Carnegie
Page 38
Why Carnegie’s hypocritical reversal on the progressive labor attitude? To begin, fellow manufacturers had completely ignored his tenets for achieving harmony with labor and conflicts continued unabated, prompting the cynical mind to pose: Why should Carnegie listen to himself if no one else did? A better explanation originated with the Haymarket Riot, which had turned public sentiment against labor unions and caused many capitalists to consider all labor unions part of an anarchistic element. So there was little popular support for Carnegie’s call to recognize unions, and this lack of empathy included his partners. The very month Edgar Thomson reopened, one of Carnegie’s partners, William Singer, who had been an investor in Homestead and remained president of Sheffield Steel in Pittsburgh, stated he would run his mill on a nonunion basis only and announced severe wage cuts. The men went on strike, and Singer hired special police to protect the property. Because Singer, unlike Carnegie, was of the old iron aristocracy—an allegedly more civilized class—his aggressive actions were unexpected and shocking. Other members of the iron aristocracy followed Singer’s lead in summarily expelling the unions.
The concept of arbitration, by the time Carnegie wrote his 1886 articles, was passé, and, in fact, an 1886 survey conducted by Age of Steel discovered that both manufacturers and workers no longer considered arbitration an option by a three-to-one margin. Strikes and lockouts were now unavoidable and only five of twenty-two mill owners considered profit-sharing or some form of welfare capitalism as a means to harmony.53 So, as it turned out, Carnegie’s high and mighty call for labor harmony, while it attracted attention, was completely out of touch with the times. He had not spent enough days in the Pittsburgh trenches to comprehend the situation and was now forced to act in contradiction to his ideals. Also, because Carnegie couldn’t afford to lose either Jones or Frick, to a degree, he was acquiescing to their desires to expulse the union. Considering he was submitting to pressures on a number of fronts, his reversal was not a cut-and-dried case of contradiction and hypocrisy.
Not to be forgotten, the Amalgamated and the Knights of Labor were still entrenched at Homestead, but their time would come. In the ensuing years, tension between capital and labor would increase as the workers’ conditions in America’s increasingly urbanized and industrialized cities deteriorated. The labor problems at Carnegie’s mills would be compounded by Carnegie’s prolonged absences, during which he became more involved in the cultured life and American politics.
Notes
1. David A. Stewart to AC, April 1, 1882, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
2. Whipple, p. 32.
3. William R. Jones to AC, November 2, 1883, ACWPHS, Jones Correspondence File.
4. Pittsburgh Dispatch, December 13, 1883.
5. Pittsburgh Dispatch, December 16, 1883.
6. Thomas N. Miller to AC, December 16, 1883, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
7. AC to A. L. Griffin, April 21, 1884, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884.
8. Warren, p. 95.
9. Carnegie interview, quoted in Fitch, p. 113.
10. Warren, p. 95.
11. AC to Louise Whitfield, n.d. (fall of 1885), quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 79.
12. Strouse, p. 225.
13. AC to W. C. Whitney, October 11, 1884, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884–1885.
14. AC to Frank Thomson, January 23, 1884, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884–1885.
15. AC to George Roberts, January 10, 1885, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1884–1885.
16. Bridge, p. 102.
17. Strouse, p. 244.
18. National Labor Tribune, January 23, 1886; also see Warren, pp. 44, 64–65, for background on strike.
19. Burrows and Wallace, pp. 1095–1096; Joanne Reitano, The Tariff Question in the Gilded Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 76.
20. Andrew Carnegie, “An Employer’s View of the Labor Question,” Forum (April 1886).
21. Pittsburgh Dispatch, March 23, 1886; Sharon A. Brown, Historic Resource Study: Cambria Iron Company (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1989), p. 178.
22. Figures cited in Bridge, p. 102.
23. Brody, p. 35.
24. AC to W. R. Thompson, April 1887, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1887–1888.
25. William R. Jones to AC, July 17, 1880, ACWPHS, Jones Correspondence File.
26. Kleinberg, p. 31.
27. National Labor Tribune, June 14, 1879.
28. Brody, p. 44; Kleinberg, p. 26.
29. Bridge, p.102.
30. Nevins, Abram S. Hewitt, p. 425.
31. Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 137.
32. Bridge, p. 199.
33. Tom Carnegie to Henry C. Frick, n.d., ACWPHS, Frick Papers.
34. AC to Henry C. Frick, February 25, 1886, quoted in Warren, pp. 41–42.
35. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 295.
36. Jay Morse to Henry C. Frick, June 1, 1887, quoted in Warren, pp. 52–53.
37. J. N. Schoonmaker to Henry C. Frick, May 4, 1887, quoted in Warren, pp. 46–47.
38. Henry C. Frick to Henry Phipps Jr. and John Walker, June 7, quoted in George Harvey, Henry Clay Frick: The Man (Privately printed, 1936), pp. 85–86.
39. See Warren, pp. 44–49, and Bridge, p. 191, for the story of the strike.
40. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 295.
41. Gage, p. 165.
42. Ibid., p. 157.
43. Fitch, p. 115.
44. Quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 374.
45. Ibid., p. 374.
46. See detailed analysis in Fitch, pp. 116–118; National Labor Tribune, April 7, 1888; Bridge, p. 102.
47. National Labor Tribune, April 14, 1888.
48. National Labor Tribune, April 28, 1888.
49. Fitch, pp. 116–118.
50. National Labor Tribune, April 28, 1888; Fitch, p. 115. Fitch cites the Knights of Labor District Assembly No. 3 Quarterly Meeting held in April 1888.
51. Brown, Historic Resource Study, p. 92.
52. G. Brooks, “Typical American Employer,” Blackwood’s (October 1892), p. 561.
53. Ingham, p. 134.
CHAPTER 17
The Pale Horse and the Gray Dress
The year Carnegie was making a splash as a progressive labor leader, his heroine was extremely ill. He decided to remain in the United States for the summer of 1886, and he again took his canonized mother to Cresson, hoping the mountain air would prove an elixir. While Margaret’s tenuous hold on life overshadowed his activities, he did look forward to Matthew Arnold’s impending July visit to Cresson—and even more exciting, Louise Whitfield’s.
When Arnold returned to the United States in 1886 to visit his daughter, he promised Carnegie, “I have no intention of letting my time in America end without a visit to my friend and last in this country.”1 The Pennsylvania Railroad ran a special train for him to Cresson, and afterward Arnold related the visit to his sister: “We stayed three days. The first day we went down to see his works at Pittsburgh, one hundred miles by rail. The country around Pittsburgh is full of natural gas, which you see here and there towering in the air in a clear flame through an orifice in the ground; this gas they have lately conducted to the works and made to do the work of coal; no more coal is used and there is no smoke. As a consequence, Pittsburgh, from having been like a town in the Black Country, has become a seemly place.”2 When climbing the stairs at a Pittsburgh mill, Arnold suddenly stopped, clutching his chest and gasping for breath, his heart weak. “This will some day do for me as it did for my father,” he remarked to Carnegie, who shrugged it off at the time. The great intellect would be dead in two years.
Even though Cresson was blessed with the great Matthew Arnold’s presence, Carnegie’s mind was on his fiancé. He wrote her during a quiet moment:
That you are coming on the 29th seems to change the scene. I count the days. The Mountain will seem alive when you are upon it. I have not written to you becaus
e it seems you and I have duties which must keep us apart. Our parents are better, and I have always known what you said recently was true. To leave your Mother: ‘you could not think of it’ nor could I leave mine . . . Mother seems really better, it is miraculous. I trust yours is also better. Everything does hang upon our mothers, with both of us—our duty is the same, to stick to them to the last. I feel this every day. . . . I wish you were here, but you will be the only belle when you do come and I shall ever be Your Andrew Carnegie.3
The fifty-year-old steel master, who could very well have been a grandfather like Arnold or Louise’s father, was instead behaving like a love-struck adolescent, full of rabid doubts and blissful dreams.
His days with Louise at Cresson were filled with forest walks and horseback rides, flower picking and cups of tea, and romantic walks under the stars. Wedding plans were made and remade, but always haunted by Margaret’s immortality, which had begun to actually frustrate her son. After Louise returned to New York, Carnegie’s feelings finally burst out in a letter to her. “What nonsense for us to dwell apart very much longer!” he wrote. “I sometimes feel I can’t endure separation.”4 Their love story was taking on an epic quality. Their separation did endure, however, when it was decided Margaret couldn’t make the return to New York. They remained at Cresson as sharply chilled autumn weather set in. Carnegie made several rushed trips to New York and Pittsburgh in September and October, dashing from Margaret to business to Louise and back again. Ragged and rundown, he was on one such visit in New York when he started to feel ill. Shaking it off, he took the train to Cresson for a sojourn at his cottage, where he wrote Louise, “Am keeping in the house and hope to be all right in the morning. . . . Yours miserably, A. C.”
What Carnegie thought was a mere cold worsened. He took to his bed, but he took time to reassure Louise: “Don’t be alarmed. Nothing serious— sure.” Two days later he wrote, “I’ll be very careful for a few days. Got your letter. Mr. Bridge brought it up—the only one I have been allowed to get for three days. . . . Don’t be alarmed.”5 Then, with his health rapidly deteriorating, he summoned a physician who determined he had the dreaded typhoid fever. Unwilling to accept the diagnosis, Carnegie called for his New York physician, Dr. Frederic S. Dennis, who promptly took the train to Cresson and corroborated that it was indeed typhoid. An attendant physician and nurse were hired to see him through the coming battle. As the leaves changed color and dropped from the trees, Carnegie’s health deteriorated further. In his weakened mental state, he felt the cold chill of death. His mother, who had been in an enfeebled state for some months, also took a turn for the worse. The gloom deepened when a telegram arrived from Pittsburgh stating Tom had fallen ill with fever. He would soon become bedridden with pneumonia.
Harry Phipps, the Carnegies’ primary partner, became frantic and moaned to John Walker, “Tom Carnegie is sick with pneumonia and is going to die. Andrew Carnegie is sick with typhoid fever and is going to die too. That’s going to leave Carnegie Brothers in a nice mess. You know our finances are not in any too good condition. We shall be called upon to settle with their estates and it will ruin us.” At the time Tom had a 17.5 percent interest in Carnegie Brothers and a 16 percent interest in Carnegie, Phipps and Company, while his older brother held 54.5 percent and 52.5 percent respectively, so Phipps’s assessment, absent sympathy for the sick, was correct.6 The partnership could never buy out the two brothers. “Don’t worry,” Walker replied matter-of-factly. “Tom Carnegie probably will die for he has been a hard drinker. But Andrew has lived an abstemious and regular life and will probably recover.”7
After two weeks in bed, Carnegie was beginning to feel better when tragic news reached him: Tom was dead at the age of forty-three. He had been in the office as recently as October 14th, but after three days in bed, on October 19, he had died. Shocked by the suddenness of his brother’s death, and with his seventy-six-year-old mother deathly ill, Carnegie suffered a relapse. Again he reconciled himself to his own death. To prepare his estate, he instructed Dod and Phipps to take charge of all his investments and valuables.8 A cold November and bitter days now swept into Cresson. One night Carnegie felt a presence in his room and he looked up to see Dr. Dennis, who had returned to help. When he asked the doctor what he was doing up so late, he merely replied that Margaret had needed him.9 The doctor didn’t have to explain that such a late visit didn’t bode well. Margaret Carnegie died on November 10, almost forty years after bringing her family to America, her job now complete. Because Dennis didn’t want to risk her death sending her son into an unstoppable free fall, he had her coffin removed through the bedroom window rather than carried past Andrew’s room and possibly alerting him. It would be days before Carnegie was told, but as Louise noted in her diary, “He suspects it. All the partners very anxious about him.”10
Back where the Carnegie American dream originated, in Allegheny City, Aunt Annie Aitken grieved. In small tense script, she wrote her niece Rachel Pattison: “The death of Aunt Carnegie and Tommy has caused a cloud to [hang] over our mental horizon, that tends to obscure our vision. . . . Poor sister had no pleasure in living any longer, in fact, a few weeks before her death she told Aunt Hazern that every night she wished she might never see another. . . . With Tom it was different, but still the effects caused by bodily suffering were nearly the same and he expressed himself anxious to go.”11 Even though he would leave behind a sizable family, Tom could hang on no longer; life in Pittsburgh’s “Hell with the lid taken off” under the command of the Scotch Devil had taken its toll.
“My life as a happy careless young man, with every want looked after, was over,” Carnegie reflected mournfully. “I was left alone in the world.”12 He took the deaths of his mother and brother so hard that he had all memorabilia reminding him of them removed from his sight. Letters and postcards were filed away, paintings and miniatures were stored in the attic, and he could not speak of them. Not until years later would a miniature of Margaret and other items slowly begin to resurface. He had so immortalized his mother that he once paid off the mortgage of a complete stranger because she looked like his mother. So often, in front of guests, he had pressed his finger to his mother’s forehead, and said, “Here’s where Tom and I got our brains.”13 Never again would he say those words. His vivid memories of his mother were a means of achieving consolation.
Emotionally spent and nerves raw from grieving, it took Carnegie weeks to realize there was still a joy in his life. “It is six weeks since the last word was written and that was to you as I was passing into the darkness,” he finally wrote Louise. “Today as I see the great light once more my first word is to you. . . . Louise, I am now wholly yours—all gone but you. . . . I live in you now. Write me. I only read yours of six weeks ago today. Till death, Louise, yours alone.”14
Once emotionally stable, physical recovery still hindered Carnegie’s union with Louise. “I am doing so well,” he reported to her. “Walked yesterday round the room three different times supported by Drs. Dennis and Garmany, and twice today already. No pain and such sweet waking and such sweet dreaming thoughts of you through the night. You make night itself bright.”15 Sweet dreaming was as close as the prudish Carnegie would ever come to expressing his suppressed sexual needs. In another letter he wrote, “Three months the doctor says I shall be better than for years and stronger. After that, Louise, the soul hunger for your companionship must be satisfied. I’ll run back to you and run away with you!”16 Yes, through all the years of bachelorhood and unconfirmed celibacy, the physical needs had been there. Yet he had devoutly pursued a traditional Victorian relationship based on feminine virtue and masculine honor.
As soon as Carnegie could travel, Dr. Dennis and his wife came out to Cresson. On December 12, they assisted him back to New York, where for weeks he remained under their care. The epic courtship of Louise now entered its final stage. Still, no public announcement of their engagement was forthcoming, as Carnegie felt it would be in poor taste so soon aft
er his mother’s death. “The quietness that would surround our union,” he explained to Louise, “so appropriate after recent events and the months that would ensue before our return to New York life, would, as I see it, enable us to begin life together so much sooner without violating the properties—think all this over, my love.”17
It seemed one obstacle after another always planted itself between Carnegie and Louise; this time it was Dr. Dennis’s recommendation that Carnegie go south to recuperate.18 Before Carnegie departed, there was some business to attend to: Phipps’s fear of what would happen to the companies on Carnegie’s demise. It was a reasonable and practical concern, not callous at all. The partners had documents drawn up that stipulated if a partner died, his interest would be purchased at book value by the company’s treasury, to be paid for in installments. In the case of Carnegie, the company was to have fifteen years to liquidate his shares. Also, the partners themselves could acquire the stock of deceased, retired, or expulsed partners, if two-thirds of the partners, in number and interest, voted to do so.19 Naturally, Carnegie’s vote was the final word as long as he lived, and he made arrangements with Lucy to buy Tom’s interest over a number of years. The papers—signed by Carnegie, Phipps, Walker, and newly admitted partners John G. A. Leishman, William Abbott, and Clay Frick, on January 18, 1887—were ominously called the Iron Clad Agreement.