by Peter Krass
The power such philanthropy gave Carnegie was not lost on the media or the laborer. There was a fear within the proletarian ranks that it amounted to social control: Carnegie and others like him were forcing their ideas and values on the masses in an attempt to control their thoughts and actions, to control their behavior by instituting strict conditions for how their far-reaching benefactions could be used. It was antidemocratic, a charge the author of Triumphant Democracy abhorred.
To date, the library was the cornerstone of Carnegie’s philanthropy, and there was no doubt he respected—even worshiped—books and authors. This reverence came to the fore in 1890 when Carnegie learned that Lord Acton, a renowned British historian who had assembled a priceless personal library of eighty thousand books, had fallen on hard times. At first, the newspapers reported that his creditors were planning to auction the library. Not long after that, a second announcement appeared in the papers: Acton’s library was not to be auctioned after all. Apparently a generous but unidentified soul had paid Acton’s debts, which amounted to about $45,000, and saved the library from being parceled off. It was Carnegie who played the anonymous hero. On June 13, 1890, he wrote to his go-between, Gladstone, from Cluny Castle: “Now one point. I wish no one to know about this, not even my wife shall know. Lord Granville [Acton’s stepfather] should understand that such an arrangement, if known, must make it somewhat uncomfortable for Lord Acton.”33 Although Carnegie loved to be recognized for his good deeds, there were occasions when modesty ruled to preserve a friend’s dignity.
The grand opening of the Carnegie Free Library in Allegheny City was anything but anonymous. Back in 1881, flush from the Dunfermline library celebrations, Carnegie had been determined to fund a spectacular public library in Pittsburgh, but here again he encountered difficulties in giving away money. In November, he wrote Mayor Robert Lyon, offering $250,000 for a library building and concert hall on the condition the city contributed $15,000 annually toward operating expenses. The approving newspapers trumpeted “Andrew Carnegie’s Magnificent Offer”; but alas, the city council could not authorize the annual expenditure, and the mayor was forced to reject the offer.34 Not to be denied, Carnegie turned to his boyhood town of Allegheny. There the town elders accepted the $250,000 at once. It was nine long years before the Carnegie Library opened, but at last he was giving back to a community from which he had taken. Carnegie had added $50,000 to his original $250,000 to construct the Romanesque building of gray granite, which had enough shelf space for seventy-five thousand volumes and housed a music hall with a $10,000 organ.
President Harrison had agreed to attend the opening ceremony, and there were some forty thousand applicants for tickets to the night of speech making and music.35 When Harrison had accepted the invitation, Carnegie, who was in Pittsburgh, could hardly contain himself and wrote Louise immediately: “I am greatly pleased. You know what ‘the President of the United States’ means to me. No official in the world compares with him.” Carnegie also wanted his wife beside him for the event: “Somehow I begin to picture helpmeet, partner, wife, love, at my side upon the occasion. If you stood on the platform in Allegheny, I should feel the ceremony to be complete—otherwise not.”36 But Louise would not be there.
What should have been a joyous month of preparations was tainted by Carnegie’s mother-in-law’s death. In January 1890, Mrs. Whitfield died at age fifty-four. Having cared for her mother at the family home on Forty-eighth Street for much of the last four months of her life, Louise was distraught and went into deep mourning. Family was important to her and Carnegie, and both were disappointed they had not produced a grandchild before her death.
The impending opening of the Allegheny library generated so much excitement that a jealous Pittsburgh reconsidered Carnegie’s old offer of giving the city a library, and representatives from that city approached Carnegie to ascertain if the $250,000 offer for a library was still good. No, Carnegie said, surprising and embarrassing the men. It must be a million dollars, he added with a grin, provided the city appropriated $40,000 for maintenance.37 They agreed. The Pittsburgh library would become Carnegie’s most ambitious project yet. The plans included a main branch with a music hall, an art gallery, and meeting rooms, among other facilities, costing $700,000, and three branch libraries costing $100,000 each. Carnegie became very involved, selecting the trustees and then assisting them in the selection of the architects, recommending books, buying artwork, even choosing the stone to be used in the construction. As with his business, Carnegie was very hands-on in managing his philanthropic projects.
The Allegheny City Library was dedicated on February 20, 1890. The music hall filled with guests long before 8 p.m., the anointed hour that the pomp and circumstance was to begin. The Mozart Society opened the affair by singing “America.” Following Bishop Whitehead’s invocation, Carnegie presented the library key to Mayor Pearson. “My wife, or her spirit and her influence, are here to-night,” Carnegie said in his dedication speech, and after thanking all involved in the project, he challenged the citizens to make use of a gift that was now theirs. “The poorest citizen, the poorest man, the poorest woman that toils from morn till night for a livelihood (as, thank heaven, I had to do in my early days), as he walks this hall, as he reads the books from these alcoves, he listens to the organ and admires the works of art in this gallery equally with the millionaires and the foremost citizen; I want him to exclaim in his own heart: ‘Behold all this is mine.’”38 Such a noble comment did not stop what became a popular refrain among his critics: oppressed laborers had no time for books. Steelworkers themselves told the Pittsburgh Survey, “We’d rather they hadn’t cut our wages and let us spend the money for ourselves. What use has a man who works twelve hours a day for a library, anyway.”39
Such public displays of munificence only caused greater friction between hungry labor and gorged capital. For all the concern Carnegie demonstrated over labor relations in his 1886 essays, he was now less attuned to the problems—dangerously so in the years 1889 through 1892, as he ingratiated himself with the Harrison administration and attempted to influence Washington politics.
Notes
1. See James A. Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. xv.
2. See Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934), pp. 423, 436–437, and Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Statesman (New York: University Publishers, 1959), pp. 415–421, for a litany of bribery and fraud schemes.
3. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, p. 420.
4. Benjamin Harrison to AC, November 22, 1888, ACNYPL.
5. Richard Welch Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), p. 17.
6. See Carnegie’s personal financial statements dated January 1, 1890, listing total assets as $15,317,514.81, ACLOC, vol. 10.
7. Alan Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 11.
8. Machiavelli, p. 23.
9. Nevins, Abram S. Hewitt, p. 505.
10. See Edward C. Mack, Peter Cooper: Citizen of New York (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), pp. 243–252, for more on Cooper Union and Cooper’s philosophy on philanthropy.
11. Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” reprinted in Edward C. Kirkland, ed., The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 14–29.
12. AC to Joseph G. Schmidlapp, December 30, 1890, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 338–339.
13. George Lauder Sr. to AC, April 5, 1891, ACLOC, vol. 12.
14. Kleinberg, pp. 297–298.
15. Louise Carnegie to William Gladstone, June 19, 1889, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, p. 339.
16. Quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 343–344.
17. New York Daily Tribune, November 30, 1890.
18. “Irresponsible Wealth,” Nineteenth Century (December 1890).
19
. Andrew Carnegie, “The Advantages of Poverty,” Nineteenth Century (March 1891).
20. Quoted in Wall, Carnegie, pp. 810–811.
21. Ingham, p. 177.
22. Strouse, p. 216.
23. Chernow, p. 237.
24. Ibid., p. 320.
25. Ibid., p. 312.
26. Ibid., p. 237.
27. Ibid., p. 237.
28. Ibid., pp. 240–241.
29. Ibid., p. 306.
30. Strouse, pp. 216, 235–236.
31. Ibid., p. 236, 272.
32. Ibid., p. 275.
33. AC to William Gladstone, June 13, 1890, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 355–356.
34. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 253; see also newspaper clippings, ACLOC, vol. 263.
35. New York Tribune, February 7, 1890.
36. AC to Louise Carnegie, January 1890, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, pp. 138– 139.
37. William B. Shaw, “The Carnegie Libraries,” Review of Reviews (October 1895).
38. New York Tribune, February 21, 1890.
39. Kleinberg, p. 299.
CHAPTER 19
Rewards from the Harrison Presidency
There was no doubt that President Harrison had more pressing matters to attend to than a library opening in dirty Allegheny City, but he was indebted to Carnegie for his substantial campaign contributions. After the ceremony, both men traveled to Washington, D.C., where, on February 25, Carnegie hosted a magnificent dinner for the president at the Arlington Hotel. The affair was called the most elegant ever by the New York Tribune. The dining room walls were banked with spring flowers, and the tables’ centerpieces were mammoth four-leaf clovers of maidenhair fern; the menu was engraved with Carnegie’s initials at the top, and the guest’s name was blown in glass at the bottom; the bill of fare included oysters, turtle soup, broiled sole, spring chickens from Louisiana, roasted spring lamb from Scotland, and teal ducks from North Carolina; and the wine list featured Château Yquem, Château Lafitte, and a rare Madeira.
Although Harrison enjoyed treating himself to such fine affairs, he was upset when critics accused him of pandering to the capitalists. He was so sensitive that when Carnegie sent him a keg of Scotch whiskey to give him a wee bit of Scotch courage and the gift made the newspapers, he scolded his benefactor.1 Harrison was especially distraught when he read reports in the papers that stated the party’s national chairman, Matthew Quay, had bought him the presidency. To disprove his critics, Harrison was fiercely independent in his selection of a cabinet, but one of its members left Carnegie rubbing his hands in glee—Secretary of State James Blaine. With Blaine in the administration, Carnegie knew he had to take advantage of the situation while he could. Indeed, he would reap benefits that were both political and monetary.
When Supreme Court Justice Bradley died toward the end of Harrison’s term, Carnegie realized his most successful coup. At a Washington dinner with the president, Carnegie noticed Harrison looked exhausted and was complaining he needed a worthy Supreme Court justice. “I said there was one I could not recommend,” Carnegie recalled in his autobiography, “because we had fished together and were such intimate friends that we could not judge each other disinterestedly, but he might inquire about him—Mr. Shiras, of Pittsburgh.” In fact, Carnegie and George Shiras were more than fishing partners; Shiras had been Carnegie’s lawyer for many years. Also, Carnegie did recommend Shiras in a letter to Harrison, claiming he was “a Lawyer not a Money-maker or a politician.”2 The Shiras appointment to the Supreme Court paid off, as Carnegie’s lawyer proved to be a proponent of big business: In January 1895, in United States v. E. C. Knight Company, he voted that the American Sugar Refining Company had not violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, even though it controlled 90 percent of the U.S. sugar-refining industry; in May 1895, he voted against an income tax; and a week later he voted to uphold the injunction the federal government used to break a strike at George Pullman’s company. An ally on the Supreme Court was supremely beneficial.
Carnegie had dreamed of Blaine inviting him into Washington’s inner circles, and he wasn’t disappointed. At the top of Blaine’s agenda was economic expansion, and toward that end he organized the first Pan-American Conference, which brought together countries from Central, South, and North America to discuss closer trade relations. Ten U.S. delegates were needed, men with experience in business and diplomacy, and Blaine tapped Carnegie; it would be the steel titan’s only political appointment. With his usual enthusiasm, Carnegie delved into Central and South American issues so that he was prepared when the conference opened on October 2, 1889, with a fancy affair at the presidential mansion. The delegates then embarked on a six-week tour of U.S. industrial and agricultural centers, with Carnegie playing host in Pittsburgh.
Now an expert on South American affairs, Carnegie took an interest when rebels overthrew the Chilean government in the spring of 1891. The United States granted asylum to prominent members of the deposed government, which it had supported during the conflict. America became more embroiled when the captain of the USS Baltimore, stationed off the coast of Chile, granted shore liberty to 117 seamen. With tensions high between the two countries, conflict was inevitable. On October 16, two naval men were stabbed to death, and seventeen others were knifed, shot, or otherwise wounded. There was a cry for revenge in the United States, but Carnegie, intent on inserting himself into the fray, cautioned Harrison: “Chile very weak and sorely tried. Her giant sister should be patient and forbearing.”3 Diplomacy ruled the day this time. Whenever such crises arose, Carnegie now felt compelled to impose his views via telegrams, letters, and visits to Washington. Arm in arm, he and Harrison would stroll through the streets of Washington, hashing out matters, the president compelled to listen. Never again would Carnegie be a laissez-faire citizen when it came to U.S. politics.
Carnegie was energized by the Harrison presidency, more so than he had been by any past administration. The most obvious reason was that he had helped to buy the presidency and rightly felt his voice should be heard. Another factor was the business-friendly Republican agenda now ensconced in Washington, offering him an opportunity to promote his interests and causing him to shift his focus from British politics—his interest there having waned since his exit from the newspaper syndicate, anyway. He also had a clear channel of communication via Blaine, and several key legislative initiatives caught his attention: the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the McKinley Tariff, and the Sherman Antitrust Act. As each of these acts took center stage, Carnegie vigorously addressed them, lobbying the president and other politicians, as well as using the media, to both promote and protect his business.
The most controversial legislation was the McKinley Tariff, which raised import duties to an average of 49.5 percent, reinforcing the robber baron image, and was considered the “Mother of Trusts” by its critics. The bill’s sponsor, William McKinley, was chairman of the Senate’s powerful Ways and Means Committee and was considered the high priest of high protection. For men like McKinley, protection was a patriotic duty that allowed infant industries to mature while inspiring internal competition. The tariff, they said, also created jobs and generated revenue for the government. On the other side of the argument, the free traders, which included a minority of Democratic congressmen and the rest of the world, claimed that the tariff aided and abetted the industrialists and their trusts, while the laboring class allegedly suffered by having to pay artificially high prices for products. Free trade, they believed, would result in more imports, competitive pricing, and thus cheaper products in the stores. Only important goods that didn’t compete with American production, such as tea, coffee, spices, sugar, and drugs, were on the free list. Although duties on steel rails were lowered from $17 a ton to $13.40, and lowered on iron and steel structural shapes from $28 a ton to $20.16, the now mature industry considered it the most protective tariff yet.4 Taking into account that the import of pig iron dropped by more than 50 percent the year after the bill was signe
d, and that the import of iron and steel products dropped by more than 50 percent within five years, Carnegie and his cohorts were indeed well protected.
Before the president signed the tariff into law in October 1890, there was impassioned debate on an international level. Gladstone, who considered the American tariff barbaric, squared off with the Harrison administration, and tensions between the two nations increased. Carnegie was distraught that the motherland and her successful son were at each others’ throats. Any conflict between the United States and Britain nourished his internal conflict—the capitalist versus the radical—which explained why he always sought so fervently to settle disputes between the two nations peacefully. Over the next year, he penned several essays published in prominent journals designed to promote conciliation and to justify the tariff. The first, “Do Americans Hate England?” appeared in the June 1890 issue of the North American Review. Britain and the United States are so much alike, he argued, that a rivalry was natural. He wrote that America “‘is a chip off the old block,’ and means to have his way upon this continent, after the example of his sire in other parts of the world.” He believed it was a matter of imitation, not intimidation.