by Peter Krass
Suddenly, Carnegie was an expert on all facets of newspaper publishing—circulation, design, and editorial—but if not careful, his overbearing style would undermine his relationship with Storey, as it had with Shinn. More revealing, two of Carnegie’s internalized thoughts were exposed in this letter. The first: “Money no object as compared with power.” While he was concerned with costs and receipts, he recognized that the receipts equated to circulation, which equated to the volume of his voice, which equated to the power to influence. He was motivated by the attainment of power; it was his Holy Grail, his drug, his ultimate aspiration, and he was willing to pay for it. Such was the case in the iron and steel industry, too; for him it was no longer about money, it was about attaining power.
The second confession: he expressed a desire to retire, an echo from fourteen years earlier. Carnegie was now successfully inventing the life he wanted among literary men and politicians; it was time to exit the brutal world of iron and steel that required his relentless attention. The predicament Carnegie faced was that if he did retire, his income would surely decrease and therefore so would his power. He was trapped. For the moment, however, he could rejoice in feeling himself evolve beyond the nagging mills he forced brother Tom and Phipps to manage.
A decade earlier, Carnegie’s social realm of intellects had been confined to Madame Botta’s parlor and the Nineteenth Century Club, but now it expanded quickly to encompass Victorian England’s most influential poets and critics. Some of these men of letters, like William Black, he met during his ambitious travels. Others he became acquainted with because of his newspaper syndicate and his willingness to fund the radical element that thrust him into the limelight. At a dinner hosted by Yates-Thompson, proprietor of the liberal literary magazine Pall Mall Gazette, Carnegie was introduced to Matthew Arnold, an Englishman who was the most influential literary critic of his age. Arnold then introduced Carnegie to his radical friend John Morley, also of great influence and editor of the Fortnightly Review. In February 1882, Morley would publish Carnegie’s essay “As Others See Us,” a glorification of America and a derision of Britain’s House of Lords, landed aristocracy, and social snobbery that was based on observations from his 1881 coaching trip. When Carnegie first met Morley, who had thin, graying hair receding straight back and eyes set deep in a dignified, narrow face with a strong chin, the Englishman had already authored eleven books of social and literary criticism and was in his fifteenth year as editor of the Fortnightly Review, which he had transformed into the most influential magazine in Britain.
Born in the industrialized city of Blackburn, where old handloom weavers haunted dingy streets beneath towering factory chimneys, Morley discovered he shared a similar childhood with Carnegie, and a lifelong friendship developed between the two kindred spirits. Morley, like Madame Botta, was particularly intrigued by the inherent conflicts between Carnegie’s devout allegiance to American capitalism and his radical actions to benefit the British working class. He was a case study, an experiment, to be dissected and analyzed. Carnegie was equally intrigued by Morley, three years his junior. Influenced greatly by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, both published in 1859, Morley was very much an independent thinker.
Although a champion of Darwin, he viewed evolution as “nature’s appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.” His view darkening with time, he would become convinced Darwinism was being abused “to give brutality a more decent name.”7 Morley placed Darwinism in a negative framework, whereas Carnegie considered it to be a positive epistle of progress. Carnegie admitted he and Morley were opposites when it came to temperament: “We are drawn together because opposites are mutually beneficial to each other. I am optimistic; all my ducks being swans. He is pessimistic, looking out soberly, even darkly, upon the real dangers ahead, and sometimes imagining vain things. He is inclined so see an ‘officer in every bush.’ The world seems bright to me, and earth is often a real heaven—so happy I am and so thankful to kind fates.”8
Toward the end of his 1882 stay in Britain, Carnegie heard from Morley that Herbert Spencer was sailing to the United States in August on the steamer Servia for a three-month tour of the rapidly evolving country. Always quick to seize an opportunity, Carnegie immediately booked passage on the same steamer and procured a letter of introduction from Morley. When he first caught sight of Spencer on board, the philosopher didn’t exude a powerful intellect: the sixty-two-year-old master was bald across the scalp with shaggy gray tufts of hair sprouting above the ears and thick sideburns wrapping under the chin; his facial features were chimplike and he was visibly grumpy; he appeared unapproachable and aloof. That didn’t stop Carnegie. It was like a child meeting his hero when he introduced himself to the philosopher early in their crossing, and, to his overwhelming delight, he ended up dining regularly with Spencer and the philosopher’s friend, Edward Lott.
One peculiar occurrence on the trip that stood out in Carnegie’s mind involved cheese, of all things. After one dinner, the waiter offered a selection of cheeses. Spencer placed his order, but when the waiter returned and placed it before him he peevishly pushed away the plate, exclaiming, “Cheddar! Cheddar! I said Cheddar, not Cheshire! Bring me Cheddar!” Carnegie was flabbergasted; the great philosopher aroused over cheese? This seemingly trivial concern triggered a conversation about meeting famous personalities and whether expectations are met. Bluntly, Carnegie said the flesh rarely lived up to the preconceived legend.
“In my case, for example,” Spencer sniffed, “was that so?”
Eyeing the rumpled philosopher intent on his cheese, Carnegie said, “You more than anybody. I had imagined you, the great philosopher brooding over all things. Never did I dream you could become so excited over the question of cheese.”9 Carnegie wanted heroic proportions to meet his illusionary expectations.
Despite the great cheese controversy, Carnegie convinced Spencer to visit Pittsburgh and the magnificent Edgar Thomson steel works, which, according to America’s most ardent promoter, exemplified progress. Crumbling under the Carnegie charm and pressure, Spencer agreed. On arriving in New York, Spencer went directly to the Catskills for a five-day respite to rejuvenate after what he considered to be an arduous ocean voyage. He then traveled up the Hudson River and on to Montreal, Niagara, Cleveland, and finally Pittsburgh, where Carnegie waited anxiously. Spencer’s evaluation of the city left no room for interpretation. “Six months here would justify suicide,” he said to Carnegie.10 It was not the industrial utopia that Carnegie blindly believed it to be; the smoke, the filth, and the noise disgusted Spencer. Clearly, there was a disconnect between Carnegie and reality; he remained either incredibly naive to America’s industrial underbelly or extremely accepting of the natural conditions—the good and the bad—of the Industrial Revolution.
Spurning the fancy Pittsburgh hotel suite an already wounded Carnegie had reserved for him, Spencer accepted Tom’s offer to stay at his Homewood house, later explaining, “The repulsiveness of Pittsburgh led me to break through my resolution always to stop at an hotel; and in the evening we drove with Mr. Carnegie to the house of his brother a few miles out.”11 Tom’s more affable personality appealed to Spencer, who had quickly wearied of Carnegie’s frenetic character. He even invited Tom to join him on the remainder of his tour, but the younger Carnegie declined.
England’s most prominent man of letters, Matthew Arnold, was Carnegie’s next visitor when the critic launched a lecture tour of the United States in the fall of 1883 to raise much needed personal funds—a career in letters was no match for one in steel. His British colleagues certainly questioned why Arnold, as well as Morley and Spencer, would so readily accept Carnegie’s hospitality and eventually his friendship. Morley posed that very question to himself and answered it as he would in critiquing a literary piece:
His extraordinary freshness of spirit easily carried Arnold, Herbert Spencer, myself, and afterwards many others, high over an occasional crudity
or haste in judgment such as befalls the best of us in ardent hours. . . . He is an idealist who lives and works with his ideals, and drudges over them every day of his life. He maintained the habit of applying his own mind either to the multifarious projects that flooded in upon him from outside, or to elaborating the independent notions that sprung up within him from his observant common sense in union with the milk of human kindness. Rapidity, energy, confident enthusiasm, were the mark of his days. . . . His enthusiasm for Burns and his radiant knowledge and love of Shakespeare are good testimony to his fine gaiety of heart. A strenuous disputant, yet he knows how to keep himself in order by quick, racy, and superabundant sense of humor. A man of high and wide and well-earned mark in his generation.12
As for Carnegie’s critical evaluation of Arnold, who had bright eyes under heavy eyelids, a sharp nose, pouting lips, and unkempt sideburns that wrapped under his chin, it was reverential: “The most charming man, John Morley and I agree, that we ever knew was Matthew Arnold. He had, indeed, ‘a charm’—that is the only word which expresses the effect of his presence and his conversation. Even his look and grave silences charmed.”13 For all his charisma, Arnold was a relatively poor man in 1882. Worrying about retirement, he started plotting a grand invasion of the United States, a country he had not yet visited.
To Arnold, the United States was a country of Philistines—a land of asinine, banal individuals driven by material gain. It was a period in American history dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain, a time marked by conspicuous consumption, a time when not poets and artists but wealth and power fascinated the public. Oil refineries, steel mills, and enormous factories defined the cities, not ornate cathedrals, palaces, and gardens. The dynamo, thanks to Thomas Edison, was a new god for the people to worship. Gaudy advertising hoodwinked the proletarian masses. Women were loud and chatty. Men were boastful, coarse, and relished a fistfight, chewing tobacco, and drinking bourbon whiskey. While Arnold ridiculed the Philistines—a group Carnegie belonged to—he was intrigued, too. America was still a democratic experiment to the British, and, like Spencer, Arnold wanted to better understand this experiment.
Arnold’s invasion involved a seventy-engagement lecture tour, during which he would speak on Ralph Waldo Emerson and on the need to balance literature with science. As he made travel plans that included bringing his wife Flu and his daughter Lucy, Carnegie insisted the Arnolds stay with him at the Windsor Hotel while in New York. He accepted, replying he would meet Carnegie at the hotel “and shall look to your kindness to advise us in all sorts of matters.”14 He could count on it. After a transatlantic crossing marked by rough seas, rain, and gloom, the Arnold family arrived in the early morning hours of October 22. “We expected a two or three hours’ wait with our baggage,” Arnold wrote his sister, “but Mr. Carnegie met us with his Secretary, took all trouble off our hands, and bore us away up to the Windsor Hotel in a carriage.”15 No one was going to come between Carnegie and his prize. The rescue was a welcome surprise for Arnold, who was bombarded by autograph seekers and newspapermen the moment he stepped ashore.
To properly introduce him to New York, Carnegie hosted a lavish reception at the Windsor, with dozens of dignitaries in attendance and the hall decorated with floral wreaths spelling out the names of Arnold’s books. “I think the reception I gave him combined more distinguished people than ever before assembled at one time in America,” Carnegie boasted to Morley, while Arnold reported to his sister: “The reception last night was magnificent, and Flu and Lucy did their duty splendidly. They will tell you about the reception and the decorations. What I like is the way in which the people, far lower down than us, live with something of the life and enjoyment of the cultivated classes. The young master of the hotel asked to present his steward to me last night, as a recompense for his beautiful arrangements of palms, fruit and flowers in the great hall.”16 Carnegie, in his reverence of Arnold, was willing to overlook the critic’s snobbish, condescending view of lower classes.
The great lecture series commenced on October 30 before a crowd of two thousand packed into Chickering Hall. A true celebrity, Arnold’s attire didn’t escape the press. He wore a black necktie that was wrapped around a pointed, stand-up collar and tied in a loose sailor’s knot, along with a black-and-white worsted scarf draped around his neck, a small silk cap on his head, and slippers on his feet. As Arnold took the podium, he struck a critical but not haughty pose, and he talked with his head thrown back, sighting the audience down his nose. The remainder of the tour took Arnold through New England cities and college towns, as well as Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. When in Chicago, Carnegie wanted Arnold to visit the stockyards where the slaughterhouses used everything but the pig’s squeal—American efficiency at its best—but he refused to enter the Philistine stronghold.
Arnold appreciated the United States for being less class inhibited and striving for stronger education, and he admired the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the legislative system; however, he ultimately took the same attitude as Spencer toward American culture—unimpressed. “Say what Carnegie will,” he wrote, “this is the civilization of the Australian colonies and not of Europe.”17 The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Opera the year he visited did not dissuade his preconceived notions, as the British perceived that America’s nouveau wealth made for an anxious nation, one seeking identity and tradition found in European cultures hundreds of years older. But quick to reject all that was European, America cut itself off from its cultural roots, and its industrial might offered nothing in the way of real values on which to build a truly civilized nation. To prove their success, Americans hunted culture, imported artwork and artists, built opera and music houses and museums to house their captured treasures, and trumpeted such efforts, hoping to win Europe’s approval. The boastful Carnegie embodied the American angst Arnold witnessed. The rising capitalist was rootless, cut off from his native land, and he was now searching for a unique identity as the Star-Spangled Scotchman. He, too, was apprehensive about his new wealth, and to ease that anxiety he sought approval and love. He sought culture and high society to wear as his emblem of success, and he would build libraries to propagate culture and knowledge across the land.
The investment in Frick, the thrust to become an influential newspaper magnate, and the courtship of Arnold, Morley, and Spencer left little time in the schedule for matters of love. Throughout 1882, Louise and Carnegie’s relationship evolved little, continuing to revolve around occasional evenings at the opera or theater and rides in the park. It became a morning routine for Carnegie to send his footman, an Irishman named John O’Hara, to the Whitfield home with a card: “Shall call for you this afternoon hope you can take a drive with me three o’clock.”18 There was little spontaneity; he conducted his courting as efficiently as he did business. On their rides together, Carnegie did speak ardently about his newspaper syndicate, about changing the disenfranchised British laborer’s life for the better, and about his new friends, Morley, Arnold, and Spencer. Hearing of the distinguished friends and formal affairs he attended only intimidated Louise, because while sociable, she was not the social animal Carnegie was; even her coming-out party at age eighteen was a low-key affair held in her parents’ home. To Louise’s dismay, Carnegie also expressed genuine interest in moving to England when he finally retired, an impossibility for her, considering she had younger siblings and a now invalid mother to watch over. Even extended periods abroad were out of the question, so when Carnegie began to hint at marriage, his advances were met with indifference.
Since her father’s death, Louise had become more independent. Even as a child, she had given her parents trouble: “I am afraid that they sometimes found me a little difficult; I had a mind of my own.”19 Carnegie now faced the same difficulty, for Louise was not a business partner who could be cajoled with compliments and money; she was a stoic Connecticut Puritan who believed her family needed
her more than Andrew Carnegie. But her adeptness around the house, whether cooking and cleaning or brightening the day with piano and song, made her all the more attractive to him. He persistently dropped hints. Why, Louise asked, should I marry a rich man with no worries? What benefit would I be? A struggling man would find me indispensable and appreciate me. Poor Carnegie, who craved approval from everyone, wanted it most from the woman who wouldn’t give it.
Another thorn in their relationship continued to complicate matters: Carnegie’s mother. Louise was not endeared to Margaret, who cast her shadow over her son, and years later she admitted that Margaret was the most unpleasant person she had ever known.20 But the matriarch was not the only family baggage. There was also brother Tom’s struggle with alcoholism. Many days he would arrive at his Pittsburgh office around 10 a.m., work briefly, and then depart for the local watering hole. “After an hour or so at the office,” recalled his lieutenant, William Abbott, “Tom would go to the Pittsburgh Club, have lunch with his cronies, and tank up! About four in the afternoon he would appear at the office again, stay for an hour and then go home.”21 His interest in the business was quickly waning as pressures intensified. “Tom was devoted to his family,” recalled Abbott. “His wife was beautiful as a girl, though she became ill proportioned as she grew older. . . . Tom, though not lacking in geniality, was not a social man. He was silent and retiring, the complete reverse of the loquacious Andrew.”22 It was true: bearing nine children had taken its toll on Lucy, but she did not lose her vivacity.