Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  In all his record of giving, however, nothing came to engage Carnegie more deeply than his quest to put an end to war between nations. Though it may be commonplace today for a schoolchild to begin an essay positing a heartfelt desire “to achieve world peace,” for Carnegie, it was no mere wish upon a star.

  Distressed by U.S. actions in the Spanish-American War and the deaths of some 200,000 Filipinos during the ensuing clash, and dismayed by the comportment of the British during the Boer War and the subsequent uprising in Somalia, Carnegie delivered a blistering speech early in the century at New York’s Metropolitan Club, where he denounced war as “the foulest blot upon humanity today.” He questioned just how far civilization could be said to have progressed, “as long as we can find no better substitute for the settling of international disputes than the brutal murder of one another.”

  One of the immediate results was the endowment of an international law library and center for the arbitration of disputes between nations at The Hague, site of an 1899 conference on world peace. Though he was at first hesitant about usurping the business of nations, Carnegie ultimately gave $1.5 million for the construction of the International Peace Palace and the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

  In 1910, heartened by President Taft’s resolve to ensure his own legacy as a peacemaker among nations, and disturbed by growing tensions in Europe, Carnegie approached Taft with the idea of endowing a private organization to support the president’s agenda. After consulting with Taft and his secretary of state (and former Carnegie Company attorney), Philander C. Knox, Carnegie made his proposal. In return for Taft’s efforts to secure a network of peace treaties between the United States and other major powers, Carnegie would contribute $10 million to endow the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “to promote a thorough and scientific investigation and study of the causes of war and of the practical methods to prevent and avoid it.”

  While Taft did succeed in reaching agreement with Britain and France, various political blunders resulted in the failure to have those agreements ratified by the U.S. Senate. It was a bitter blow to Carnegie, and the outbreak of hostilities in Europe affected him even more deeply. Informed by Louise in August 1914 of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Carnegie collapsed into a chair. “All my aircastles have fallen about me like a house of cards,” he muttered, presaging an emotional decline that would continue to the end of his days.

  Following the disclosure that Germany had proposed an alliance with Mexico, promising the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange for a broadening of the war against the United States, then-President Woodrow Wilson led the United States to join the war on April 6, 1917. Though he deplored the action, Carnegie had come to believe that only such a proclamation by the United States would persuade the Germans to negotiate a peace. Carnegie cabled Wilson to congratulate him on the decision.

  Still, America’s joining of the fray affected Carnegie profoundly, and this time the effects were physical as well as emotional. He suffered a severe attack of influenza that confined him to his bed for several days and weakened him so greatly that nurses would care for him in his New York home from that point forward.

  When a starving Russian populace revolted and forced out Czar Nicholas, and the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky agreed to terms with the Germans in March of 1918, Carnegie’s hopes dimmed for a speedy resolution to the war. The development might have spelled disaster altogether but for the arrival of American soldiers to reinforce the Western Front. By early November the German lines had been overrun by American and British forces, and Kaiser Wilhelm had fled to the Netherlands. On November 11, the war officially ended.

  The end of “the war to end all wars” renewed Carnegie’s sense of hope, for he saw in the aftermath the possibility of effecting treaties among nations that had been derailed just a few years before. During a January 1918 speech to Congress, Wilson had enumerated his famous “Fourteen Points,” in which he outlined the essential aspects of a postwar existence. The final point called for “a general association of nations” to be fashioned for the purposes of “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

  Wilson was actually able to include in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, a provision ensuring Germany’s participation in this “League of Nations.” At last, it seemed that a semblance of Carnegie’s dream was about to come true.

  Ironically, Wilson’s efforts would only set the stage for the final collision of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, possessors of the two strongest wills in American industry.

  THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN GREAT RESISTANCE in the United States to the notion of a League of Nations. Some of it was motivated by general opposition to suspicious-sounding mutual defense agreements, as well as to the concept of America forming alliances with weaker partners. Let other nations fend for themselves, went such thinking. Still other opponents to the League were eager to attack Wilson for reasons of political partisanship.

  Chief among Wilson’s foes was Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a staunch “big-stick” Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge saw no reason to extend the resources of the United States to lesser nations, and the idea that the country would be on remotely equal footing with the likes of Germany was appalling to him and fellow conservatives, who had dubbed themselves “the Irreconcilables.” Lodge vowed to fight Wilson to the end, and predicted that the Treaty of Versailles would never achieve the necessary two-thirds vote of the Senate for ratification.

  Initially, Wilson and his supporters, including a fair number of Republicans led by former President Taft, seemed to have the better of it. But the longer the fight stretched out, the more chances opponents had to sway public opinion.

  One of the Irreconcilables was General Leonard Wood, an associate of Theodore Roosevelt and a potential Republican candidate for the presidency in 1920. Wood was an arch-conservative who was convinced that the Bolsheviks’ next target was the United States, a prospect that in his eyes required an immediate military buildup and a concerted rooting out of the “Reds” in America’s midst. His forceful views on the rights of industrialists to protect their property from Bolshevik-influenced strikers had of course endeared the general to Henry Frick, still a powerful member of the board of United States Steel. So, on an evening in May 1919, Frick agreed to host a dinner at his New York home on behalf of the aspiring candidate Wood.

  Previously, Frick had had little to say about the proposed League of Nations, but during the dinner he became intrigued by the general’s fervent denunciation of the prospect. Biographer Harvey writes that Frick approached General Wood with a summation of ideas that he had gleaned during dinner:

  “As I understand it, then, the proposition is to pledge the United States, now the richest and most powerful nation in the world, to pool its resources with other countries, which are largely its debtors, and to agree in advance to abide by the policies and practices adopted by a majority or two-thirds of its associates; that is, to surrender its right of independence of action upon any specific question whenever such a question may arise.”

  Wood nodded, assuring Frick that he had pretty much hit the nail on the head.

  “Well, I am opposed to that,” Frick countered, not surprisingly. “Of course I am. I don’t see how any experienced businessman could fail to be. Why, it seems to me a crazy thing to do.”

  He agreed to join the Irreconcilable cause on the spot, and soon helped to secure the support of Andrew Mellon. Together they raised considerable monies to support a massive public awareness campaign against the League of Nations, one meant both to defeat the proposal and to ruin its chief proponent, Woodrow Wilson.

  EVEN TO THE END, THEN, the two titans remained locked in combat.

  Though confined to a sickbed and apparently willing to let bygones be bygones when it came to t
he business battles of the past, the eighty-four-year-old Carnegie could not shake his dream of a world without war.

  Frick would have none of it. Though he would turn seventy in a few short months, he was still aghast at the notion of aligning oneself with the weaker or less fortunate, and bent on forging alliances with like-minded men of fiber. (Later in 1919, General Wood would lead a military contingent against striking steelworkers in Gary, Indiana.) Frick remained the living exemplar of the credo that had made him who and what he was: one of the fittest, a survivor.

  There would be no caving in for Frick, not to weak sister nations, and not to sniveling entreaties from a former business partner whose storied acts of philanthropy amounted in his eyes to a bald-faced attempt to buy one’s way into heaven. Because Carnegie’s autobiography would not be published until 1920, Frick could not have known of his former partner’s summary reflection on the lessons of Homestead: “Nothing I have ever had to meet in all my life . . . wounded me so deeply. No pangs remain of any wound . . . save that of Homestead.”

  Had Frick read the passage, he would have scoffed at Carnegie’s hypocrisy. He might also have pointed to Carnegie’s subsequent lines, which put his claim of eternal suffering into perspective:

  “It was so unnecessary. The men were outrageously wrong. The strikers, with the new machinery, would have made . . . thirty percent more than they were. . . . While in Scotland I received the following cable from the officers of the union of our workmen: ‘Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do and we shall do it for you.’ . . . [M]ost touching, but, alas, too late. The mischief was done, the works were in the hands of the Governor; it was too late.”

  In context, then, this reflection on an incident that had supposedly wounded Carnegie deeply comes off as a complaint rather than a confession. If he had only been in Pittsburgh to oversee the situation, Carnegie would have his audience believe, the entire tragedy might have been averted!

  Given all that he had seen in his long association with Carnegie, it is little wonder that Frick reacted as he did when he read the letter handed to him by James Bridge on that spring day in 1919.

  No surprise, really, that he wadded up Carnegie’s plea for peace. They’d have an eternity to go over all that they had done, and there would a well-lit place to hold the discussion. One wag later observed that the closest Frick ever came to a blast furnace was on the day he died.

  CARNEGIE WAS DISHEARTENED BY FRICK’S REBUFF, of course, and was made even more dour by the prospects for U.S. ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. It had become increasingly clear that Lodge and the rest of the Irreconcilables would have their way. There might be peace in Europe, but there would be none between Carnegie and Frick, and there would be no League of Nations.

  If Carnegie had other reasons to keep up the fight, they did not endure. He died on August 11, 1919, at Shadowbrook, a fifty-four-room estate in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, the second-largest private home in the United States (after the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore in North Carolina), a place that Louise had purchased in 1916 for its many similarities to Carnegie’s beloved Scotland retreat.

  Louise describes Carnegie’s passing in a simple but poignant entry in her diary: “I was called at 6 AM, and remained with my darling husband, giving him oxygen until he gradually fell asleep, at 7:14. I am left alone.”

  NOR WOULD FRICK LONG SURVIVE HIM. On election day of 1919, Tuesday, November 4, already suffering from a cold he had caught while golfing, he was diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning attributed to a lobster he’d enjoyed at a celebratory lunch with one of the Irreconcilable leaders, James A. Reed. The cold, combined with the food poisoning, escalated into an inflammatory rheumatism, which put him in bed for more than two weeks. Typically undaunted, he had the November 7 board meeting of U.S. Steel moved to his home.

  On November 19 he finally felt strong enough to rise from his bed and make his way downstairs at One East 70th Street for one of his “little visits” with his beloved pictures. That communion seemed to revive him, and soon afterward he insisted on being driven out to Long Island, where one of his surviving sons, Childs, lived with his family.

  The excursion was ill-conceived, and Frick was soon confined to his chambers once again. On December 1, James Bridge found Frick revived a bit, sitting in his bed, surrounded by newspapers, eager to hear who Bridge felt was going to win next year’s presidential election. Bridge refrained from asking whether Frick had read accounts of the recent memorial service held in Pittsburgh on what would have been Andrew Carnegie’s eighty-fourth birthday, but he was heartened by Frick’s improved appearance.

  On the following morning, December 2, Frick awoke and asked his butler to bring him a glass of water. He drank it down and then announced, “I think I will go to sleep.”

  With that, he closed his eyes and, moments later, died. Though some accounts attributed his death to ptomaine, his doctor’s statement set the record straight. Frick’s heart, weakened by recurring bouts of inflammatory rheumatism, had simply given out. He was three weeks shy of his seventieth birthday.

  29

  EARTHLY GOODS

  NO NOVELIST COULD HAVE CHOREOGRAPHED it more neatly. In the end, partners turned nemeses Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, born fourteen years apart, died within mere weeks of each other. Who of any imagination wouldn’t wonder whether Frick had taken up Carnegie on his offer of a meeting after all?

  There were holdings to be disposed of in the immediate wake of each man’s passing. Though the tally of Carnegie’s giving had risen above $350 million by the time of his death, more than $25 million of that damnably sticky money remained. Having long ago provided amply for his wife and daughter, Carnegie made no further bequest to either in his will. Rather, that instrument sent the bulk of what he had left, $20 million, to the Carnegie Corporation, and another $4 million to a special fund that would provide annual pensions of $5,000 to $10,000 for a diverse group of individuals, including relatives, old friends from Dunfermline, British prime minister David Lloyd George, former president Taft, and the widows of Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland, there being no pension funds for such notable public servants at the time. Another $1 million was divided among the Hampton Institute, the University of Pittsburgh, the Stevens Institute, the Cooper Union, and the St. Andrews Society.

  Of Frick’s $145 million estate, $117 million was given to various public entities. He left his collection of art, valued at $50 million, to the city of New York, along with a $15 million endowment for its maintenance. As mentioned earlier, his home on Fifth Avenue would go to the city following the death of his wife, Adelaide, when funds from the endowment would provide for its conversion into a public museum.

  He also left gifts of $15 million to Princeton University, where his son Childs was an alumnus, $5 million to Harvard, $5 million to MIT, and another $5 million to the Educational Commission of Pittsburgh, which he had established in 1909 to assist in the training of public-school teachers.

  To the city of Pittsburgh he also left a 150-acre parcel of land, along with a $2 million endowment to establish what is now the sprawling Frick Nature Preserve. Another $7 million went to various institutions and charities in the Pittsburgh area, including $1.5 million to Mercy Hospital, where he had finally consented to receive medical treatment following Alexander Berkman’s attempt on his life.

  To his daughter, Helen, then thirty-one, he left $6.5 million for her to disperse among whatever charities she saw fit. The $25 million that remained was divided among his wife, his daughter, his son Childs and grandson Henry Clay II, three other grandchildren, and various other relatives and associates.

  ALTHOUGH NO VANDERBILT- OR ROCKEFELLER-LIKE dynasty would follow from either Frick or Carnegie, their descendants were many and did not lack entirely for accomplishment. Carnegie’s daughter, Margaret, married and had four children; by the 1990s, a great-granddaughter, Margaret Carnegie Miller Thompson, had made her way back to the country of her forefather’s yout
h. She lived not far from Skibo Castle and was willing to make an appearance now and then for visitors at her great-grandfather’s former manor, converted to an exclusive private club and hostelry. (Pop star Madonna married Guy Ritchie there in 2000—rooms are $2,000 and up.)

  There was, in fact, an Andrew Carnegie II, though he was actually the son of Carnegie’s brother, Tom. Another of Tom Carnegie’s nine children, daughter Nancy, married a grand nephew of John D. Rockefeller Sr.—her first son was named Andrew Carnegie Rockefeller, a name to live up to if there ever was one.

  The Carnegie descendant who achieved perhaps the greatest notoriety, however, was in fact no descendant at all. A small-time criminal and confidence woman named Elizabeth Bigley, born to Canadian parents on October 10, 1857, had, after a checkered career that included stints in fortune-telling and forgery, moved to New York City in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Living under an assumed name, she met and married a physician named Chadwick. In short order, “Cassie Chadwick” divulged a dark secret to the wives of her new husband’s acquaintances: they were to tell no one, but she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter.

  The “secret” was dutifully circulated among New York City’s elite, many of whom delighted in such “proof” that the sanctimonious Carnegie was no saint. At the same time, the rumors proved to be no obstacle to the new Mrs. Chadwick, who, over the ensuing eight years, secured more than $20 million in credit from various lending institutions, sometimes forging Carnegie’s name as co-signer. She was eventually caught in 1906 and was sent to prison, where she died the following year.