by Peter Krass
21. AC to Henry Phipps Jr., March 8, 1870, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1869–1870.
22. AC to Henry Phipps Jr., August 9, 1871, ACWPHS, ser. I, subser. 2.
23. Hendrick interview with William Abbott, August 1829, ACLOC, vol. 239.
24. Henry Phipps Jr. to AC, November 27, 1875, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
25. AC to Andrew Kloman, November 6, 1874, ACWPHS, Lucy Furnace Company File.
26. AC to Andrew Kloman, March 17, 1875, ACWPHS, Lucy Furnace Company File.
27. William P. Shinn to AC, October 21, 1876, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
28. AC to Carnegie Bros. & Co., April 2, 1878, ACWPHS, Lucy Furnace Company File; Hendrick, The Life of Andrew Carnegie, vol. 2 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), pp. 35–36; David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 2.
29. AC to Baily, Lang and Co., May 8, 1876, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Rail Order File.
30. AC to William P. Shinn, May 12, 1876, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Rail Order File.
31. AC to William P. Shinn, February 1, 1876, and AC to William P. Shinn, May 10, 1876, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Rail Order File.
32. See Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 209–210.
33. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 298–299.
34. AC to William P. Shinn, April 10, 1876, ACLOC, vol. 4.
35. AC to William P. Shinn, August 26, 1876, ACLOC, vol. 4.
36. John Scott to AC, January 16, 1877, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
37. AC to William P. Shinn, April 3, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
38. William P. Shinn to AC, April 4, 1877, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
39. AC to James Swank, May 8, 1876, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1876.
40. AC to H. M. Curry, April 3, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
41. William P. Shinn to AC, April 27, 1877, quoted in Bridge, p. 119.
42. AC to William P. Shinn, May 1, 1877, ACLOC, vol. 4.
43. William P. Shinn to AC, November 15, 1877, ACWPHS, Edgar Thomson Operating File.
44. William R. Jones to AC, April 14, 1876, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
45. William R. Jones to AC, February 22, 1877, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
46. William R. Jones to AC, May 6, 1878, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
47. Tom Gage, “‘Hands-on, All-over’: Captain Bill Jones,” Pittsburgh History 80 (Winter 1997–1998).
48. William R. Jones to AC, March 24, 1878, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
49. William R. Jones to AC, May 24, 1878, ACWPHS, W. R. Jones File.
50. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 1, pp. 212–213.
51. AC to E. Y. Townsend, April 19, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
52. AC to William P. Shinn, April 30, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
53. AC to Carnegie Bros. & Co., December 8, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
54. AC to John Fritz, December 8, 1877, ACWPHS, Letterbook, 1877.
CHAPTER 12
Rekindling the Flame
Carnegie’s conviction that he was the fittest, that he was superior to his peers, as was his beloved Republic to other nations, was reinforced by an eight-month voyage around the world that began in 1878. This odyssey also rekindled dormant literary aspirations and marked a new phase in his life in which Carnegie sought to vastly expand his cultural realm beyond New York and to develop intimate personal relations beyond his mother.
He had made a number of trips to Europe in the early and mid-1870s during his bond-selling junkets, but none expressly for pleasure. After wholly dedicating himself to accumulating money since his European tour with Vandy in 1865, Carnegie decided to undertake the fantastic trip, a feat accomplished by no one he knew. The dangers were inherent, what with the number of miles he would travel by rail and steamboat and the corresponding high probability of accident. There were numerous hazards in foreign lands, too, from disease to political instability to strange foods to wildlife. To accompany him, he again enlisted his faithful companion Vandy, who was now a sales agent for the Union Mills. They would go west, taking the train to San Francisco and then a steamboat to Japan, the first country on the itinerary. From there they would journey to China, India, Egypt, Italy, France, and Great Britain.
Before locking up his Broadway office, Carnegie sat at his rolltop desk and wrote a last note to Shinn: “Good bye my friend, I feel so perfectly satisfied to leave E. T. in your hands. This absolute confidence is worth everything & I daily congratulate myself that I have met you & got such a man bound in the closest manner to our party. Your fortune is secured that I do know.”1 So was Carnegie’s. He had begun with $250,000 of the original $700,000 in capital. In 1878, the Edgar Thomson Steel Company’s capital stock was increased to $1,250,000 with Carnegie alone adding the last $250,000 bringing his total share to $741,000, or 59 percent.2 Now he would have the last word on everything in the partnership. At the moment there was little to criticize as 1878 profits were $401,800, an impressive 32 percent return on capital. Also, E.T. was now able to manufacture rails for less than $37 a ton and sell them for $42.50 on average, an agonizingly low price for his competitors to match.
There was one weakness Carnegie was not yet aware of. It was the highly praised Shinn, who was fast going the way of Kloman. While Carnegie was overseas and unknown to the other partners, Shinn and his brother John would form the Peerless Lime Company—the good old interlocking invest-ment—to sell lime to E.T. at a healthy profit. Bitter over Carnegie’s relentless criticisms, Shinn had decided he deserved a greater financial reward.
On October 12, 1878, Carnegie bid his office adieu. Then, with Mother and trunks in tow, he took the train to Pittsburgh, where he settled his mother in Tom’s house and toured the mills, rattling off endless instructions to his brother, Phipps, and Shinn. Before her son departed, Margaret gave him a small, but handy thirteen-volume set of Shakespeare’s writings, a companion to occupy his many hours at sea. Suspecting this would be a unique odyssey, he also packed notebooks for recording his experiences. Then it was to San Francisco where the SS Belgic awaited. When Andy and Vandy arrived dock-side on October 24, they discovered they would be sailing with eight hundred downtrodden Chinamen who were returning home, an unsettling situation.
This journey was no coaching trip to Dunfermline or tour of western Europe, where Carnegie could get by with bastardized French. To find accommodations and guides, they would have to rely on connecting with American and British dignitaries stationed in the various countries, and on letters of introduction obtained in one city to be used in the next. They would encounter written languages involving ideographs and syllabic characters, Semitic and Sanskrit in origin, and spoken by people who were predominantly Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. How would these nations compare to the United States? For Carnegie, here was an opportunity to confirm the righteousness of the great Republic’s economic and political systems. Ingrained in him was the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, which provided the lens through which to study foreign societies, governments, religions, and, of course, their commerce and industries, with the ultimate question being, How evolved were they? As Carnegie traveled from city to city, as he passed people in the street, took in art and architecture, met with dignitaries, and dined on native food, he would ask this very question over and over.
On November 15, the islands of Japan were sighted. Tokyo was stranger to Carnegie than he had ever imagined: the citizens forever bowing to the ground, the depth depending on class and rank; jinrickshaws rushing about, the men pulling them clothed in a loin rag and a hat the size of a barrel top; fishmongers and water carriers stumbling along with a basket swinging at each end of their bamboo poles; and women with painted lips, whitened necks, and those married with blackened teeth. “How women can be induced to make such disgusting frights of themselves I cannot conceive,” Carnegie noted, “but Fashion—Fashion does anything.”3 Food was plentiful: beef, mutton, woodcock, snipe, hares, venison, fish, turnips, radishes, and carrots. At one m
arket stand, Vandy measured the radishes and carrots, which were eighteen and twenty inches respectively; they concluded the soil must be rich, an important environmental factor for social evolution. Ultimately, however, Carnegie had little respect for Japanese culture, writing that, “the odor of the toyshop pervades everything, even their temples.”4
On November 27, they sailed for the coastal city of Shanghai, China. There was a brief stopover in Nagasaki, and the two men hiked up through the terraces built on the steep coast for cultivating various crops. As they gazed down at the boxed farmland resembling a quilt, a momentary serenity enveloped Carnegie. Nagasaki was a peaceful farming community, and he could understand why the inhabitants would never want to leave such a place. As the ship made its way across the East China Sea, Carnegie eagerly anticipated China, a land that had given the world the compass, gunpowder, porcelain, and the art of printing. He even paid Confucius a compliment: “It is an old and true saying that almost any system of religion would make one good enough if it were properly obeyed; certainly that of Confucius would do so. I have been deeply impressed with his greatness and purity.”5 To highlight the point, he quoted Matthew Arnold:
Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
For ever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look’d on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.
Carnegie habitually quoted Arnold, Burns, and Shakespeare to make his points, especially when he was attempting to develop ideas involving intellectual and emotional depth. Such quotations helped him define his thoughts and feelings as he continued to struggle with his identity, a struggle that dated back to when the Carnegie family moved to America and he found it necessary to reinvent himself.
On reaching Shanghai, Carnegie and Vandy took rooms at the Astor House in the American Settlement, part of the property the Chinese government had set aside for accommodating foreign peoples. The streets reminded Carnegie of an English town—broad, lighted with gas, and equipped with sewers—but there were no telegraph lines nor railroads yet. He was amazed to discover the obstacle to railroad building was graves; coffins were buried everywhere, many covered lightly with dirt or completely exposed, because in this region the Chinese wanted their kin to be near them in death. After nine days in Shanghai, the twosome traveled by mail steamer to Hong Kong, and then it was on to Canton. Here, as they toured the streets, they found dogs, cats, rats, and mice nicely dressed—hanging in windows, that is, for consumption. The dogs, Carnegie observed, could easily pass for a delicious young roasting pig. He found them to be of delicate flavor—yes, he bravely immersed himself in the various cultures. As for the few women he saw, they weren’t as repulsive as those in Japan, but he did pity them for their lack of individual rights. They were married off into relative slavery, and were discarded if they were unable to deliver a boy. Part of the problem was evolutionary, according to Carnegie; he calculated that thousands of years of seclusion had molded the Chinese female into the same form, so men might as well marry or reject one as another.
At one point, their guide pointed out a bloodied square where criminals had just been executed, their heads put in jars and left as a reminder. Even so, Carnegie decided China placed little emphasis on warlike qualities, instead exulting triumphs in peace. “No general, no conqueror, be his victories what they may, can ever in China attain the highest rank,” he wrote. “That is held only by successful scholars who have shown the possession of literary talent.”6 This was the rank that Carnegie coveted; it represented immortality for a man with no religion, a man such as himself. He would write a book on these travels, Round the World, to share his personal scholarship and to obtain that immortality.
Against its illustrious history, he found China an inconsistent country and determined that further development, or evolution, would require adopting more features from the Great Republic, from postage stamps to railroads. Criticisms aside, Carnegie caught the souvenir bug and managed to ship home nine boxes of curios, including a temple gong. The two men returned to Hong Kong for Christmas. There, on Christmas day, Carnegie, who was always introspective at the year’s end, thought wistfully of walking to holiday services at church with the future Mrs. C.
Next on the itinerary was Saigon, where he found nothing to laud, and then to Singapore. Here, close to the equator, Carnegie appreciated the unadorned existence of the native men wearing loincloths, and nothing more. In response, the best Vandy and he could do was make a pact not to wear starched clothes on their return home. (The promise didn’t last long.) While in Singapore, they did manage to reduce their dressing time to just seven minutes as vests, overcoats, and other wardrobe items were eliminated in the heat.
On January 14, they boarded an English mail steamer for Ceylon, later to be renamed Sri Lanka, where Carnegie encountered pretty women dressed in closely fitted skirts and tight jackets, all of pure white cotton or muslin, and Buddhist priests in sheets of yellow plaid silk cloth wrapped around their bodies and draped over the shoulders. It was his first encounter with Buddhism, and there was much to favor in the religion’s faith in gratitude, contentment, moderation, and forgiveness, among other means for a peaceful way of life. Such a religion was a reflection of the environment, he decided, which was lush with botanical gardens and varieties of palm trees, including breadfruit, banyan, and jackfruit. The caste system was the island’s only drawback, a social system Carnegie would experience to a greater degree at the next stop, India, a country ruled over by Great Britain.
A three-day journey by mail steamer brought the adventurers to Madras, India, and from there they sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta, the City of Palaces. During a jaunt to the Ganges River to watch the Hindus participate in the sacred rite of bathing, Carnegie observed sarcastically, “What a mercy that Brahma thought of elevating personal cleanliness to the rank of virtues!”7 Cremations on the funeral pyre, the mostly naked body sitting upright in the flames, was an unsettling sight to Carnegie. He was also disturbed to discover those in charge of dressing and burning the dead were of such a low caste no one desired to associate with them. To soothe himself, he ruminated over Spencer, reflecting, “In the progress of the race such dreadful conceptions of God must apparently exist for a time.”8 He was certain the railroad and newspapers would aid the country’s evolution beyond the oppressive caste system by providing the people means to trade with and to educate one another.
On February 6, Carnegie and Vandy traveled by train to the Hindu Mecca, Banaras, a mystical city where the rajah’s temple was on a cliff overlooking the Ganges, then pushed on to Akbar to view the Taj Mahal. Filled with great expectations for the Taj, Carnegie claimed to be disappointed, but only slightly, when he finally toured the wonder: “Am I to be disappointed? Of course I am. I have made up my mind to that, and having just had tiffin, and drank a whole pint of bitter beer, I feel myself quite competent to criticize the Taj with the best of them, and especially well fitted just now to stand no nonsense.”9 The structure was solemn and joyous, graceful and charming, the interior adorned with exquisite mosaics of fruits and flowers, originally made from precious stones, but now colored glass that still dazzled. Shah Jahan had built the Taj Mahal, completed circa 1648, as a tomb and a memorial for his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal. It took eleven years, twenty thousand men, and an emperor’s fortune to build, but its great cost to society was justified, according to Carnegie: “Truly a costly monument, you say. No doubt, but if it has given mankind one proof that the loftiest ideal can be wrought out and realized in practice, the Taj would be cheap even if its erection had emptied the Comstock lode. . . . I would think the time and labor and money bestowed upon it well spent had it been twenty times—aye, a hundred times—as great. There is no price too dear to pay for perfection.”10 The monument intoxicated Carnegie; for him, such monuments were another form of glorious immortality.
On February 16, they arrived in Delhi, where they remained for several days before moving on to Bombay. Carnegie fel
t at home in that city, which he called the Rome of India and found quite modern. Here, business caught up with him when a letter from Shinn dated December 1 arrived with news that struck Carnegie to the heart: Mr. David McCandless, chairman of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company, as well as longtime supporter and confidant, was dead.11 Carnegie, feeling cheated, lamented he was not there to see his friend one last time. With great difficulty, he wrote to Shinn:
It does seem too hard to bear, but we must bite the lip & go forward I suppose assuming indifference—but I am sure none of us can ever efface from our memories the images of our dear, generous, gentle & unselfish friend— To the day I die I know I shall never be able to think of him without a stinging pain at the heart—His death robs my life of one of its chief pleasures, but it must be borne, only let us take from his loss one lesson as the best tribute to his memory. Let us try to be as kind and devoted to each other as he was to us. He was a model for all of us to follow. One thing more we can do—attend to his affairs & get them right that Mrs. McCandless & Helen may be provided for—I know you will all be looking after this & you know how anxious I shall be to cooperate with you.12
While Carnegie’s tribute was undoubtedly heartfelt, he would take advantage of his friend’s untimely death to further consolidate his own power within the company. As for Shinn, he would start negotiating to replace McCandless as chairman before Carnegie even returned to the States.
While en route to Egypt, a six-day leg, Carnegie took time to reflect on India. He concluded that the country, strong in the cotton, wheat, and tea industries, had great potential; but, as he had decided about China, the quicker it adopted Western ways, including the Christian religion, he believed, the better off the people would be. So, although he had rejected the church, thinking himself evolved beyond the need for a dictatorial god, he wanted to impose Christianity on India for the country’s benefit, a contradiction he didn’t acknowledge. As for the British rule of India and elsewhere, he was impressed: “The more I see of the thoroughness of the English Government in the East—its attention to the minutest details, the exceptional ability of its officials as evinced in the excellence of the courts, jails, hospitals, dispensaries, schools, roads, railways, canals, etc.,—the more I am amazed.”13 Too easily seduced by genius in any form, whether in an individual or a political system, Carnegie was blind to the underside of colonialism, to the oppression and economic pillaging. For all of England’s noble work, however, he did recognize it wouldn’t be long before India revolted against the British Empire.
