by Peter Krass
For dinner, it remained a tradition for the bagpiper to lead the guests to the table. The estate provided most of its own meat and produce, the heated greenhouses producing the usual vegetables, as well as peaches, apricots, figs, and grapes. Evenings involved a game of billiards, backgammon, or the card game Pit, and conversation might include a debate over which author’s work they would bring with them if condemned to live on a desert island. Dante and Shakespeare were invariably at the top. Carnegie considered Dante too gloomy, while Morley thought two-thirds of Shakespeare was padded. Ever loyal, Carnegie consistently chose Spencer, which always elicited a groan— the philosopher was too dry. Regardless of who was visiting, every day the Carnegies would go to Louise’s boudoir, where she would play the piano while they sung hymns. It was sacred time, a quiet moment in the day Louise desperately needed.
The Skibo visitors, so many requiring delicate handling, her husband’s autocratic demands, and the frantic pace of their lives while trying to raise a young daughter took its toll on Louise, and she suffered from nervous exhaustion. Instead of looking forward to Skibo with pleasure, she began to do so with apprehension. “She has no long Holiday term as you lucky Scotch Professors and I have,” Carnegie admitted to St. Andrews principal James Donaldson. “Skibo I call one interrupted playtime. Not quite so for the ‘Boss of the show’ however—woman’s work is never done.”17 Even when on vacation, Louise felt as though the daily demands ran her ragged. “Mr. Carnegie is busy and happy but it is anything restful for me,” she wrote to a friend while vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas. “Everyone laughs when we say we are here for my benefit, on account of my high color, but what with callers for Mr. C’s registered letters, Doctor’s instructions in regard to the care he needs, etc., it is hopeless for me to try and rest. Home is a perfect haven of rest in comparison.”18
Contrary to being upset by her weakness—or weariness, really—Carnegie was understanding and tackled the issue with his usual gusto. On the piece of adjacent property he had purchased from the duke of Sutherland, secluded in the moors, was a stone cottage known as Auchinduich, where they could escape the hordes, the servants, and the chaotic schedule. No visitors were permitted. The cottage required serious refurbishing, but he made certain it was ready that summer of 1904, explaining to Morley: “It is an experiment we are to try. I think a wise one.” At first feeling forced into the solitary confinement, Carnegie quickly appreciated what it meant to his wife and him. “We must manage somehow that you do not have so much energy in your doings,” he told Louise prior to one summer’s flitting. “A slow, quiet-going life is needed. I wish we could all go to Auchinduich direct and play at homekeeping.”19 It was a rare show of sympathy.
This annual period of relative isolation also afforded him the opportunity to bond with his daughter, Baba, who seldom interacted with her father for any extended length of time. His adoration for her was all too obvious in letters to family and friends. To Dod, who now lived in nearby Ospisdale, he wrote: “So sorry I shall miss you . . . Baba fine—in third class now and reading a little. She repeated a verse she had learned at school, which I praised highly. Then she said, ‘Yes, and that isn’t Shakespeare either, Papa. Glad some people could do better than he could.’ Mean, wasn’t it, to attack my God among men?” He bragged to Morley: “Baba keeps on showing her American precocity. Tells her mother and me names of flowers we don’t know. Her latest remark: ‘Don’t step on the nemophila.’ Gardener says he told her the name a few days ago. Madam has been told several times but forgotten it.” In another letter to Morley, he proudly announced that eight-year-old Margaret “made golf score of 54 to-day. Her mother beaten badly.”20 And to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Nineteenth Century magazine, “Madam and I very well and Margaret very sprightly. We think she is progressing well. Eats well, sleeps well and keeps us on the go. Her chief work is making up parties who never had a motor ride and taking them as her guests. Already the young socialist crops out. Why should some be rich and others poor? Why do we invite rich people and give them everything when they have plenty at home—and the poor haven’t? Questions easier to ask than to answer. Her babble for a day would enrich even the Century columns.”21
Come August, the Carnegies’ hectic schedule resumed. That month in 1902, Carnegie and Morley spent a day cruising on Moray Firth. When they returned, Louise ran to greet them, shaking a newspaper with a story announcing that King Edward had instituted an Order of Merit and Morley was one of the first twelve members. Of such recognition the two men differed greatly in their attitudes. Morley preferred to avoid pomp and circumstance, while Carnegie, of course, invited it. When the provost of Montrose wanted to give Freedoms to both men together, Morley refused even though his friend pressured him, explaining how “double pleased” he would be.22 As his philanthropy now exploded exponentially, the libraries and Freedoms were being exchanged so rapidly that the London Times couldn’t keep track. Morley wrote: “How dog-sick you must be of all these meetings, addresses and Hallelujah business. I shouldn’t wonder at your longing for Skibo, and what Mr. Smith calls ‘the quiet stream of self-forgetfulness’—blessed waters for us all.”23 Knowing his friend’s disdain for pomp, Carnegie poked fun at him by purposefully apprising him of every award. When he received the Freedom at Glasgow, he wrote Morley: “I thought you would like the close of my Glasgow speech, but you should have heard the vast audience cheer the sentiment, Civilized Warfare! . . . I never spoke with more abandon. It was great.” And he crowed to Dod: “So sorry I shall miss you—but ‘engagements’ call— I go to Salisbury for ‘Freedom’ in the morning and next morning North’d— Think I can get over to Dulloch over Wednesday night—six freedoms in six days last week, rather exhausting.”24 Carnegie claimed he never bored of receiving Freedoms because each ceremony was a little different than the last, each town was unique with unique problems, and he enjoyed counseling the various mayors and provosts on their problems. He eventually received fifty-seven Freedoms, a record Winston Churchill was unable to surpass. After accepting his fifty-second, he wrote a friend, bragging that he had fifty-two to Gladstone’s seventeen—so maybe, after all, there was a wee bit of ego involved in collecting the Freedoms.
In the fall of 1902, he opened libraries and received Freedoms at Perth, Falkirk, Greenock, and Stirling, making two speeches at each town. The Carnegies also visited the Gladstone family at Hawarden and attended the dedication of St. Deniol’s Library, a memorial to William Gladstone. The last stop of the whirlwind tour was the University of St. Andrews. Founded in 1411, it was the oldest institution for learning in Scotland, presided over by Catholic bishops and archbishops until the Reformation and now affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Carnegie and Louise were to attend the ceremonial introduction of the new Lord Rector, an honorable chair held for three years. It was the right of the students to elect the Lord Rector, and traditionally it was a statesman, an aristocrat, or a man of letters, never a capitalist. Carnegie was the first. The students were well aware that he had made the largest donation toward an endowment for educational purposes by an individual when he gave $10 million to establish the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and many of them benefited from the tuition aid. But considering university students were a notoriously independent lot, this was a sign of heartfelt acceptance. When the train pulled in, a fine carriage awaited Louise and him; and when they arrived on campus, the students rushed to greet him. The introduction of the new Lord Rector took place in Volunteer Hall, which was decorated in a blazing mass of red, purple, and gold. After hymns and prayers, Andrew Carnegie, LL.D., was installed in the honorary position. As St. Andrew’s principal Sir James Donaldson was reading the rector’s oath in Latin, there were jeers and one student yelled, “Oh! Jamie, why don’t ye tell Andra what ye’re saying?” At the conclusion, when Carnegie uttered “Juro”—“I swear”—there were peals of laughter.25 They were all well aware of Carnegie’s mocking of dead languages, and he laughed with them. The most
important event, the rectorial address, followed, and was the only potential source for real scandal.
When Carnegie had submitted a twenty-five-page draft of his speech, then titled “A Confession of Religious Faith,” for Donaldson to review, the principal had been startled by what he read. It was a soul-baring essay on a most controversial subject, the replacing of traditional Christian religious creed with a new belief system reflecting Darwin and Spencer. In this confession, Carnegie reflected on his father’s rejection of the Presbyterian Kirk and his own rejection of Swedenborg and Channing. He embraced science as a means for explaining the universe, and he concluded by calling on the young men to obey “the judge within” and to concentrate on their duty in this life, not thinking of the next.26 It was too much for Donaldson, who kindly rejected the heresy.
As a substitute, Carnegie drafted a second speech, “The Industrial Ascendency of the World,” on America’s uncontested march to industrial supremacy and what Europe must do to respond. He did not discard everything from his first draft, as he opened by imploring the young men to listen to their conscience and quoted one of his favorite Burns lines: “Thine own reproach alone do fear.” With little segue, he then endeavored to review the great economic changes the world was experiencing; to the delight of his audience, he determined that “material progress is Britain’s child.” The nation’s destiny lay with America, however, and he briefly promulgated his desire for reunion. As for continental Europe, he contested, it would survive only if the Continent became a political and economic federation based on the American model. He finished with a rousing declaration: Britain was the modern-day Greece, even more than Greece was to its world.27 The students approved and would elect him to a second term. Another man who appreciated Carnegie’s speech was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who read it in the newspapers. The notion of a unified Europe was appealing.
Carnegie returned to Skibo triumphant. “Home again. Great excursion, big crowds, all passed off well,” he notified Morley. But to Dod, he gravely admitted he was not the morally superior man others considered him: “Of course St. Andrews was the apex, and there from the beginning to end triumphant. I may turn out quite spoiled—I am not the man they take me for, as none knows better than you except myself. So that keeps me half ashamed of it all and I am humbled.”28 Carnegie had allowed his mask, carved of ego and vanity, to fall, and he revealed himself ever so briefly. The mask was just as quickly replaced, necessary to disguise the self-doubts from not only others, but himself.
Before returning to the United States, the Carnegies toured Switzerland in early November. While there, they ate contaminated food and all three fell sick. Louise and Margaret recovered quickly, but the elder Carnegie did not, so they returned to London to consult a top doctor, who assured them it was nothing more than a bad case of food poisoning. Still, they postponed sailing for New York, and a week later found him confined to a London hotel bed for his sixty-seventh birthday. Louise had to assure the press corps that he was recovering and expected to sail for America in a fortnight. When it came time to return to New York, Carnegie, dreading the grim reaper would harvest him before he sowed all of his seeds, insisted on being accompanied across the Atlantic by a physician. Upon disembarking on December 10, the newspaper reporters crowding the pier noticed he leaned heavily on Louise’s arm and that she forcefully permitted them but a few questions. From the dock, the family was driven directly to a newly constructed home on Ninety-first Street, where the badgering reporters again awaited their arrival, peppering Carnegie with questions about his health, his philanthropy, and the landmark New York residence.
To purchase the property, he had used a clever ruse: he hired a broker to quietly buy options on all the plots on the Fifth Avenue block between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets and insisted that the expiration date for each be set for the same day. On that day, Carnegie emerged from the shadows and bought them all, catching the various owners by surprise. If they had known he was behind it, prices would have soared. The property, located on a slight rise, prompting Carnegie to dub it “the Highlands,” was just across from the great expanse of Central Park, where Louise and he had first ridden together twenty years earlier. As for the Fifty-first Street home, they kept it so his sister-in-law, Lucy, would have a New York headquarters when in town.
The Scottish-Georgian mansion cost $1.5 million to build, not much more than the option money won from Frick, Phipps, and Moore in 1900. So, while on the British side of the Atlantic he was joking that Skibo was a gift from Frick, he also did so on the New York side about his new Fifth Avenue mansion; when Carnegie had a good joke running, he couldn’t let go. On reading about the block-long mansion and its extravagant amenities in the newspapers, Dod admonished Carnegie, who replied, “I don’t like building any more than you do & am sorry the house grew to a mansion while my thots were on selling out. But I do believe it is far healthier up here & would not return to 51st St. for anything.”29 It was another weak excuse from a celebrated hypocrite.
Schwab’s chateau, incidentally, didn’t quite reduce this home to a cottage, considering it had sixty-four rooms on six levels, including two gymnasiums—one for Carnegie and one for Margaret—leaded glass windows, an entry canopy by Tiffany, an Aeolian organ with three-story-high pipes in a great oak-paneled hall, private and public living rooms, and servants quarters. It was also the first private residence to have an Otis passenger elevator (Schwab’s home wouldn’t open until 1904). There were extensive gardens with beds of pansies, daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, and roses, as well as lilacs, wisteria, dogwood, and rhododendron, and a lead-and-glass greenhouse to nourish the more exotic. A wrought-iron fence around the perimeter protected the property from prying reporters, intruders, and vandalism.
Carnegie’s library at his Ninety-first Street mansion served as a war room for his philanthropy and his crusade for world peace. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)
The iron fence was a prudent decision considering the overzealous authors, the destitute, the cranks, and the crazies who staked out his residence and stalked him for years. The first case to seriously aggravate Carnegie occurred in December 1904, and Roosevelt actually dispatched Secret Service agents to protect him until it was resolved. It began when Carnegie received a unique Christmas present that year: news of an illegitimate daughter. In early December, he learned that a Mrs. Chadwick of Cleveland had convinced her husband and a Cleveland bank officer, a Mr. Reynolds, that she was Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter and had access to his wealth. She pedaled notes, one as high as $500,000, claiming they were as good as gold, backed by A. C. himself. Not until Reynolds traveled to New York did he discover the notes were worthless. In the ensuing lawsuits, Carnegie was forced to testify against the insane Mrs. Chadwick, who was locked up.30
In spite of the loonies, every day Carnegie would endeavor to walk in Central Park, his favorite course a two-mile loop around the reservoir he often did twice. Savvy reporters would ambush him, but rather than shoo them away, he would take them by the elbow and bring them along on his jaunt, telling one story or another, but never quite giving them the information they wanted. Other times, Carnegie would go into the park and find a strategic bench for people watching. He relished the days he was anonymous and indulged a stranger or two in a story. Most of his time was spent in his war room for benevolence, the modest study off his library at the west end of the house. To inspire himself, the walls were not graced with fine art—although there was a painting of Captain Bill Jones in his bedroom, where he slept on the same brass bed he had as a boy in Allegheny City. Instead, the walls were adorned with mementos and engraved maxims: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”; “The Gods send thread for a web begun”; “All is well since all grows better”; and “Thine own reproach alone do fear.” The maxims reinforced Carnegie’s belief that he was both destiny’s child and in control of his own fate; and yet, as he always had, he continued an internal battle with these two forces, predestination and free
will. The fact that he didn’t sleep with his wife wasn’t necessarily unusual; sleeping in his old bed was, as even now he still felt compelled to remind himself of his childhood bout with poverty. By keeping himself tied to the past, he drove himself mercilessly forward.
The first formal dinner to christen the home was for the Carnegie Veterans’ Association, a group of about thirty men who’d been partners in Carnegie’s company, from Phipps to Schwab to Gayley, and the other juniors. The dinners were held annually, usually in November, and gave the sentimental Carnegie a chance to reminisce with his boys and reconnect with the past. The first was held on December 18, 1902, for which Louise and Margaret elected to leave the house for the evening. When they returned around 10 p.m., they were stuck in the vestibule for about ten minutes on the cold night before the butler finally heard them over the raucous dinner. The spying reporters noted it all for the next day’s editions.31
At the Highlands residence, Carnegie entertained a gaggle of powerful politicians—the prime minister of Canada, Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—as well as celebrity scientists and activists, including Madame Curie and Helen Keller. Of all these, he preferred the company of authors and poets and started hosting an annual Literary Dinner. Richard Watson Gilder helped organize the affairs and recruited John Burroughs, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, among dozens of others. Carnegie and Gilder, who first met at the Author’s Club, were initially drawn together by mutual regard for Matthew Arnold and then by shared tastes in literature. As an editor, Gilder was characterized as prissy; Walt Whitman never appeared in his pages, and he considered Twain to be coarse. Gilder wanted to elevate American tastes. Such lofty ideals suited Carnegie, and soon he was playing golf and dining regularly with him.