been slow and expensive, which in turn limited the uses for steel. Bessemer developed a way of injecting oxygen into molten, or melted, iron, burning away the carbon and resulting in steel that could be poured into molds or rolled into thin

sheets. Steel produced using the new process proved to be ideal for building bridges as well as many other products, such as rails, military cannons, and support beams for skyscrapers.

Carnegie acquired the right to use Bessemer's process in a steel mill in the United States. Soon, he was using Bessemer's process to manufacture steel rails for the railroads. Since coal was the principal fuel used to make steel, Carnegie acquired another company that owned coal mines to guarantee a steady supply of coal for his mills. Carnegie also hired scientists to study the chemistry of making steel and did not hesitate to build new plants in order to improve the quality of his product and the efficiency of his operations.

On the one hand, Carnegie treated his workers well, as long as it did not cost too much. On the other hand, he strongly resisted the efforts of his employees to organize into unions. The essential idea of unions was that while a single worker had no influence over a factory owner—one worker could easily be dismissed and replaced by another—all of the factory's workers acting together could unite and disrupt a factory's smooth operation by refusing to work unless their demands were met. A conflict occurred in July 1892, when steelworkers at one of his steel factories, the Homestead Plant on the Monongahela River, 7 miles east of Pittsburgh, went on strike, or refused to continue working, in protest over wages they believed were too low. Homestead was an enormous steel factory, spread over about 150 acres and employing 4,500 men. Three years earlier, the men had negotiated a contract setting their wages, and the contract expired in July 1892. Most workers went on strike until a new agreement was reached.

Right before the workers struck, Carnegie had left on a vacation in his native Scotland and put his newly appointed chief executive, Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), in charge. Shortly after the strike began, violence broke out between the workers and guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, hired by Frick. Several strikers and guards were killed when workers rushed past a fence 4 feet high and 4 miles long that surrounded the factory and attacked guards. Angry workers even tried to use an antique cannon from the town hall to fire on river barges bringing Pinkerton guards up the Monongahela River and into the plant, but the cannon exploded, injuring several strikers.

Frick finally called in troops from the Pennsylvania National Guard to restore order and protect the mill. On July 23, however, Frick was attacked in his office, surviving two gunshot wounds and three stab wounds.

The Homestead strike caused Carnegie great distress. As the mill owner, the public blamed him for the violence and accused him of hiding in Scotland while letting Frick do his dirty work. In truth, Carnegie was furious at the way Frick handled the crisis. Two years later, Carnegie replaced Frick with Charles Schwab (1862–1939) as chief executive. Schwab had begun his career as a common laborer.

Despite the Homestead setback, Carnegie kept building his company. He acquired rights to mine iron ore in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, where ore could be scooped from just beneath the surface of the mountains at a fraction of the cost of underground mining. He built his own steamboats to carry the ore from Lake Superior to Conneaut, Ohio, on Lake Erie, and then used his own railroad to haul the ore to mills in Pittsburgh.

New uses for steel were literally springing up: steel was used for the columns that supported tall buildings, especially in New York City, for the elevators inside them, and for the elevated tracks on which passenger trains ran. Carnegie's steel company gained a major share of the rapidly expanding steel industry.

By 1900, Carnegie Steel was the largest steel company in the world, producing more steel than all of Great Britain combined. In 1901, banker J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) was trying to assemble a trust, a company that would own a significant portion of the country's steel manufacturers in order to control the price. Rather than face a bruising competition with Morgan, Carnegie began exploring the idea of selling his company. Working through Schwab, the company president, Morgan inquired about Carnegie's asking price. The following day, Carnegie wrote a figure on a slip of paper: $480 million (worth about $10.6 billion in the twenty-first century). Morgan accepted the price on the spot and used Carnegie Steel as the centerpiece of United States Steel.

The philanthropist

For several years before he sold his company, Carnegie began paying more attention to his personal life and philanthropy, benefitting others through charitable gifts. He spent nearly a year traveling around the world. He and his mother also took a sentimental trip back to Dunfermline, Scotland. There, Carnegie donated funds to build a new public library, the first of many libraries Carnegie eventually helped fund. In a special ceremony, his mother, Margaret Carnegie, laid the foundation stone of the new building.

Only after his mother died in 1886 did Carnegie marry. At age fifty-one, he married Louise Whitfield (1857–1946), with whom he had been in love for years. Ten years later, their only child, Margaret, was born.

At age sixty-five, Carnegie started giving away his immense fortune. The project for which he is best remembered was donating funds to build public libraries. In total, 2,811 libraries were built throughout the United States from his donations. The project reflected Carnegie's belief that the best way to help people was to help them help themselves through education. Carnegie donated nearly 5,000 organs to churches in the United States, as well. He also supplied the funds used to build Pittsburgh's Carnegie Technical Schools (which, in 1912, became Carnegie Institute of Technology; and, in 1967, Carnegie-Mellon University, after a merger with the Mellon Institute). Throughout his life, Carnegie remembered friends from Dunfermline, and he later contributed funds to them.

Andrew Carnegie was also a strong advocate of world peace. He was among the first to call for a "league of nations," an organization of nations, as proposed by President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924; served 1913–21), that would exert moral leadership and help nations avoid future wars. He also built in the Netherlands what he called the Peace Palace, which today houses the principal judicial body of the United Nations, among other institutions. When World War I (1914–18) broke out, Carnegie's wife, Louise, later said that the industrialist's heart was broken. He died five years later, on August 11, 1919, at his vacation home in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, one of the most successful immigrants to ever come to the United States.

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Livesay, Harold C. Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business. New York: Longman, 2000.

Meltzer, Milton. The Many Lives of Andrew Carnegie. New York: Franklin Watts, 1997.

Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Periodicals

Chernow, Ron. "Blessed Barons." Time (December 7, 1998): p. 74.

Web Sites

Carnegie, Andrew. "The Gospel of Wealth." American Studies at the University of Virginia.http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/wealth.html (accessed on March 10, 2004).

Carnegie, Andrew. "The Opportunity of the United States." Anti-Imperialism in the United States 1898–1935.http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ailtexts/carn02.html (accessed on March 10, 2004).

Lorenzen, Michael. "Deconstructing the Philanthropic Library: The Sociological Reasons Behind Andrew Carnegie's Millions to Libraries." Michael Lorenzen.http://www.michaellorenzen.com/carnegie.htm (accessed on March 10, 2004).

"The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie." PBS American Experience.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie (accessed on March 10, 2004).