by Peter Krass
Notes
1. AC to George Lauder Jr., March 12, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 82.
2. John Morley to AC, April 5, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 82.
3. AC to John Morley, April 9, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 82.
4. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 247.
5. “Mr. Carnegie’s Gift,” Harper’s Weekly, March 30, 1901.
6. New York Daily Tribune, January 25, 1903.
7. New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1905; and Homestead Committee to AC, February 23, 1903, quoted in Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 247.
8. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 248.
9. “Persons of Interest,” Harper’s Bazaar (April 1901), p. 1017.
10. Quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 271, 356.
11. Wall, Carnegie, p. 831.
12. “The Progress of the World,” American Monthly Review of Reviews (April 1901).
13. Frederick Cleveland, “Mr. Carnegie as Economist and Social Reformer,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 1901), pp. 78–79.
14. AC to John Wanamaker, November 11, 1904, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 276.
15. AC to Mrs. Russell Sage, February 26, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 174.
16. John D. Rockefeller to AC, February 2, 1903, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 277. Also see John D. Rockefeller to AC, January 29, 1896, ACLOC, vol. 36. Rockefeller greatly appreciated Carnegie’s philanthropy.
17. Frederick Gates to John D. Rockefeller, April 24, 1905, quoted in Chernow, p. 314.
18. Carnegie, An American Four-in-Hand in Britain, p. 140.
19. New York Daily Tribune, March 17, 1901.
20. “Mr. Carnegie’s Gift”; New York Daily Tribune, March 24, 1901.
21. George S. Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969), p. 14.
22. Ibid., pp. 203–204.
23. Ibid., p. 57.
24. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 207.
25. Bobinski, p. 105.
26. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 201.
27. AC to Charles Eliot, December 31, 1904, ACLOC, vol. 110.
28. Goodenough, p. 177.
29. Bobinski, p. 108.
30. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
31. See Robert Sidney Martin, Carnegie Denied (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993). Martin studied 47 of the 225 communities that rejected or failed to follow through on the offer of Carnegie libraries. He concluded only 3 of these 47 opposed the libraries due to significant labor antipathy.
32. Bobinski, pp. 90–91.
33. Ibid., p. 103.
34. Ibid., p. 104.
35. New York Daily Tribune, April 26, 1904.
36. Bobinski, p. 185.
37. Hamilton Holt, “The Carnegie That I Knew,” Independent (August 23, 1919).
38. Quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 261.
39. Wall, Carnegie, p. 830.
40. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie (Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1919), pp. 320–321.
41. New York Daily Tribune, June 6, 1901.
42. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 215.
43. Goodenough, p. 83.
44. Andrew Carnegie, “How to Win Fortune,” New York Tribune, April 13, 1890.
45. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 218–219.
46. AC to John Morley, June 24, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 83.
47. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, p. 233.
48. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 221.
49. Goodenough, pp. 80–81; Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 223.
50. Flint, pp. 167–168.
51. AC to George Lauder Jr., March 1, 1902, ACLOC, vol. 87; Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 267.
52. Satterlee, p. 348.
53. AC to George Lauder Jr., September 26, 1901, quoted in Wall, Carnegie, p. 926.
54. AC to John Morley, n.d. (probably September 1901), ACLOC, vol. 84.
55. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, June 13, 1902, ACLOC, vol. 89. Carnegie wrote the note on the back of the letter, which was an invitation for AC to join TR at Oyster Bay.
56. AC to Moses H. Clapp, March 29, 1906, quoted in Wall, Carnegie, p. 956.
57. Carnegie, Autobiography, p. 248.
58. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 258.
59. AC to Andrew D. White, April 26, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 82.
60. Quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 230.
61. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, November 28, 1901, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 227–228.
62. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, December 31, 1901, ACLOC, vol. 86.
63. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, pp. 97–98; New York Daily Tribune, January 30, 1902.
64. New York Daily Tribune, November 26, 1902.
CHAPTER 30
Human Frailty
Carnegie’s first twelve months of retirement were marked by triumph as he gave away some $30 million to libraries and educational foundations, but the philanthropy didn’t bring internal peace. His personal life remained filled with conflict and disappointment as he contended with the shortcomings of friends, family, and himself. In his relationships with those close to him, he would continue to reveal polarized characteristics, from callous cruelty to sentimental empathy; it was the same maddening, dichotomous Carnegie who had yet to discover a place in life that brought him contentment.
Human frailty surrounded the world’s greatest philanthropist, Carnegie’s protégé Schwab included. The sale of Carnegie Steel made instant millionaires out of dozens of vested partners, and they indiscreetly bathed in the riches, prompting one of them to observe that “the sudden flood of gold dazed and demoralized some of the younger partners, who, masters now of riches they have never dreamed of, began to kick up their heels like pasture colts. Some of them never recovered.”1 In addition to a mansion-building spree and conspicuous consumption, there were Caligula-like parties. The newspaper reporters gawked and reported it all. It was distasteful to Carnegie. “These young men were models as long as they knew they had to be—besides they had my example & they were poor,” he wrote Oswald Villard, who had run an editorial in the New York Evening Post on Pittsburgh’s nouveaux riches. “Altho making large sums, these went to their credit paying for their interests. Now they see stock gamblers prominent in the Company & behind it. They become demoralized. . . . It is too sad for me to see such ruination morally. You will see I cannot speak of it publicly.”2
In private, Carnegie would lament: “Have you seen Charlie’s house? Mine is a cottage by comparison.” On a block-long piece of property at Seventy-second Street and Riverside Drive, Schwab was building a mansion modeled after a French Loire Valley chateau. It was four stories with a 116-foot lookout tower, a 60-foot swimming pool, a bowling alley, a gymnasium, six elevators serving ninety bedrooms, and a power plant consuming ten tons of coal every day. It was to reflect his million-dollar salary. But his chateau was not the worst of his extravagances or his crimes.
The very month Carnegie officially incorporated the Carnegie Institution of Washington—January—Schwab was in hedonistic Monte Carlo celebrating his fortieth birthday without his wife. On a lucky roll at roulette, a frenzied crowd pursued him from one table to the next, and the New York Sun ran the headline: SCHWAB BREAKS THE BANK. Considering U.S. Steel already suffered from bad press, a gambling president made for great fodder, and the newspapers did their best to embarrass him. No one was more outraged than Carnegie, who felt as though a son had stabbed him. He cabled Schwab immediately, informing him that the public was shocked and he would probably have to resign. “Serves you right,” he concluded unsympathetically, and followed it with a punishing letter that amounted to an excommunication. Schwab was literally heartbroken by the cruel denunciations.3
Carnegie also wrote Morgan a letter fraught with sadness, anger, and unforgiving condemnation: “I feel in regard to the enclosed as if a son had disgraced the family. . . . He is unfit to
be the head of the United States Steel Co.—brilliant as his talents are. Of course he would never have so fallen when with us. . . . I have had nothing wound me so deeply for many a long day, if ever.”4 Morgan did not heed the call for Schwab’s resignation; as far as he was concerned, Schwab’s only crime was that he had indulged himself while in the public’s eye, instead of behind closed doors.
Now all the gossipers scurried out from the woodwork, and Carnegie heard stories of Schwab’s gambling episodes with Bet-a-Million Gates and the rich poker games in Waldorf Astoria suite rooms and at Canfield’s casino. Imperiously righteous and exceedingly spiteful, Carnegie smacked Schwab with yet another barbed letter laced with accusation based on hearsay that echoed the Leishman episode years earlier. An emotionally drained Schwab replied he was deeply hurt that “you would be willing to listen to and believe the stories someone has seen fit to tell you. . . . I am no gambler. . . . But be what I may, there is no condition of affairs that would make me even listen to a tale of such a character concerning you. I’d defend you or any of my friends until I knew the truth.” Schwab regretted the loss of Carnegie’s “confidence and friendship” but concluded the letter by saying, “Do not send for me for I should not come.”5 He had had enough of the preaching.
Once back in New York, Schwab sought Morgan’s forgiveness, and as Schwab recalled, “he simply said, ‘Forget it, my boy, forget it.’ He was, of course, the direct opposite of Carnegie in many ways. Carnegie was little and spare and at times narrow. Morgan was big and human, with human failings and human virtues.”6 When Carnegie summoned Schwab, he refused to visit with his old and spare mentor: “I have not as yet been able to muster up sufficient courage to come to see you. Your very severe letters to me and especially your letter to Mr. Morgan has depressed me more than anything that has ever occurred.”7 For the president of U.S. Steel to be afraid to visit Carnegie said all that was necessary about the force of the latter’s character and the contents of the letters. Carnegie, despite growing more expansive in his views as he delved into philanthropy, did remain narrow in many ways, as Schwab contended. He was still too reactionary, too impulsive.
As a result of the scandal, Schwab started suffering bouts of insomnia and nervous irritability. He lost weight, complained of numbness in his extremities, and occasionally fainted. His anxiety was at a dangerous level. Smilin’ Charlie resigned as president of U.S. Steel on August 4, 1903. U.S. Steel’s common stock price was also spiraling downward. From $55 in 1901, it slumped to $47 in 1902; after a financial panic in 1903, it would eventually crash below $10 the next year. “I see U.S. stocks way down,” Carnegie gloated to Dod. “Guess our Bonds are better than both together—I thought they would prove so.”8 When the stock crashed, his tune changed.
Carnegie feared the company wouldn’t have the cash to pay the interest on his bonds, and, if so, what would happen to his noble benefactions endowed with those U.S. Steel bonds? He anxiously wrote Elbert H. Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel’s executive committee: “More and more I think the managers will see the wisdom of accumulating an enormous reserve fund by holding fast to a large portion of the earnings in prosperous years, so that regular, though moderate, dividends can be maintained.”9 He couldn’t help but give advice.
Following Schwab’s fall from grace, in the summer of 1902, another trusted aide-de-camp failed Carnegie. Two years earlier, he had hired Hew Morrison to purchase a library of books for Skibo, the canon of western literature, and specifically told him “that I do not wish rare or curious books or elaborate bindings. It is to be a working library, only of the gems of literature.”10 When he discovered Morrison had found the gems but stripped them of their covers, he was livid: “I never said one word to you about changing the bindings of these gems, never. Now I learn that you have spent more money on bindings than the precious gems cost. This is, to my mind, not only a waste of money, which is wrong in itself, but an insult to the great Teachers from whom I draw my intellectual & emotional life—my spiritual existence.”11 For his entire adult life, Carnegie had used literary gems to help define his emotions and himself, and now Morrison, unwittingly, had made a mockery of that. Still, Carnegie loved to browse his library, the collective books giving his soul substance—although he never touched most of the volumes, the spines never cracked.
Other than the library debacle, Skibo was in stunning shape and ready for hordes of visitors. “Fishing, yachting, golfing,” Carnegie wrote Morley. “Skibo never so delightful; all so quiet. A home at last. . . . The average American wouldn’t like our life at Skibo. There aren’t enough of ‘other people’ to go around—no casinos, nor dancing, and all that. But we love it. . . . I am off to the moors, all alone. Mist on the hills. But I’m a Celt, not a prosaic Englishman like—well, like a very good fellow I know.”12 When tramping through the moors, Carnegie was like a boy; he never hesitated to lay in the heather and, looking up at the sky, croon o’er an auld Scotch sonnet. At such moments, he was unspoiled by wealth.
Yet the fleeting peace he discovered at Skibo also forced introspection; he would confront his lost youth, regretting that he had missed out on such carefree days as a boy. This was evident when a visitor, T. P. O’Connor, remarked how he envied Carnegie’s wealth, and the laird replied, “I would give you all my millions if you would give me your youth.” A moment of silence passed, and then Carnegie added a comment that O’Connor never forgot. In a hushed and bitter voice, he said, “If I could make Faust’s bargain I would gladly sell anything to have half my life over again.”13
Carnegie was haunted by the specter of death. When his friend Herbert Spencer lay on his death bed in Brighton, in the fall of 1903, Carnegie sought answers from his master on the most profound of questions, “You come to me every day in thought and the everlasting ‘Why?’ intrudes.”14 Why must we die?
“The why? and the Why? and the Why?” Spencer replied, “are questions which press ever more and more as the years go by; and time passed wholly in bed, save when on occasion, being rather better, my nurse helps me stagger to the sofa, gives abundant opportunity for them.”15 The torturous introspection rattled Carnegie, particularly Spencer’s inability to answer Why? With Spencer’s health rapidly declining, Carnegie’s only solution to answering the big question was to buy a memorial to immortalize his master. On December 8, 1903, Spencer died.
Age didn’t appear to be having any ill effects on Carnegie, however. Now in his late sixties, he surprised visitors with his perpetual youth, his bronze face accentuated by white hair, his walk jaunty, and the line of his mouth and chin retaining its hardness.
June and early July were traditionally quiet months at Skibo as Louise required time to settle in, unpack the trunks, and help Margaret adjust. Then came the storm of personalities. Although it overwhelmed his wife, Carnegie was generous with his invitations and enjoyed a large group of mixed com-pany—Dunfermline natives and American capitalists, American Republicans and British liberals—all together at once. There were old friends like Robert Pitcairn, who stayed for a week in July, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife, Abby, who visited in August. And then there were the “Old Shoes”— that is, those who were as comfortable as an old shoe, like Morley, the Yates-Thompsons, and Andrew White—who never required an invitation. The next summer they were even honored by an unexpected visit from King Edward VII; Buckingham Palace was being refurbished, and he wanted to review the modern amenities installed at Skibo.
While Carnegie was a social creature, his favorite companion at Skibo was Laddie the collie. There were few people he could trust because everyone wanted his money. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)
At Skibo, two of Carnegie’s favorite companions were a pair of collies the family owned and kept at the castle. In photographs taken by Louise—on the stone porch, walking the moors, or picnicking in the heather—the dogs appeared at Carnegie’s side more than his guests. Always sanguine about the human race, always needing to be surrounded by adoring people, alwa
ys gravitating toward one hero or another, Carnegie ultimately knew who his best friend was.
So the parade continued. The bagpipes sounded at 8 a.m. to rouse the guests—a small manifestation of Carnegie’s autocracy in the Highlands. Breakfast was porridge, kippers, and scrambled eggs while the organist played Beethoven, Bach, and Wagner—Carnegie’s morning devotions. Early each morning Louise would review the plans for the day with the butler: what activities the guests would pursue, what vehicles might be needed, any special meals, who was coming and who was going. Each guest, on his or her first visit, was given a bone spoon embossed with the word Skibo in silver letters, and those visitors of note were given the privilege of planting a tree under which was placed a tablet inscribed with the variety of tree, the name of the planter, and the date. Daily activities had not changed much since the days of Cluny, except now there was yachting. With the North Sea accessible, yachting became a favorite of the guests who might sail for a picturesque coastal spot for a picnic or dock at a village and hand out candy to all the children who scurried over to the magnificent boat. On one occasion, when the engines died while they were skirting the coast, Carnegie and his party feared they would be dashed against the rocks. The yachting party—Sir Henry Fowler, Sir Walter and Lady Foster, Reverend Robert L. Ritchie, the pastor of a local parish, and James Bertram, among others—ran up signals of distress, using towels and broomsticks, and a trawler came to their rescue. During the return to port, waves started kicking up and Carnegie’s party sought shelter in an empty hold, but they discovered a woman and two ragged children there and chose not to venture in; the yachting party either feared disease or were arrogant. Instead, they covered themselves with one of the trawler’s spare sails. After spending the night in the fishing village of Cro-marty, they reached Skibo the following afternoon.16