Despite his advancing age and his depression about the war, Carnegie kept up an interest in what was happening in war-torn Europe. On 7 November 1916 Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President and on 7 December David Lloyd George – who had resigned from Asquith’s government because he thought the war was being mishandled – became British Prime Minister of a coalition government.
The war raged on and in April 1917 America entered the war, the sinking of their merchant ships having made it inevitable. US troops were in France by June. The involvement saddened Carnegie, although he accepted the inevitability of it all. By 6 November 1918 the Germans were in general retreat. Carnegie’s ‘reluctant tool’ the Kaiser was stripped of his power, his nation now being ruled by its Reichstag, and on 9 November 1918 he was forced to abdicate. At five in the morning in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne, north of Paris, the armistice was signed on 11 November. Carnegie’s ‘hero funds’ and ‘dependants funds’ would have plenty of work to do; 10 million were dead and 20 million wounded in battle, while another 5 million were lost to disease and starvation. Peace talks began in Paris in January 1919 with Woodrow Wilson negotiating for America, Lloyd George for Britain, Georges Clemenceau for France and Vittorio Orlando for Italy; on 28 June the Treaty of Versailles was signed with Germany. The treaty was a compromise but did not include one of Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ – that a League of Nations be established to ensure world peace in the future. This clause had particularly pleased Carnegie. Alas, the terms of the treaty, which included the redistribution of lands once held by Germany and exorbitant reparations to be paid to the Allies, were an eventual source of future international conflict.
At noon on 22 April 1919 – the 32nd anniversary of his own wedding – a somewhat frail Carnegie walked down the grand staircase of 2 East 91st Street, to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to Ensign Roswell Miller. Margaret had been a friend of Roswell’s sister Dorothy at Miss Spence’s school, and Carnegie had been acquainted for some years with Roswell’s father, a former president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul’s Railroad. Margaret and Roswell had known each other only a short while when he proposed. On their wedding day Margaret was awakened by Angus MacPherson (from Skibo) playing the pipes. Carnegie’s last public appearance saw him waving goodbye to his daughter and new son-in-law as their Stutz automobile swept down the drive to their honeymoon – with Nannie Lockerbie in attendance!
Carnegie’s relationship with his daughter has always been a point of discussion for biographers. His involvement with business, philanthropy and travel, and Margaret’s attendance at private schools, kept them apart. Although he was an attentive father when at home, as Louise was to say, events prevented Margaret ‘from ever knowing your dear Daddy’.7 Was it this that made her question her father’s endowments in the name of peace? Again, was she critical about the source of her father’s wealth? Maybe there is a clue to her attitude in a comment she made to Carnegie’s biographer Burton J. Hendrick: ‘Tell his life like it was. I’m sick of the Santa Claus stuff.’8
Carnegie now spent a sedentary life at his home in New York in the company of Louise. Walks in his garden were followed by backgammon in the evening after supper, with his irritation at losing as keen as ever. He thought often of neglected Skibo, but his physician did not advise him to take the long journey; even despite Carnegie’s opinion that it did not matter if he did die in Scotland. Summers were spent at such places as Pointe d’Acadie, Bar Harbour, Maine, or Brick House, Norota, Connecticut, but in 1917 Carnegie bought the 900-acre estate and house of Shadowbrook on a summit near Lenox overlooking Lake Mahkeenac in the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts.9 At Shadowbrook Carnegie enjoyed the peaceful New England surroundings and when work was concluded he pored over letters and papers on the activities of the Carnegie Corporation with his secretary John A. Poynton, who had succeeded James Bertram in 1912. Carnegie enjoyed the totting up of his donations; by 1918 the figure had risen to $324,657,399.10 Visitors came and went, although Carnegie’s contemporaries were fast predeceasing him, but one – cousin Dod Lauder – brought back family memories and the echoes of their childhood in Dunfermline. They walked, fished, talked and played checkers. Alas, Dod had little interest now in American history and politics so Carnegie did not get the stimulating conversation on these subjects he so enjoyed. One of the younger generation to visit Carnegie was Charles M. Schwab, whose ebullience acted on Carnegie as a fillip; Schwab brought news of his war work – building submarines and manufacturing munitions – and always succeeded in making Carnegie laugh.11 But soon Carnegie was to be past all such tonics. As Elihu Root was to say, Carnegie was ‘fading gently and happily out of life’.12 On 9 August 1919 Carnegie contracted bronchial pneumonia. His last Sunday was spent resting on a porch overlooking Lake Mahkeenac; Louise was with him and his valet Morrison hovering in attendance. In the next hours Carnegie gently sank into a sleep; he never woke and died a short while after 7am on 11 August 1919.
* * *
Before he died Carnegie had received copies of the two-volume edition of John Morley’s autobiography entitled Recollections; it was full of memories for Carnegie:
Your wonderful book of recollections has given me rare and unalloyed pleasure. You have dealt with matters of state as no others could in my opinion, especially those of India and Ireland . . . I have read every word and it is as if I were again talking these things over with you face to face on the terrace of Skibo. Your references to me are all too flattering, but I am not altogether displeased, though you know my modest nature.
I feel confident that with America’s help, the great war cannot last much longer, and Madam and I are thinking and talking of the time when we will return to Skibo and have you with us once more.13
On Carnegie’s death hundreds of cables, telegrams and letters were received by Louise Carnegie, but perhaps the one she treasured most came from John Morley:
I cannot realise that my most steadfast of all friends has gone, nor do I realise that this letter will find you lonely in your home. Though he was far from me in place and sight, in goodbye at the Liverpool Station, could we suppose that we were to meet no more, and that the humane hopes we had lived in, and lived by, were on the very eve of ruin. Our ideas and aims were just the same, but the fire and glow of his spirit was his own, and my debt to him from the year when [Matthew] Arnold made us acquainted, was more than I can find words for. His interest in me and my doings was for all this long span of time active, eager, indulgent, long-sighted, high pitched. My days of survival cannot be far prolonged [Morley died in 1923], but they will be much the more dull now that the beacon across the Atlantic has gone out.14
Years before he died Carnegie and Louise had chosen their final resting place; Pittencrief Glen, Dunfermline, had been in the frame, but the final decision said the grave would be in that part of colonial America known as Sleepy Hollow Cemetery near Tarrytown, New York State. Here a Dutch church was built in 1697 and around it are the graves of those who played a role in the American Revolution that led to the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Here too lies the American man of letters Washington Irving, who enlivened Carnegie’s childhood reading with his tales of Rip Van Winkle and his immortalisation of this area in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.
Louise and Margaret were inundated with queries about the funeral. Would Carnegie have a grand American public funeral? Louise was adamant that he would not. In life Carnegie had been a public figure, but in death he was hers and Margaret’s. On 14 August 1919 a funeral service was held in the public reception room at Shadowbrook. Only family members and intimate friends were present, amounting to no more than sixty people around the flower-banked coffin. There was no eulogy, and although Carnegie had belonged to no denominational church a twenty-minute Presbyterian funeral service of prayers and Bible readings was conducted by the Revd Dr William P. Merrill of Brick Presbyterian Church, New York, assisted by the Revd Dr Benson N. Wyman of the Lenox Congregational Church. The same aftern
oon Carnegie’s coffin was taken by train and hearse to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and while hired guards kept all others away the family watched the coffin being placed in the new vault as Dr Merrill intoned the last commitment.
Although there was no eulogy at Carnegie’s funeral, newspapers covering the magnate’s demise pursued those who had known him well for suitable obituary quotes. The New York Globe and the Pittsburgh Dispatch, for instance, quoted Dr Henry S. Pritchett, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: ‘[Carnegie] made vital, in our country at least, the conception that the owner of great wealth is a trustee for the public, obligated to divide his wealth for the public use.’ The sentiment was repeated nationwide, although such men as Herbert N. Casson suggested that there might be those who would remember Carnegie ‘as a social menace’.
On 19 November 1920 Louise Carnegie wrote to Hew Morrison concerning a suitable gravestone for her husband – Morrison had given invaluable help during the purchase of Skibo estate. The stone she had chosen was Migdale rock from a Skibo quarry and the design was worked out with the help of the Revd Ritchie of Creich parish; the actual design – a tall Celtic cross – was drawn by Ritchie’s brother and the selected sculptors were Buchanan of Glasgow. Morrison was asked to oversee the Scottish end of the project.15 The wording Louise chose is direct:
ANDREW CARNEGIE
BORN IN DUNFERMLINE, SCOTLAND, 25 NOVEMBER 1835
DIED IN LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS, 11 AUGUST 1919
As an after-dinner joke, Carnegie would lighten the conversation further by asking what form of words the epitaph might take for each of the guests assembled round the table. He would kick off by suggesting for himself: ‘Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.’ The words ultimately chosen by Louise could have been supplemented by another of Carnegie’s favourite quotations from Robert Burns’s late 1785 poem ‘To a Louse’:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder Free us,
An foolish notion . . .
An important part of Carnegie business after his death was the execution of his last will and testament; it was released by probate in late August 1919. Each word of the text is Carnegie’s own compilation, incorporating his own idiosyncratic spellings, and a copy may be seen at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Every sentence is identifiable as pure Carnegie, and a special mention of daughter Margaret is made:
Having years ago made provision for my wife beyond her desires, and ample to enable her to provide for our beloved daughter Margaret; and being unable to judge at present what provision for our daughter will best promote her happiness, I leave to her the duty of providing for her as her mother deems best. A mother’s love will be the best guide.16
The main legacy clauses included:
Butler: George Irvine
Housekeeper: Mrs Nicholl
Nanny: Miss Lockerbie
Senior Servant: Maggie Anderson
Family: Dunfermline relatives, Annie and Maggie Lauder to
receive $10,000 each
Various sums were to be paid out to retainers, gamekeepers, crofters, foresters and gardeners at Skibo, with a further long list of annuitants and heads of foundations. Special funds were allocated to such beneficiaries as:
President William Howard Taft: $10,000 per annum
The widow of President Grover Cleveland: $5,000 per annum
The widow of Theodore Roosevelt: $5,000 per annum
John, Viscount Morley: $10,000 per annum
Prime Minister David Lloyd George: $10,000 per annum
John Elliot Burns MP, Labour leader: $5,000 per annum
Thomas Burt MP, trade unionist: $5,000 per annum
The public clamoured for news about Carnegie’s wealth at his death. The Literary Digest gave the total of his main benefactions up to 1919 at $350,695,653.17 He left the sum of $30 million, of which two-thirds was to pass to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The remaining $10 million went in various legacies, for instance $200,000 each to Pittsburgh University, the Stevens Institute, and the St Andrews Society (New York), and a provision of $4 million to develop the Carnegie pension fund. The contents of Carnegie’s will have retained financial influence to this day, and questions about it are still posed. For instance: why did Carnegie not leave all his money to his wife and daughter? The answer is quite simple. In what was perhaps the world’s first prenuptial agreement, Carnegie gave his wife a lifetime provision, a home in New York, and Skibo Castle, with ample funds for daughter Margaret’s needs. To give them any more Carnegie thought would be a ‘burden’.
EPILOGUE
THE CONUNDRUM OF ANDREW CARNEGIE
Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch the basket.
Often repeated Carnegie maxim in public speeches
Andrew Carnegie was and remains an enigma. His various international trusts, endowments and foundations keep his name alive today, and he is remembered by most for his philanthropy. Some still vilify him as a ‘robber baron’, but whenever a wealthy person gives a huge donation these days, for whatever public project, he or she is warmly hailed as the new Carnegie. But Carnegie was more than a Santa Claus dispenser of money; he was a romanticist, a writer, a political opportunist, a traveller, a socialiser, a quicksilver and melancholic Celt, and a lover of life. All of these aspects must be recognised as giving clues as to his character in all its idiosyncrasies. It is to form a misleading assessment to judge Carnegie solely by the mores of the twenty-first century; he was a nineteenth-century man with his roots in eighteenth-century Scotland, where actions often considered repulsive today were deemed acceptable in his era.1
Whether or not Andrew Carnegie was indeed ‘the richest man in the world’ probably had more to do with newspaper interest of his day than with reality, but it is likely that Carnegie had no contemporary rivals when it came to amassing ‘liquid assets’.2 For many one question stands out in the whole Andrew Carnegie story – what were the secrets of his financial success? Was there a formula he stumbled across that had made the poor Dunfermline boy rich?
The basic traits which formed Andrew Carnegie’s success were evident long before his family emigrated to America in 1848. From his grandfather Thomas Morrison he said he learned his optimistic nature.3 From his mother he learned self-reliance and that life is a brutal struggle to be overcome; he considered her ‘heroic’.4 He was brought up among Chartists and republicans, from whom he learned that every man was equal; what each person did with that ‘equality’ in life would be the key to success or failure. It should be pointed out too, that Carnegie was in the right place at the right time; when he arrived in America the country was awakening economically and industrially; it is also worth remembering that during his life Carnegie did prosper from lucky twists of fate. Carnegie went to America with a grounding in three strengths; hopefulness for a better future than Dunfermline or Scotland could offer, the self-confidence to make that better future, and a feeling that he was the compeer of any.
Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy of success was based on the premise that all achievement begins with an idea, a theory that he backed up with French poet and author Victor Marie Hugo’s maxim: ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.’ He believed also that there is no such thing as something for nothing, and that the secret of success has nothing to do with formal education. For him self-education tailored to the individual’s personal needs was the best enlightenment of all.
Carnegie did not believe that he was ‘doomed’ to poverty or failure, and considered that negative thinking leads to misfortune. Faith in himself was the great antidote to failure, and he was convinced that the fundamental weakness in anyone’s plan for success was a lack of self-confidence. The young Carnegie had self-confidence and self-reliance far beyond his years. These factors, he said, should be combined with that optimism and tenacity to
solve personal problems that he had learned from his family background. From his early years Carnegie adopted a definite purpose in life and stood by it until all was completed – even if it was just to earn enough money to get his mother a carriage, or a servant, to make her a ‘lady’.5 Incentive was always a driving force for Carnegie; in going to America the Carnegies had burned their bridges and therefore had the incentive to succeed or perish. Thus Carnegie gave his senior staff incentives to bring themselves and him success.
A great collector of quotations by the world’s great writers and thinkers, Carnegie had one in his notebooks that gives a clue to his unceasing drive. It comes from English poet and playwright William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus: In Memory of Robert Louis Stevenson’:
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
Sometimes Carnegie interpreted this ruthlessly, putting his own needs and career before those of, say, his close colleagues. Thus whatever he did – whether buying steel or playing checkers – Carnegie HAD to win, and to do so he took advantage of every opportunity, even if he had to trample on others to get there. If things went wrong it was never Carnegie’s fault in his own mind, and others always took the blame; this was particularly brought out in the Frick–Homestead affair.
Carnegie’s notions concerning wealth were based on ‘Social Darwinism’. The theory was a misconception of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in which Darwin propounded the idea of the survival of the fittest in the animal world. This theory was taken up by Herbert Spencer who applied it to human society, which made it run contrary to anything Darwin had said. Spencer noted that in his opinion great wealth was amassed by people of ‘superior ability, foresight and adaptability’.6 Carnegie absorbed all this but reinterpreted it in his own way and concluded that the wealthy had a responsibility towards society and its needs. He chose capitalism as the best route to his goals. In this he revolutionised philanthropy. Although he had a sense of unease about his own wealth, he did not approve of conventional charity. Giving cash to the poor was not a good policy in Carnegie’s eyes; giving them education and the tools for self-success was his aim. Strange as it may seem Carnegie had an aversion to cash. As biographer Burton J. Hendrick pointed out, he rarely carried money around. He was even ejected once from a London bus because he had no coppers for the fare.7 Carnegie believed that he was put on this earth to do good, and that this was the reason he became rich; because of this he believed his mind was tuned to the secrets of financial success.
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