by Peter Krass
Carnegie wasn’t finished with attacking the British monarchy, however. During the years he was active with the newspaper syndicate, he was writing what would be his greatest literary triumph, his magnum opus, a 509-page book titled Triumphant Democracy. Of the eight books he published, it received the greatest attention. Bound in a flaming red cover—on the front a broken royal scepter, and on the back a royal headband turned upside down—the book was an eye-catcher. The cover’s symbolism suggested a damning of Britain’s monarchy, and the written words confirmed it. To begin, instead of the book being dedicated to his favorite heroine, his mother, Carnegie dedicated it to his Beloved Republic, and it was indeed a grand tribute to America’s progress and unparalleled prosperity. “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace”; he wrote in the preface, “the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express.”37 Armed with eco-demographic numbers and fiery rhetoric to glorify the American democracy and damn the British monarchy, Carnegie discussed, debated, and delivered righteous sermons on the people, cities, occupations, education, religion, crime, agriculture, manufacturing, trade, railways, art and music, literature, government, and foreign affairs, as well as dishing up plenty of his personal reflections in general. No subject was left out. One could hear the drums drumming and the pipers piping as he marched onward. It was promotional literature that couldn’t be bested by the greatest of public relations experts.
In celebrating America’s many triumphs, Carnegie did not forget the workingman: “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, prizefighting. Wife-beating is scarcely ever heard of, and drunkenness is quite rare.”38 Evidently Carnegie had not spent much time with Captain Jones’s secretary, a renowned drunk, and had not patronized the saloons around Braddock and Homestead, and was somehow blind to the lines of men on the streets waiting their turn in the brothels. As he did with all things American, Carnegie glossed over the workingman’s faults. When one critic asked of his book, “Where are the shadows?” Carnegie wittily answered, “The book was written at high noon when the sun casts no shadows.”39
Naturally, Carnegie sent copies of the book to his dozens of friends and acquaintances, congressmen, lawyers, editors, historians, competitors, and multiple copies to Captain Jones, who passed them out among the men (Captain Jones had to buy one himself). Letters of thanks poured in, each one carefully filed for posterity and ego’s sake. Sales in the U.S. surpassed fifteen thousand within a few months, and a cheap reprint targeting Britain’s working class sold forty thousand.40 While many of the reviews from friends and conservative quarters were glowing, others easily penetrated the book’s veneer.
The master, Herbert Spencer, while acknowledging the United States was indeed an economic triumph, discounted the importance Carnegie placed on its democracy and placed emphasis on its prodigious natural resources. He also regretted that there was a cost to American prosperity: “Absorbed by his activities and spurred on by his unrestricted ambitions, the American is, to my thinking, a less happy being than the inhabitant of a country where the possibilities of success are very much smaller; and where, in the immense majority of cases, each has to be content with the hum-drum career in which circumstances have placed him, and, abandoning hopes of any great advance, is led to make the best of what satisfaction in life fall to his share.”41
Matthew Arnold had a similar response. From Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting his daughter, who had married a Yankee, he wrote a friend, “You should read Carnegie’s book, Triumphant Democracy. The facts he has collected as to the material progress of this country are remarkable, and I am told the book is having great sale, being translated into French and German, etc. He and most Americans are simply unaware that nothing in the book touches the capital defect of life over here [America]; namely that, compared with life in England, it is so uninteresting, so without savour and without depth. Do they think to prove that it has savour and depth by pointing to the number of public libraries, schools and places of worship?”42 The Philistines would always be Philistines.
Contrary to Arnold’s opinion, many Americans did indeed realize Carnegie had glossed over faults. One critic wrote to the proliferator of propaganda: “May I be permitted to doubt ‘Triumphant Democracy’ and to protest against its bitter disregard, as it seems to me, of fact and circumstance in almost everyone of its assertions, altered so unhesitatingly, about the advance of the United States people. . . . You have no superior in your own estimation—you are to be pitied indeed. Of course a successful business man sees only blessings in increase of business, business, business. . . .”43 The Dial, an American periodical, reviewed the book along the lines of Arnold: “Mr. Carnegie certainly pounds the drum and toots the horn with great skill and volume of sound. . . . The late Mr. Disraeli once referred to Mr. Gladstone as ‘a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity.’ One is inclined to fit the coat on Mr. Carnegie, letting it out in spots: ‘A sophistical statistician, inebriated by the exuberance of his own statistical fecundity.’” While the magazine acknowledged America’s industrial might, it questioned whether Carnegie used the right units—railroad track mileage, dollars, etc.—for measuring true greatness. “The truth is that in America our real tasks have just begun. . . . It wouldn’t hurt us if we had less bragging and more books—less show and fuss and more honest living—less pork and more scholars.”44 The Philistines needed more soul.
Liberals like Morley received the book more kindly; the eco-demographic statistics were actually useful weapons in his political party’s battle to reform the monarchy. “I congratulate you on your completion of your task,” Morley wrote, “and I am much obliged to you for sending me a copy. It is a substantial, well considered and important book. I have not had time to read it all, but I have turned it over pretty carefully, and have got a good idea of it. I do not assent to every word in it, and there are some passages where the sentiment is a trifle too aggressively republican, for there is no difference between us as to the roots of things. But that does not matter. The book is a solid contribution on the right side. And it is written in high spirits which give it an attractive literary vivacity.”45
Triumphant Democracy was indeed infused with literary vivacity. In referring to the Union army during the Civil War, Carnegie evoked powerful images: “Even the vaunted legions of Xerxes, and the hordes of Attila and Timour were exceeded in numbers by the citizen soldiers who took up arms in 1861 to defend the unity of the nation, and who, when the task was done, laid them quietly down, and returned to the avocations of peace.”46 On education, he wrote: “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.”47 On art: “If Art be, as she is, a most jealous mistress, she is as just as she is exacting and no respecter of persons. There is nothing monarchical about her.”48 His language was persuasive—too persuasive at times—as he manipulated history.
If critics had known, they would have reserved their severest condemnation for Carnegie’s revision of his own personal history portrayed in Triumphant Democracy, for his vanity distorted his vision of himself and reality. In a section depicting the invention of the sleeping car and its introduction to the American public, Carnegie glorified himself and evoked T. T. Woodruff’s wrath. Back in 1858, Woodruff had brought a model of his sleeping car directly to the attention of Pennsylvania Railroad president J. Edgar Thomson. Not so, according to Carnegie’s revised account in Triumphant Democracy: “Well do I remember that, when a clerk in the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, a tall, spare, farmer-looking kind of man came to me once when I
was sitting on the end seat of the rear car looking over the line. He said he had been told by the conductor that I was connected with the railway company, and he wished me to look at an invention he had made. With that he drew from a green bag (as if it were for lawyer’s briefs), a small model of a sleeping berth for railway cars. He had not spoken a minute, before, like a flash, the whole range of the discovery burst upon me.”49 Carnegie claimed that he himself then enthusiastically sold the idea to Tom Scott. The simple farmer type and vigilant young clerk teaming up made for a classic American success story—a classic fictional story, however.
When Carnegie sent a copy of the book—inscribed “To my friend of old T. T. Woodruff. With best wishes of the author”—Woodruff couldn’t comprehend Carnegie’s arrogance and misleading statements as he read about his supposed discovery of the poor, naive inventor and his stupendous sleeping car. He immediately wrote a letter to Carnegie full of rebuke: “I believe, Mr. Carnegie, that when you penned the said inscription upon the flyleaf of that book, that you then felt all and even more than was expressed by the inscription; but sir, when you were attempting to give the rise and progress of sleeping cars your arrogance spurred you up to make statements recorded in your book, which is misleading and so far from the true facts of the case and so damaging to your friend of old as to merit his rebuke.”50 Woodruff pointed out that he already had his sleeping cars running on other lines and that he had approached Thomson directly, with a letter of introduction from Ohio & Mississippi Railroad president Samuel Barlow. After Scott and Thomson had agreed to create a partnership, in which Andy was given a share, to finance his expanding operations, Woodruff had subcontracted the construction work. “A contract was entered into with Murphy and Allison, of Philadelphia, for the construction of four sleeping cars,” he clarified for Carnegie, “which were built and placed upon the Pennsylvania Rail R. Their rank in numerical order was Nos. 22, 23, 24 and 25, the model of which was a full sized car of the finest construction . . . and a little too big for the said green bag in use for lawyers’ briefs, to which you allude in that fine spun recollection of events.”51 How confident was Woodruff in his version? Enough to send the Carnegie letter to the newspapers. As mentioned, by 1857 the Woodruff car was on several lines, and when Woodruff found himself on the Pennsylvania’s doorstep in early 1858, he found the perfect customer in the forward-thinking Thomson. Also, Woodruff’s letter of introduction was from the president of the Ohio & Mississippi, whom Thomson knew well through their price-fixing schemes, which strengthened the inventor’s claims of direct contact.
Carnegie’s response to Woodruff’s charges was lame: “Your letter surprises me. Your error lies in the supposition that I intended to write a history on the ‘rise and progress of sleeping cars.’ I only mention them incidentally. It is impossible to enter into details in one volume, which aims to give a history of the country as a whole.”52 The tone of righteous indignation in Carnegie’s reply was no different than how he had responded more than twenty years earlier to the librarian in charge of Colonel Anderson’s books, who “took him to task” over the facts. Carnegie, experiencing a certain arrested development, was like the guilty, sulking boy who never admits his own mistakes—a trait that marked his career. He didn’t bother to offer a more specific rebuttal to Woodruff’s version of how the inventor came to sell his invention to the Pennsylvania because he knew the inventor was right. Worse yet, in an 1896 essay, “How I Served My Apprenticeship,” and later, in his autobiography, Carnegie stuck to his own green-bag version of the story. Long dead, Woodruff could not refute his false claims.
So why the revision besides the wayward vanity? Carnegie wanted to appear more proactive as a rising young man, he wanted to justify the one-eighth interest he was given in the sleeping car business, and he didn’t want to acknowledge that a handout gave him his start in business. Come 1886, Carnegie was a true tycoon, a hero to millions in the United States and abroad, and nothing could be allowed to taint his historical rags-to-riches story. And there can be no mistake concerning the importance of the one-eighth interest Carnegie was given in the Woodruff concern: by 1863, it was generating $5,050 in dividends, providing the funds for future investments.53
The sleeping car rewrite was not the only instance in which Carnegie dabbled in revisionism. In recounting his very first investment in his auto-biography—the purchase of Adams Express stock—he indulged in wholesale editing. According to Carnegie, when Scott had asked him if he had $500 to invest, he boldly said yes, although he did not. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity, he consulted with his mother immediately. The next morning his mother took the steamer to East Liverpool, and through her brother mortgaged their house for the $500, which was then given to Scott.54 His personal papers, carefully archived by him and then his beloved libraries, tell a very different story. The documents show that Tom Scott fronted him the money, and then Carnegie borrowed from others to pay off the IOU to Scott. To enhance his mother’s legend and to make him appear more proactive, he had again revised family history.
Carnegie wanted to be the visionary everyone was now making him out to be, the man who allegedly envisioned the day iron bridges would replace wood and the day steel would replace iron. The problem was that his visions involved patient observation, meticulous calculation, aggressive self-promotion, and, to a degree, luck—to being in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, such revisionist indiscretions called all of Carnegie’s writing into question as to its accuracy and truthfulness. What was real? What wasn’t? What happened? What didn’t? The year Triumphant Democracy appeared, Carnegie also published two essays on labor relations that were hailed as progressive manifestos, but knowing his propensity for self-serving propaganda, one had to question the purpose of these essays.
Notes
1. Hendrick and Henderson, p. 66.
2. Ibid., p. 66.
3. AC to Louise Whitfield, n.d. (1884–1885), ACWPHS, General Correspondence.
4. Hendrick and Henderson, p. 66.
5. Ibid., p. 66.
6. See newspaper clipping dated May 7, 1884, ACLOC, vol. 264.
7. Herbert Spencer to AC, May 26, 1884, ACNYPL.
8. AC to Louise Whitfield, June 11, 1884, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 67.
9. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 287.
10. Wall, Carnegie, p. 436.
11. New York Daily Tribune, July 4, 1884.
12. Louise Whitfield to AC, n.d., quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 56.
13. AC to Louise Whitfield, July 19, 1884, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, pp. 67–68.
14. Joseph Frazier Wall believed Carnegie never made such a commitment, but Carnegie’s official biographer claimed he did. A letter dated July 22, 1886, from Carnegie to Louise, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 76, strongly suggests that he did make such a promise.
15. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 329.
16. James G. Blaine to AC, August 20, 1884, ACNYPL.
17. James G. Blaine to AC, November 22, 1884, ACNYPL.
18. James G. Blaine to AC, August 28, 1886, ACNYPL.
19. Hendrick and Henderson, p. 69.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 74.
22. AC to John Morley, October 8, 1884, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 249.
23. See Trial Balance document dated April 30, 1887, ACWPHS, Box 20, Folder 4.
24. Wall, Carnegie, p. 415.
25. AC to Louise Whitfield, July 23, 1885, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 75.
26. Wall, Carnegie, p. 415.
27. AC to Samuel Storey, January 14, 1883, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 268.
28. AC to Samuel Storey, February 28, 1884, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 268–269.
29. AC to Samuel Storey, April 22, 1884, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884.
30. AC to Samuel Storey, November 5, 1884, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884–1885.
31. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 316.
32. AC to Willi
am Gladstone, April 27, 1885, ACLOC, vol. 8.
33. AC to William Gladstone, July 14, 1885, ACLOC, vol. 8.
34. AC to William Gladstone, January 25, 1886, ACLOC, vol. 8.
35. Wall, Carnegie, p. 441; Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 270.
36. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 270.
37. Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), p. 1.
38. Ibid., p. 125.
39. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 274.
40. Ibid., pp. 275–276.
41. Herbert Spencer to AC, May 18, 1886, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 277– 278.
42. Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. II, p. 396, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 277.
43. Charles A. Cole to AC, August 3, 1886, ACLOC, vol. 10.
44. “Triumphant Democracy,” Dial, April 1, 1894.
45. John Morley to AC, May 17, 1886, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 278–279.
46. Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy, p. 7.
47. Ibid., p. 135.
48. Ibid., p. 319.
49. Ibid., pp. 297–298.
50. T. T. Woodruff to AC, June 12, 1886, ACLOC, vol. 9.
51. Ibid.
52. AC to T. T. Woodruff, June 15, 1886, ACLOC, vol. 9.
53. See income for 1863, ACLOC, vol. 3.
54. Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 75–76.
CHAPTER 16
Patronizing the Peasants
The workmen Carnegie so effusively complimented in Triumphant Democracy were not quite as pleased with their progress as their Little Boss was, and in the mid-1880s they began to agitate more vigorously for higher wages and better conditions. The capitalists were not going to be so forthcoming, however; after the economy had peaked in March 1882, a prolonged business contraction had begun and money was tight. Then, in April 1884, a financial panic was set off by a rogue Wall Street speculator, Ferdinand Ward, who had fleeced the prominent Marine Bank, as well as General Ulysses S. Grant. When Marine Bank failed, others followed and visions of the 1873 panic and subsequent depression rattled Wall Street. To survive the volatile market, Carnegie was desperate to cut costs and to solve the wage-related labor troubles that were now plaguing the iron and steel industry.