Helped by Carnegie’s brainwashed childhood, Storey convinced Carnegie that his money and influence, combined with Storey’s rhetoric and political influence, could bring about an end to Britain’s hereditary privilege. Together they formed a newspaper syndicate to promote the cheap radical press. From its owner and editor, the philanthropist John Passmore Edwards, Carnegie bought two-thirds interest in the daily (London) Echo in 1884. The paper was an ardent supporter of all ‘progressive movements’. Thus Carnegie and Storey obtained a network of seven daily newspapers and ten weeklies, which covered the areas where the majority of Liberal/radical supporters could be found: from the Midland Counties Guardian at Wolverhampton to the Echo at Birmingham. At the Wolverhampton-based Evening Express & Star, editor (and Scotsman) Thomas Graham – who had met Carnegie during the coach trip of 1881 – turned a Tory paper into a radical one, much to Carnegie’s glee.
In the north of England in particular Carnegie and Storey hoped to incite the working classes to whatever local rebellion was necessary, with Queen Victoria, her family, the House of Lords and aristocrats in general, the Tory Party and the Church of England as the main targets. They supported Liberal candidates at elections and campaigned for the Reform Bill of 1884. Carnegie liked to give his employees pep talks, so he would arrive, for instance, at the offices of the Evening Express & Star to pontificate:
He made no pretence of dictating policy, still less of writing leading articles himself, but he liked to assemble the entire editorial force and give little talks on the great issues then pending in England. The new franchise bill, extending the vote to agricultural labourers, the great popular mass still left outside the breastworks, was the measure on which Carnegie grew most eloquent, though the fierceness with which the Gordon campaign in the Sudan was assailed left a permanent impression.21
In everything in which he had a financial stake, Carnegie had a penchant for interfering.
In Queen Victoria’s Britain attempts to undermine the Establishment did not sell papers. Carnegie’s publishing ventures were soon piling up losses, but his enthusiasm and cash kept things going – Carnegie was never one to give way under adversity and he encouraged his editors to persist. Nevertheless the Tory press was winning the circulation race and Carnegie saw that his cash simply could not buy reader interest or loyalty. As with all his failures, Carnegie blamed others, and the reasons for the newspapers’ decline were placed at the doors of such men as Thomas Graham. It must be said too, that Carnegie’s dealings with Storey were not all sweetness and light. Storey baulked at Carnegie’s efforts to influence his political opinions. In terms of managing newspapers, Carnegie was out of his depth.
‘Harmony did not prevail among my British [newspaper] friends and finally I decided to withdraw,’ wrote Carnegie.22 Carnegie and Storey sold back the controlling share in the London Echo to John Passmore Edwards at a profit, but Carnegie was unable to pull out entirely from the other papers as Storey and Graham wished to continue; Carnegie accepted ‘notes’ against his shares as security, a holding he had to retain for many years. He never again backed publications, but used those of others to promote his ideas in articles. In the future too, he would use newspapers as propaganda outlets, and he was not against using his money and influence to have stories against himself and his projects suppressed – using precisely the methods he had openly despised in his younger radical days.
The newspaper interests brought Carnegie negative publicity from some quarters. There were those who were unhappy about Carnegie using his money in the ‘task of transforming Great Britain into a republic’.23 In particular the Tory press was annoyed that ‘an American citizen, with a great fortune made in the United States, [was] fanning the flames of English revolution’.24 The St James’s Gazette made its position clear:
. . . the present agitation originated in America, and is an attempt to infuse republican sentiments into English politics. The movement, with all its paraphernalia of banners, processions, monster meetings and other factious machinery which American politicians know so well how to handle, is entirely foreign to English sentiment, and is the result of American influence and paid for by American dollars. Mr Carnegie is at the head of a conspiracy which is more subtle and dangerous than that of the dynamiters and which seeks to destroy both the Crown and the House of Lords.25
Carnegie replied that he would, if it were in his power, totally destroy both ‘Crown and House of Lords’, and any ‘vestige of privilege throughout the world’, carefully sidestepping the issue that he was using the privilege bought by his wealth and influence to do so. In a letter to Storey, who had suggested that Carnegie’s outspokenness was not helping the cause, Carnegie said that he was ‘no conspirator’ and eschewed violence: ‘The first duty of a Republican is to bow to the decision of the ballot box. The weapon of Republicanism is not the sword but the pen.’26
Many accused Carnegie of trying to curry favour in order to win himself a seat in the House of Commons; it was even suggested that he intended to replace the Liberal barrister Charles Pelham Villiers as MP for Wolverhampton. Carnegie hotly denied any such thing, although the charge was repeated for several years. Incidentally, in his own cognisance Carnegie was an American, although it could be argued that technically he was not as no naturalisation papers existed; again emigration had not stripped him of his British nationality, so he could have stood for the British parliament . . . certainly his wealth and influence with the Liberals could have brought about such a state of affairs if he had really wanted it.
Carnegie’s newspapers failed to provoke a workers’ revolution in Britain. Yet the issues they did support, like universal suffrage, payment for MPs and Home Rule for Ireland, did come about. Just as Carnegie’s newspaper ventures were failing the Liberals suffered a blip. On 8 June 1885 the Liberal budget was defeated by an alliance of Tories and Irish nationalists, and Gladstone’s administration fell at the subsequent general election. Tory Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, became Prime Minister.
While all these opportunities and friendships were being pursued and exploited by Carnegie, another more significant relationship was simmering back home in America.
THIRTEEN
TWO DEATHS AND A WEDDING
Till death, Louise, yours alone.
Andrew Carnegie, November 1886
After years of shilly-shallying on his part, Carnegie and Louise Whitfield became engaged during September 1883. It was an arrangement made in secret, and biographers have speculated that at the moment of betrothal neither party really knew what the other wanted in terms of marriage; and, in the case of Carnegie, whether marriage was what he wanted at all. Louise’s mother was delighted that her 26-year-old daughter was to be married; Mrs Whitfield’s health was not of the best and she feared that her daughter’s concern about her would cause her to remain unmarried. Margaret Carnegie received the news of the engagement in her usual self-centred way when it came to her son’s activities. She considered that he was abandoning her. Although Margaret Carnegie was a selfish, rather unpleasant woman, Carnegie’s devotion to her need not be overplayed when it came to his possible marriage; he was 48, and although the umbilical cord to his mother was still emotionally attached, it was very long and Carnegie was largely free to go where he liked and do what he wished. Perhaps this was why he wanted the engagement to be a secret outside the respective families. Louise confided in her diary: ‘Had a delightful horseback ride with Mr Carnegie. . . . Am so unhappy, so miserable.’1 She was to slip in and out of happiness with the arrangement, never knowing how secure she was: ‘Nothing is certain, nothing is sure. I am striving so hard to do what is right, but I cannot see the light yet. . . .’2
During the spring of 1884 Carnegie took another coaching trip. Before he set off, he had a serious talk with Louise and the engagement was broken off. It was clear that Carnegie was unable to accept the commitment of marriage. On 23 April Louise wrote in her diary: ‘In the afternoon, took the last sad step [to bre
ak the engagement]. Felt it was best. . . .’3
Carnegie’s coaching trip differed from his tour of 1881 as this time he intended to hobnob with the famous. He assembled a travelling group made up of John Morley; William Black, whose volume Adventures in a Phaeton had inspired the 1881 trip; Edwin Austin Abbey, an American artist, who illustrated the works of Shakespeare and Herrick as well as American magazines; (later Sir) Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia, a book Carnegie had recently gifted to Louise; Arnold presented to Carnegie the original manuscript of the book; Matthew Arnold, his wife Flu and daughter Lucy, who were picked up en route at Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham; and two of William Ewart Gladstone’s eight children. The party was completed by MP Samuel Storey. The prospective route was from Charing Cross in London to Ilfracombe in the south-west; it would take six weeks and encompass stops in Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon.
Because of his current involvement in radical newspapers and Liberal politics Carnegie was in high political mood. His conversation as they travelled was peppered with his republican and anti-monarchal opinions and he repeatedly engaged the company in his pro-American comparison with all the English things he saw. William Black found this somewhat wearing; having observed Carnegie closely as they travelled in the four-in-hand, he dubbed him ‘the Star-Spangled Scotchman’.4 Carnegie delighted in his new nickname.
Two incidents on the trip, both associated with Matthew Arnold, particularly impressed Carnegie. While in Hampshire a visit was made to All Saints’ churchyard, Hursley, to see the two large horizontal tombstones covering the graves of John Keble (1792–1866) and his wife. The poet and divine had been Arnold’s godfather and his predecessor as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The inspirer of the Tractarian Movement (which asserted the claim of the Church to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative) and a keen promoter of High Church principles, Keble was vicar of Hursley from 1836 until his death and contributed to the famous Tracts for the Times. Carnegie watched Arnold’s reactions at the grave: ‘We walked [in] the quiet churchyard together. Matthew Arnold in silent thought at the grave of Keble made a lasting impression on me.’ Later he would say: ‘Even his look and serious silence charmed.’5 At Winchester they visited Arnold’s old school, founded by Bishop William Wykeham in 1387. Carnegie bristled at Wykeham’s maxim carved as a motto, ‘Manners mayketh man’, but was mollified when Arnold pointed out that the comment referred not to table manners but to the medieval pursuit of the arts.6
During the trip Carnegie thought much about Louise. From Dartmoor, on 11 June, he wrote to her describing the tour and telling her that he would be coming home on the SS Servia on 5 July to meet up with his mother at Cresson. As before, Carnegie prepared a private note on the tour for circulation to friends; in due course it too was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The Carnegies returned to New York and the relationship with Louise was resumed as if no break had taken place, with horse-rides in Central Park. Louise soon realised, though, that she was no nearer the altar than before. Carnegie advanced and retreated in his ardour each time they met, with Louise assuring him that she was happy with the status quo. At last they were engaged once more on 18 November 1884.
Louise Whitfield, with ‘a light and happy heart’, was to see little of her peripatetic fiancé, who was at that time deep in the reorganisation of his steel assets. It is clear that Louise loved Carnegie – the antithesis of the ideal man that her girlfriends sought – and found strength in the belief that one day he would be hers. In the spring of 1885 Carnegie announced that, despite some reluctance on his part (to leave his mother . . . and Louise), he was to go to England with Mr and Mrs Henry Phipps. His radical newspapers needed his attention and he would be away until 22 August.
On this trip Carnegie corresponded regularly with Louise, expressing his loneliness and wishing ‘a certain young beautiful lady were only here to brighten [the days] with her smiles and silvery laugh . . .’.7 Louise spent a forlorn few weeks in a resort hotel at Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, with her mother. Carnegie’s letters to her, in which he complained that hers were not affectionate enough, did not lighten her mood. At length, from her stiff reply describing her own dolefulness, Carnegie understood that he was not the only one feeling lonely and ceased to gripe. In fact Carnegie became more literally demonstrative and Louise began to believe that they would eventually marry . . . but when? Margaret Carnegie still stood in the way, although Carnegie, in trying to hide his mother’s selfishness, said that they should hold back for both their mothers’ sakes.
In his biography of Carnegie, Joseph Frazier Wall cites a number of cogent reasons why Carnegie, ‘who had always aggressively gone after and obtained everything he had ever wanted’,8 was holding back from winning the woman who was more and more in his thoughts:
All of the psychological explanations so dear to the amateur Freudian could be brought forth in way of explanation [of Carnegie’s vacillation concerning marriage]: a weak, ineffectual father who had been unable to provide for his sons; a domineering, ambitious mother who HAD provided; an unduly prolonged childhood innocence of sexual knowledge; a sense of competition with a younger brother for his mother’s affection; a personal vanity so strong as to indicate latent narcissism.9
Whatever the reasons, Louise had the nous to bide her time to get what she wanted: in her copy of Longfellow’s poetry, she underlined a line from ‘A Palm of Life’: ‘Learn to labour and to wait.’
As well as his business interests, Carnegie had been allocating time to writing. Magazine articles and travel notes now gave way to a substantial tome entitled Triumphant Democracy. Since 1882 the idea for the book had been buzzing around in his imagination, so much so that when Carnegie met Gladstone at Lord Rosebery’s he was able to give the Liberal Prime Minister ‘some startling figures which I had prepared for it’.10 These figures proved that, in the English-speaking world at least, republicans outnumbered monarchists and also that America ‘could purchase Great Britain and Ireland and all their realized capital and investments and then pay off Britain’s debt’ without exhausting the national funds. For good measure he added that America was now ‘the greatest manufacturing nation in the world’.11
This book was Carnegie’s ‘third literary venture’ and he attributed its inspiration to the personal realisation of ‘how little the best informed foreigner, or even Briton, knew about America, and how distorted that little was’.12 He dedicated the book to his ‘Beloved Republic’ and mocked the ‘old nations of the earth’ as snails compared with America’s speedy economic pace.13 Lost in a plethora of words, Carnegie damned the monarchy and pontificated on every subject on which he felt strongly, from agriculture to religion. His rose-tinted spectacles, though, did cause him to anger his target audience of radicals with certain statements. For example, ignoring American whore-houses and violent boozers – which he must have seen plenty of in places like Pittsburgh – he made this comment:
As a rule, the American workingman is steadier than his fellow in Britain – much more sober and possessed of higher tastes. Among his amusements is found scarcely a trace of the ruder practices of British manufacturing districts, such as cock-fighting, badger-baiting, dog-fighting, prize-fighting. Wife-beating is scarcely ever heard of, and drunkenness is quite rare.14
Like Sir William Wallace driving the English out of Perth, Stirling and Lanark in 1297, the best-loved events of his childhood storybooks, Carnegie cut a swathe through everything he disliked, although in the process he left behind clues as to where his future charitable donations would go:
Educate man, and his shackles fall. Free education may be trusted to burst every obstruction which stands in the path of the democracy towards its goal, the equality of the citizen, and this it will reach quietly and without violence, as the swelling sapling in its growth breaks its guard.15
For the first time in print, too, Carnegie distorted his own family background and his role since emigration. Those who had helped him were sidelined as
he gave the impression that all he had achieved had been done entirely by his own unaided efforts. Among those who took offence was T.T. Woodruff – of sleeping-car fame – since Carnegie had portrayed himself as the real promoter of the vehicles. But Carnegie simply brushed aside Woodruff’s criticisms: after all, never in his life did he admit mistakes to others.
The 509-page book was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in a number of editions between 1886 and 1888 under its full title Triumphant Democracy of Fifty Years of the Republic. Translations into French, German, Italian and other Continental tongues were ordered. Within a few months hardback sales reached some 17,000 in America, with strong sales in Britain; a cheaper edition of 40,000 at a shilling was issued in Britain for the ‘working classes’.16 A revised edition would appear in 1893, in which Carnegie proposed a tariff-free reunion between Britain and America. Carnegie wanted the book to stand out in the bookshops and on library shelves so a bold red was chosen for the binding; on the front cover was Carnegie’s own design of two golden pyramids, one firmly based representing the republic, and the other inverted and inscribed ‘Monarchy’. Underneath was a broken sceptre. There was a reverse imperial diadem on the back cover, representing the monarchy which Carnegie really believed was shortly to come to an end. Outer embellishments included pro-American quotes from Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.17
In America reviewers were divided in their opinions about the book; some thought that Carnegie was excessively biased in his lauding of the American way of life, while others were happy that their country was so extravagantly complimented. Overall the volume was considered to be an adroit and exhilarating picture of the United States, with the only cavil being that it glossed over the country’s imperfections. Few Americans realised that the book was Carnegie’s thesis towards a revolution in Britain to bring about the radical society that had so excited his childhood thoughts. Indeed he became something of a defender-spokesman in British radical circles. He loved to accept speaking engagements to tub-thump for republicanism and lambast royalty. He was intoxicated by the applause which greeted some of his provocative pronouncements, such as: ‘The Prince of Wales got £105,000 per annum or the gross earnings of 30,000 people and the men who fought their country’s battles [in the Crimean War] died in the workhouse.’18 Consequently left-wing groups and their Liberal bedmates in Parliament received the volume as a justification for their aims. The Tory press saw it as a sinister attack on British society, the St James’s Gazette leading the pack with the Saturday Review promoting an anti-American line.
Carnegie Page 14