by Peter Krass
To Carnegie, the temple now palace appeared to be a Flemish guildhall, with a brick facade, steeply pitched roof, and towers—useless towers. It was more warlike than peaceful. Haunted by the Frenchy palace and unable to sleep, he dispatched his director at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, Samuel Harden Church, who, according to Carnegie, was all-knowing of things aesthetic, to The Hague to review the plans and recommend revisions. The director of the temple, Jonkheer van Karnebeek, quickly learned it was futile to resist Carnegie. In mid-July, he acquiesced to the revisions proposed by Church, who updated his anxious boss: “The only unpleasant thing he is yet tenacious of is red brick. How a Peace Palace could be beautiful in red brick I fail to see. He thinks the climate of Holland will not stand stone or marble. But you can get him out of this heresy.”49
At this point, the floundering Dutchman van Karnebeek reluctantly ascended Mount Olympus to pay homage to the roaring Zeus—that is, he went to Skibo to see Carnegie. The Scotsman demanded the same granite used for Skibo be cut for the temple, but as it turned out the quarry had little left to yield. He then insisted van Karnebeek import the stone used in building the city of Aberdeen, but it was too expensive. Red brick it would be. With an exasperated sigh, Carnegie wrote Richard Watson Gilder: “If you knew what efforts were made to obtain the very ‘temple’ idea your artistic sense instinctively suggested you would be surprised. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when we meet. Of course I must bow my head and say ‘all right.’ That is the part of the giver always.”50 Perhaps not always. Whereas Carnegie had given the reins to the trustees of his various endowments, along with the power to modify their respective missions, he was still very controlling under certain circumstances, especially when dealing with men and nations he considered inferior.
The other instrument Carnegie controlled for pushing his peace agenda outside the purview of Washington and Roosevelt was the New York Peace Society, which he became president of in 1907. The membership included powerful editors and clergymen who influenced public opinion, a potent weapon. He wasted no time and used his influence to attract big names—Harvard president Eliot, Earl Grey, d’Estournelles, and Root, among others—to the society’s annual three-day conference. “I am drawn more to this cause than to any—Just as when young I became a rabid anti-slavery zealot,” he admitted to Eliot, “so in regard to war, far more heinous than owning and selling men is killing men by men.”51 There could be no doubt that world peace was now Carnegie’s mission.
The group wielded enough influence that after Carnegie’s speech at the conference made the papers, Roosevelt actually attempted to persuade Carnegie to modify his views. “Have just read your splendid letter to the Peace Congress. Only one point that seems to me weak. ‘Righteousness’ vs. Peace. Disputants are both seeking ‘righteousness,’ both feel themselves struggling for what is just. Who is to decide? No one. According to you, they must go to War to decide not what is ‘Right’ but who is Strong. Pray reflect.”52 Righteousness justified war, according to Roosevelt, whereas Carnegie, who was once “not a man of peace at any cost,” now flatly denied there existed any reason for man to kill man. Such a radical position, Roosevelt rightly perceived, would undercut Carnegie’s chance for success.
New York Peace Society board meetings were held at his Ninety-first Street home, and through these gatherings Carnegie befriended Hamilton Holt, editor of the Independent. Holt shared Carnegie’s views on peace, race union, and even spelling reform, and, reasoning “the views of a multimillionaire being always good ‘newspaper stuff,’” he soon consulted Carnegie on all public issues. Following Gilder’s death, they became golfing partners at St. Andrews, the most pleasurable time to be with Carnegie. “We always went to St. Andrews by motor,” Holt recalled, “Mr. Carnegie being bundled up by Mrs. Carnegie and numerous butlers till the only part of him visible was his nose under his goggles and drawn-down cap and over his muffler and turned-up collar.”53 Carnegie could putt, the editor observed, but couldn’t drive; and if he had a bad lie in the fairway, he didn’t hesitate to tee up the ball. Other than that indiscretion, Carnegie played strictly by the rules and, of course, counted his opponent’s strokes. After a round, he and Holt would retire to his small cottage, where Carnegie would take off his shoes, wrap himself in a blanket, and nap until the two servants and a St. Bernard dog presiding over the cottage served lunch.
At one such lunch, Holt asked Carnegie if he ever lost faith in human nature when so many people, even good friends, tried to wheedle money out of him. “No,” Carnegie replied, “that doesn’t trouble me at all, for I don’t see people unless they are properly introduced and I don’t become intimate with those I don’t like. And besides, as long as I have money and others have ideas, I am more than obliged to those that are good enough to bring me their proposals. They benefit me more than they do themselves.”
On the way back to New York, they had a flat tire. Carnegie motioned to Holt to walk a short distance away; he didn’t want the chauffeur to become flustered by the two men watching over his shoulder as he changed the tire. If only Roosevelt had only been so lucky.
Notes
1. John Ross to AC, September 8, 1900, and John Ross to AC, September 20, 1900, ACLOC, vol. 78.
2. AC to John Morley, January 18, 1903, ACLOC, vol. 93; and AC to George Lauder Jr., June 16, 1903, ACLOC, vol. 97.
3. AC to John Ross, n.d., ACLOC, vol. 98.
4. Quoted in Goodenough, p. 118.
5. New York Daily Tribune, August 7, 1903.
6. New York Daily Tribune, December 31, 1902, and April 26, 1903.
7. New York Daily Tribune, January 28, 1902.
8. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 163–164.
9. AC to Frederick Hols, April 4, 1902, and AC to Frederick Hols, August 7, 1902, quoted in Wall, Carnegie, pp. 904–905; AC to Andrew D. White, August 10, 1902, ACLOC, vol. 90.
10. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, p. 273.
11. Andrew D. White to AC, April 30, 1903, ACLOC, vol. 96.
12. Wall, Carnegie, pp. 880–881.
13. See letters quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 179–183.
14. AC to Frederic Harrison, June 8, 1904, ACLOC, vol. 115.
15. AC to John Ross, March 16, 1911, ACLOC, vol. 189.
16. AC to John Morley, December 29, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 146.
17. Mack, p. 244.
18. New York Daily Tribune, March 9, 1904.
19. New York Daily Tribune, April 20 and October 24, 1905.
20. “Carnegie as a Socialist,” Independent (January 12, 1905), p. 105.
21. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, p. 149.
22. Wall, Carnegie, p. 874.
23. New York Daily Tribune, April 29, 1905.
24. Henry Pritchett to AC, March 13, 1909, ACLOC, vol. 163; AC to Abram Harris, March 16, 1909, ACLOC, vol. 164.
25. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, February 2, 1909, ACLOC, vol. 162; AC to Theodore Roosevelt, February 3, 1909, ACLOC, vol. 162.
26. Carnegie Institute Trustee to AC, July 31, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 132.
27. Andrew D. White to AC, January 25, 1904, ACLOC, vol. 102.
28. Woodrow Wilson to AC, April 17, 1903, ACLOC, vol. 95.
29. Henry Wilkinson, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 288.
30. New York Daily Tribune, December 6, 1906.
31. New York Daily Tribune, January 1, 1906.
32. AC to David Starr Jordan, n.d., ACLOC, vol. 136.
33. A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie, p. 318.
34. New York Daily Tribune, April 6, 1906.
35. Goodenough, p. 262.
36. AC to Charles W. Eliot, February 3, 1910, ACLOC, vol. 173.
37. Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 265–266.
38. AC to William Archer, August 15, 1910, ACLOC, vol. 179.
39. Hamilton Holt, “The Carnegie That I Knew,” Independent (August 23, 1919),
p. 252.
40. Wall, Carnegie, p. 918.
41. Theodore Roosevelt to Whitelaw Reid, November 13, 1905, quoted in Wall, Carnegie, p. 1109.
42. Larry L. Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment: The Tycoon, the President, and Their Bargain of 1910 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1985), p. 24; AC to Theodore Roosevelt, February 5, 1905, ACLOC, vol. 111.
43. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, February 6, 1905, ACLOC, vol. 111.
44. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, May 19, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 129.
45. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1906; Theodore Roosevelt to AC, August 6, 1906; AC to Theodore Roosevelt, August 27, 1906; and Theodore Roosevelt to AC, September 6, 1906, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 302–308.
46. AC to David J. Hill, June 10, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 130.
47. AC to David J. Hill, June 18, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 130.
48. AC to David J. Hill, June 20, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 131.
49. Samuel Harden Church to AC, July 18, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 131.
50. Unless otherwise noted, all peace palace letters are quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 334–336.
51. AC to Charles W. Eliot, March 15, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 140.
52. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, April 10, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 141.
53. Holt, “The Carnegie That I Knew,” p. 252.
CHAPTER 32
The Metamorphosis of Andrew Carnegie
Roosevelt’s bellicose attitude toward capitalists and big business continued to rattle Wall Street in early 1907 as he proclaimed his intention to regulate all large trusts and opened a preliminary investigation of Standard Oil for an antitrust suit. Compounding the investment community’s anxiety, England’s and Germany’s cash-starved governments, which had witnessed their capital depleted during the Boer War, raised their interest rates to attract investors, causing money to drain from the United States and credit to tighten. All of this made for stormy seas: by March 1907, the public’s confidence had reached ebb tide, and the stock market was a floundering ship. As distasteful as it was to him, Roosevelt was forced to seek advice from Pierpont Morgan, who visited him in Washington on March 12, and Carnegie, who wrote him the day Morgan was there. In support of Roosevelt, Carnegie called for strict federal regulations to govern Wall Street and encouraged the president: “We cannot trust this to the Gamblers, for such they are.”1
It was too late. Two days later the stock market crashed, the Dow Jones losing 25 percent of its value. While men like Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, blamed Roosevelt and his policies, Carnegie attempted to bolster his confidence by supporting his position that the government must take a stronger hand in regulating private enterprise. “Nothing radical needed, but this is imperative,” Carnegie concluded. He promulgated this message in letters to the editor and interviews in an attempt to force change.2
Contrary to what Carnegie told Roosevelt, radical medicine was needed. In October, yet another banking panic would hit New York. It was precipitated by the rapacious Wall Street speculators F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse, who attempted to corner the copper market and failed. The alarm sounded. There was a run by depositors on the trust companies that had financed their ill-advised venture, causing those banks to fail; stocks tumbled to a new low; interest on short-term loans shot to 125 percent; and the ex-president of the devastated Knickerbocker Trust killed himself. It took Morgan and a syndicate of powerful men—as well as many lost meals and smoked cigars—to bail out the banks. Even John D. Rockefeller came out of hiding to tell the Associated Press he would ante up half of his fortune to thwart the panic; he eventually provided $10 million to improve liquidity. Even with Morgan skillfully playing the role of central banker, a severe economic downturn couldn’t be avoided.
While economic value and lives were being destroyed, one man found Carnegie’s utterances on regulation sanctimonious and highly amusing. He was the former secretary of the Frick Coke Company, M. M. Bosworth. “Through your great wealth and your philanthropy, libraries, etc.,” he screeched in condemnation, “you have become a public character of prominence and international interest. Some of your public utterances and writings are read with interest. To some of your old employees they are both interesting and highly amusing. Recently you publicly referred to persons who buy and sell stocks in Wall Street as stock gamblers. . . . Why don’t you tell the public that through the great volume of your business, you were able to take railroads by the throat and to compel them to secretly violate state and Federal laws . . . ? Why are you apparently afraid to acknowledge that you were the ‘chiefest rebater’ of the Pennsylvania RR Co. as charged in last June’s Pearson’s Magazine by James Creelman.”3 If Carnegie responded, he left no record.
On the political front, Roosevelt also sought Carnegie’s aid. The titan had made it well known that Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s emperor, had made several overtures to him to be his guest in Germany, but each time Carnegie had taken pleasure in denying him. Ever since Carnegie’s St. Andrews’ rectorial address in 1903, which the kaiser had read with great interest—especially the bit about a unified Europe—he was interested in meeting the philanthropist. Now, with all the sword rattling in Europe, Roosevelt and Secretary of State Root encouraged Carnegie to meet with the kaiser, who had recently extended another invitation. A second Hague Conference was scheduled to assemble on June 15, 1907, at which disarmament, arbitration, and other means of obtaining peace were to be discussed. Roosevelt was hoping Carnegie might be able to discern where Germany stood on these topics, as the kaiser was fighting the agenda.
“The Kaiser is the difficulty,” Morley complained to Carnegie. “He is moving heaven and earth against the whole thing, and makes no secret of it that if the topic of disarmament is raised, his men will walk out.”4 While Morley condemned the kaiser, Roosevelt’s position on disarmament was no different. “We must always remember,” the president wrote Carnegie on the importance of arming the military, “that it would be a fatal thing for the great free peoples to reduce themselves to impotence and leave the despotisms and barbarisms armed.”5 With such powerful leaders unwilling to yield, Carnegie was certain that it was his duty to intervene. Thus he accepted the kaiser’s invitation to visit with him in Germany. Charlemagne Tower, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, arranged for the two to meet in Kiel during a popular regatta in June.
Carnegie had not been completely ignoring the emperor, and his correspondence could be as heavy and blunt as a sledgehammer. In a January 1907 letter, he included a lengthy, suggestive soliloquy in which he imagined himself the emperor. In the spirit of a Shakespearean tragedy, in which a king, racked with self-doubts, takes the stage alone and questions his purpose, it opened: “God has seen fit to place me in command of the greatest military power ever known. For what end? Surely for the good and not for evil; surely for peace and not war. To prove the servile follower of a Caesar, Frederick, or Napoleon, who prevailed by brute force? Never! That day is past.” The self-exhortations for peace continued throughout: “Thank God, my hands, as yet, are guiltless of human blood. What part, then, can I play worthy of my power and position? It must be—shall be—in the direction of Peace on earth. . . . I am the only man who can bring Peace among men. Can it be that God has destined me so to work his glory, and so to benefit the world? . . . I have it! Eureka! An International Police! A League of Peace! Propose to the Hague Conference that this be formed . . . Yes! This is my work! Thank God. Now I see my path and am happy.” Carnegie was obviously attempting to manipulate the kaiser psychologically, but his own consciousness, his own voice, was too strong; it was his destiny of which he spoke as much as that of the kaiser’s or Roosevelt’s.
At the end of the soliloquy, Carnegie returned to himself and concluded, “If that kindred soul, our President, had ‘The Emperor’s’ role to play, I should have been at his side long ago urging it. His part in some measure is yet to play, and he means to play it well—and for Peace too—but there is only one on
earth to whom has been given the power to resolve and execute—the Emperor of Germany.” While Carnegie massaged the emperor’s ego, he was, in fact, at Roosevelt’s side exhorting him to take up the mantle of peace, too. “An international police should really be the aim of the next Hague Conference,” Carnegie wrote the president the month after his creative monologue to the kaiser. “If the German Emperor would rise to his destiny and stand with you favoring this, instead of pegging away, trifling over petty questions!— chasing rainbows in the form of a colonial empire which he cannot get, and which would do Germany no good if he did.”6 For Carnegie, an international police force, backed by a League of Nations, was a most viable option to arbitration. He hoped the martial, the imperialist, the expansionist leaders of the world—namely, Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II—would find the active enforcement of peace more enticing than passive arbitration.
Carnegie had high hopes for tangible accomplishments when he sat down with the kaiser. Before embarking on his adventure, he penned a short piece titled “The Next Step—a League of Nations” for the May 25 edition of Outlook magazine, to further promote such an international association and the German emperor’s participation, in particular. He acknowledged that he was not presenting a novel idea, but asked that nations in conflict simply ask themselves, “Is war imperative?” and “Is there no honorable escape?” He devoutly believed an international police force, however difficult to organize, would abolish “at one stroke the killing of men by men in battle like wild beasts.” What he feared most was the politicians and diplomats becoming bogged down in petty details: “Not seldom the easiest way to secure agreement in a great problem is to treat it boldly as a whole, go to the root, and settle it upon permanent foundations. I believe the world peace problem to be a case in point. Petty details often arouse more hostility in meetings of men than the sweep of large principles.”