Carnegie

by Peter Krass

  There was still one thing missing, however—a waterfall. Carnegie solved the problem by convincing the duke of Sutherland to sell him a large tract of land to the north and west, nearly doubling the estate’s property, which included a section of the River Shin and a fine waterfall. The river also offered excellent salmon fishing. Without the intensity of business competition to expend his energy, he punished the fish mercilessly, his passion famous among friends. Charles Flint enjoyed telling the story of when he took Carnegie fishing: “I was interested to see how $300,000,000 would fish. He went at it as though he were pulling in another million.”50

  Carnegie also attacked golf with greater vigor, playing frequently at the challenging Dornoch course, where he became vice president of the club. He later invited J. H. Taylor, five-time British Open champion, to visit Skibo and instruct Louise and him. In notes to Dod and friends, he crowed, “I beat Lucy today badly at golf—really broke my record & now feel I can do something creditable. . . . I am beating my friends at golf, so all goes well. I played eighteen holes today with Taylor. Beat him! Beat Murray Butler Saturday. Beat Franks the day before. I am playing better! P.S. They gave me a stroke a hole, but that’s a detail.”51 A stroke a hole. Anyone was free game in his insatiable need to compete, and whether playing golf or backgammon, if Carnegie lost he was miserable for hours afterward.

  Skibo Castle, which Carnegie purchased in 1898, was said to be cursed. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)

  Every day that first summer of retirement he read a little Shakespeare or Burns, endeavored to peruse a dozen or more daily newspapers—at least that’s what he told the press—and reviewed his own essays as he prepared an anthology, The Empire of Business, to be published the next year by Doubleday, Page. It would include seventeen essays dating back to 1885, covering commerce, industry, and business success. Carnegie also kept himself well acquainted with business conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, digesting everything of significance, especially any news related to U.S. Steel, the company paying the interest on his $200 million plus in bonds.

  As the bereft father, Carnegie harbored ill-founded ill-feeling toward U.S. Steel and Morgan, and, to assuage his pain, he made disparaging remarks about the company in the press, contributing to the billion-dollar steel trust’s bad public relations image. In the same manner he had belittled Frick, he told Skibo guests: “Pierpont is not an ironmaster, he knows nothing about the business of making and selling steel. I managed my trade with him so that I was paid for my properties in bonds, not stocks! He will make a fizzle of the business and default in payment of the interest. I will then foreclose and get my properties back, and Pierpont and his friends will lose all their paper profits. Pierpont feels that he can do anything because he has always got the best of the Jews in Wall Street. It takes a Yankee to beat a Jew, and it takes a Scot to beat a Yankee!”52

  In retirement, Carnegie pursued golf as avidly as he had business. Losing put him in a foul humor for hours. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)

  Carnegie must have watched with a mocking smile as Morgan contended with his first labor agitation that summer with not even six months having passed since the formation of U.S. Steel. Striking was sporadic, but in the end, the Amalgamated was no match for the greatest industrial Goliath ever created. Ten fewer mills were union after the summer strikes, and conditions remained deplorable for the slingshot-wielding steelworkers.

  A greater threat to Morgan and big business emerged in the wake of President McKinley’s assassination, carried out on September 6, 1901—the president would die on September 14—while he was visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a festival to celebrate progress. The assassin was an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, who had been inspired by one of Emma Goldman’s speeches. To think, if Goldman had been linked to her boyfriend Alexander Berkman and the Frick murder attempt, the McKinley assassination might never have happened, as she would have been in jail. Now the cowboy Roosevelt was president of the United States; as a reformer, he was a menace to Morgan and, by association, U.S. Steel and the company’s largest bondholder, Carnegie. Such was the work of the gods.

  “President McKinley gone,” Carnegie lamented to his cousin Dod. “Isn’t it dreadful. I was quite depressed by the shock & not very confident of Roosevelt’s wisdom but power may sober him.”53 To Morley, he reiterated his concern about the would-be imperialist Rough Rider: “Anxious about Roosevelt, an unknown quantity, capable of infinite mischief. . . .”54 In a memorandum to himself and for posterity’s sake, Carnegie wrote: “President Roosevelt. If he would only act as he tells one that he feels. Plenty good advice given & apparently taken & then some wild erratic outburst on stump. Prest. Eliot Harvard sums it all up when he said recently, ‘I knew Teddy when he was a boy. I know him now when he is still a boy, and I’ll never know him anything else but a boy.’ But one can’t help loving him. He has high & pure ideals.”55 In time, Roosevelt would come to have the same respect and distrust for Carnegie.

  Wall Street was rattled by this new, unpredictable force who as governor of New York had forced reforms on Tammany Hall and municipal corruption. Roosevelt, with an ego to rival Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller’s, was not going to pander to the industrialists or to Wall Street. In fact, he had both Morgan and Rockefeller in his gun sights and, walking quietly while wielding his big stick, launched a trust-busting campaign. His first move was to instruct Attorney General Philander Knox (who had been highly recommended by Carnegie and Morgan) to dissolve one of Morgan’s railroad consolidations, Northern Securities, a holding company controlling three railroads, for restraint of trade. When in February 1902 the charges were filed, Morgan was first surprised, then livid. Although the stock market plunged, the public approved—the people despised the Morgan monopolies. The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court in 1904 and Knox won. The attorney general had made a good show of it, but he was careful ultimately to protect the Morgan interests—in particular, U.S. Steel.

  Wisely, Carnegie did not take an aggressive posture with Roosevelt; instead, he pursued the canny course of ingratiating himself with the new president. Interestingly, the month before the charges were levied against Northern Securities, Carnegie had delivered a speech to railroad men in New York titled “Railroads Past and Present.” It was harmless enough, mostly a retrospective of his career with the Pennsylvania and the importance of railroads, but vigilant observers, and perhaps cynics, could not easily dismiss the coincidence. No doubt, Carnegie was feeding Roosevelt information, especially considering several years later he wrote Senator Moses Clapp of Minnesota: “A few great railroad organizations control the situation, combining they divide the business between them—agree not to build in certain territory, fix rates, &c. That govt. must control them & prevent unlimited sway to public or private injury seems obvious. . . . The President is right upon this question sure.”56 For decades Carnegie had harbored a grudge against the railroads, and still did. Even in retirement he could be extremely spiteful. He would also soon be advising the president, welcomed or not, on a host of issues, political and economic.

  When Carnegie returned to the United States in the fall, he still found retirement hard to accept. “I felt myself entirely out of place,” he recalled, “but was much cheered by seeing several of ‘the boys’ on the pier to welcome me—the same dear friends, but so different. I had lost my partners, but not my friends. This was something; it was much. Still a vacancy was left.”57 With that sense of vacancy came the heightened awareness of his mortality, a sense of urgency, the need to push inordinately. The expanding void had to be filled at an ever-greater pace; therefore, Carnegie threw himself violently into his philanthropy. The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh continued to nourish him; at a November 12 afternoon meeting of trustees, he announced his intention to increase the endowment of the technical school from $1 million to $3 million. Later in the month, at the 145th annual St. Andrew’s Society dinner at Delmonico’s, attended by five hun
dred, he donated $100,000 to aid the aged and decrepit Scottish poor in the city. As the society’s president, he said a toast for President Roosevelt and King Edward. A piper played Scottish airs, there was a small orchestra, haggis was the prize dish, and on the dais with Carnegie was Mayor-elect Seth Low and Mark Twain, who arrived late and received a hearty cheer. And Carnegie was deep into planning his next great venture, a U.S.-based foundation modeled on the Scottish universities trust.

  But then the Dunfermline branch of the family suffered a terrible loss with the death of eighty-seven-year-old Uncle Lauder. The teacher who seemed as though he would live forever was gone. It shocked Carnegie, rendered him childlike, and left him gasping for breath:

  Sunday night

  December 22, 1901

  Dear Dod:

  I am stunned and somehow protected from severe shocks, except every now and then one comes that seems almost to stop the heart.

  What this loss is to you and to me no one knows but ourselves; they cannot know. I don’t believe there ever was so sweet, so fond an attachment on earth, as between us three men—the Teacher and his pupils.

  But I can’t write about it; I must quit.

  It is so saddening. What on earth will Scotland be to me now? He was Scotland.

  Well, I must bite my lips and say nothing. This life, so delightful to us when it touches the precious relationship, is, apart from these sweet touches of affection, a fearful mockery; but good night. Do write a few lines and tell me how you are. This blow doesn’t draw us closer—nothing could do that; but it does send the thoughts more to you.

  Ever yours,

  Naig

  Uncle Lauder, like his mother, Margaret, had been a driving force, a guiding force he still needed. “I feel so lonely,” he wrote Morley. “The intense interest he took in all my doings gave me satisfaction. ‘How this will please Uncle Lauder!’ was always present in my mind as events came.”58 Except for his mother, Carnegie had never had such definitive emotional attachment to any human being. There was no quoting from Burns or Shakespeare to express his emotions now.

  Within days of Uncle Lauder’s death, Carnegie was again fully immersed in his philanthropy; it served to heal this wound as well as old ones.

  For over a year his friend Andrew White, the ambassador to Germany and a former Cornell president, recalling that George Washington had wanted a national university and using the lure of heroic immortality, had been pushing the idea of one on Carnegie. Carnegie replied: “You suggested a National University at Washington—Washington’s desire, several have; but while this does, as you say, ensure immortality to the Founder, it has hitherto seemed to me not needed, and this puts immortality under foot. . . . Don’t care two cents about future ‘glory.’ I must be satisfied that I am doing good, wise, beneficial work in my day.”59 He pointed out that Johns Hopkins could very well serve as an embryo for a national university, and he had no desire to duplicate others’ efforts; redundancy had been anathema at his mills and remained so. The promises of immortality did nothing for Carnegie—that was already secure—but there was an appeal to linking himself indirectly to George Washington, of committing a great act in his spirit. After talking over the subject with Daniel Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins, he decided it would be best to give the United States a gift similar to what he’d given Scotland, in the form of a Washington-based national trust supporting all American universities. The focus would be on science alone—no tuition aid or other peripheral projects that would just drain funds and scatter his efforts.

  Carnegie, like fellow New York philanthropist Peter Cooper, dreamed of science conquering misery, and he recalled the words of Prime Minister Bal-four: “One discovery which adds to our command over the forces of nature may do more for mankind than the most excellent teaching of what is already known.” The glory of discovery, of pushing mankind one great leap forward, was far more intoxicating to Carnegie than large-scale tenement reform, or filtration plants, or urban high schools. As the plan evolved, Carnegie consulted a number of renowned educators, just as he had in creating the Scottish trust. Daniel Gilman recalled: “Mr. Carnegie raised many hard questions: How is it that knowledge is increased? How can rare intellects be discovered in the undeveloped stages? Where is the exceptional man to be found? Would a new institution be regarded as an injury to Johns Hopkins, or to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or any other university? What should the term ‘knowledge’ comprise? Who should be the managers of the institution? How broad and how restricted should be the terms of the gift?”60 Carnegie was clearly as thorough in how he should give away his money as he was when making it; there’d be no slapdash decisions.

  He was so enthused that on Thanksgiving Day he took the time to express his intentions to create a foundation that would benefit all American universities in a letter to Roosevelt. To bolster the idea, he presumed what George Washington would desire: “For some time, I have been considering the propriety of fulfilling one of Washington’s strongest wishes, the founding of a university at Washington, but the conclusion reached was that, if with us today, he would decide that under present conditions greater good would result from cooperation with, and strengthening of, existing universities throughout the country, than by adding to their number. . . . If established and managed as I believe it can be, our country will possess a potent instrument for discovery and invention and the pursuit of knowledge, for it aims at the cooperation of all our higher educational institutions, thus ensuring unity and effort hitherto lacking, from which I think we are not too sanguine in predicting a surprising harvest.”61

  Realizing this was an opportunity to revolutionize science and education while he was in power, Roosevelt invited Carnegie to the White House for lunch on December 1 and again on December 12 to discuss his plans. Carnegie divulged that the Carnegie Institution of Washington, as it was now being called, was to receive an unheralded endowment of $10 million (another $22 million would follow in later years). The money was significant, but to give the institution national prominence, Carnegie wanted Roosevelt— the man he deemed capable of “infinite mischief”—to serve as a trustee, along with several other Washington politicians. “I will serve with the greatest pleasure . . .,” Roosevelt wrote Carnegie on New Year’s Eve. “It seems to me to be precisely the institution most needed to help and crown our educational system by providing for and stimulating original research.”62 Including Roosevelt was a shrewd move on Carnegie’s part; not only was it a feather in his cap, it was a means of keeping tabs on the Rough Rider.

  The trustees numbered twenty-seven, including Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, William N. Frew, Abram Hewitt, John Hay, Elihu Root, and Andrew White—such a collection of men was yet more clear evidence of the power Carnegie commanded. At the first meeting, held at the State Department, the trustees elected seventy-year-old Daniel Gilman to serve as the first president, which he did until 1904. In the Founder’s Deed of Trust, Carnegie charged his trustees to “in the broadest and most liberal manner encourage investigation, research, and discovery—show the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind . . . To promote original research . . . To discover the exceptional in every department of study whenever and wherever found, inside or outside of schools, and enable him to make the work for which he seems specially designed his life work.” As with the Scottish trust, the trustees were given absolute power, a difficult concession on Carnegie’s part but necessary to give the organization legitimacy. After Carnegie outlined his goals at the meeting, he declared, “Gentlemen, your work begins. Your aims are high; you seek to extend known forces, and to discover and utilize new forces for the benefit of man.”63

  What was particularly unique was that the institution had no tangible goals such as those demanded in business or in Carnegie’s library giving and Relief Fund. Its purpose was far more abstract, its precise benefits unknown. It was a testament to Carnegie’s expansive mind that he was now able to disconnect himself from the narrow purpose of profit making. But th
en again, just as he had in the steel business, he knew an investment needed to be made today for profits tomorrow. “You are one of the very few who realizes that the world’s activities of tomorrow will found their very existence upon the research of today,” complimented Professor Theodore W. Richards of Harvard. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University, J. H. Kirkland, also lavished praise on the institution, comparing its spirit with Harvard, Yale, and Columbia; but Kirkland worried that such large endowments would discourage the small givers, who were equally important in supporting institutions at large. He predicted individual benefactors would play an increasingly important role in the educational system—a thought that worried the critics. A suspicious public wanted its say and feared the money of the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Stanfords would muffle its voice.

  At the annual meeting in November 1902, the institution’s trustees confirmed the need to promote original research and support projects that attempted to fill knowledge gaps. They would not enter into anything being done well by other groups or that could be done better by others.64 Over the first six years, the institution established departments to support work in experimental evolution, marine biology, historical research, economics and sociology, terrestrial magnetism, astronomy, geophysics, botany, and nutrition. Eventually, research labs and stations would be established around the world.

  One of Carnegie’s dreams was for the research to discover cures to disease, not just for humans, but for plant and wildlife that would ultimately benefit mankind. He didn’t leave all the work to his trusts; he also gave $50,000 to Madame Curie and $120,000 to Robert Koch for his studies in bacteriology. Koch, a German, was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for discovering the bacillus that causes tuberculosis, a tremendous step toward controlling and defeating the disease. This was the kind of result Carnegie fantasized about and made him impervious to criticism. Did not saving millions of future lives justify the trampling under of thousands of past ones, his laborers?