by Peter Krass
With straight, serious hair parted flatly in the middle and a full but bland mustache encroaching over his upper lip, Gilder’s most prominent feature was his large round eyes, oversized porous disks absorbing all that was around him. Although aware of the egoist Carnegie’s faults, he genuinely admired the industrialist for his appreciation of classic literature, which was why he agreed to help with the literary dinners. “A.C. is truly a ‘great’ man”; he wrote a friend, “that is, a man of enormous faculty and a great imagination. I don’t remember any friend who has such a range of poetical quotation, unless it is Stedman. (Not so much range as numerous quotations from Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, etc.) His views are truly large and prophetic. And, unless I am mistaken, he has a genuine ethical character. He is not perfect, but he is most interesting and remarkable; a true democrat; his benevolent actions having a root in principle and character.”32
Carnegie held the inaugural literary dinner in March 1903, to honor Sidney Lee, the renowned Shakespeare scholar visiting from Britain. Handsomely engraved invitations were mailed out to men Carnegie came to call the “Knights of the Cloth.” This playful name was given because each guest would pencil his autograph on a cloth placed at his seat, and then Louise would have them embroidered. The guests were often a quixotic bunch typified by John Burroughs, who as a renowned naturalist and author was the antithesis of Carnegie. He was attracted to Carnegie’s wealth, but he also never forgot Carnegie’s kindness to Walt Whitman. Carnegie had bought many copies of Leaves of Grass and made sure Whitman’s appearances for readings and talks were sold out.
A guest of honor in 1904 was none other than John Morley, who last visited the United States in 1868. Carnegie had invited Morley to accompany him and the family home to New York after their sojourn at Skibo in time to observe the 1904 presidential election and to deliver the Founder’s Day Address at his Pittsburgh institute, as well as tour about and hobnob with important people. In making preparations, Carnegie forwarded a draft of the Founder’s Day program to Morley, who couldn’t help but mock his friend when he read the proceedings were to open with prayers and blessings: “By the way, I’m both perplexed and scandalized at the discovery that proceedings at Pittsburgh on your Day seem to begin with Invectives of the unseen & unknowable power. I don’t mind this sort of thing in places of ancient endowment. It disappoints me to find theological appeals started fresh in your new foundation. I would have no theology.”33
That October, Morley accompanied the Carnegies on the Celtic, which arrived to a pack of waiting reporters who accosted Carnegie on the economy and the Russo-Japanese War, which had erupted back in February. On the latter topic, he said he was very sorry for the underdog, Japan, and predicted Russia would win—a complete misreading of the situation, for the Russian fleet would be annihilated in the Battle of Tsushima Strait. Carnegie was expecting to give Morley a grand tour of New York; that is, until the host came down with a severe case of gout and was ordered to bed for a month. It was terribly disappointing, a cruel hoax it seemed, and he began to wonder if his days in New York were limited considering he had been sick most of last winter while there. Gilder took over the chore as tour director. After experiencing the chaos of New York’s seamy melting pot, Morley took the train to Niagara Falls to witness the raw beauty “human hands could not control, destroy, or otherwise blemish.” From there it was to Pittsburgh, where he delivered the library’s Founder’s Day address, “Some Thoughts on Progress.” “Pittsburgh was an unalloyed pleasure and gratification and interest,” Morley wrote his bedridden friend. “It gave me a completely new vision of your work in the world. Of course, I have always known it in a general way; but 1) to see Homestead, its magnitude, order, system and discipline; 2) the Museum, Institute &c. &c.; 3) to hear the position you hold in so great a community, brought all home to me in a way that was at once striking, half-unexpected, and wholly delightful.”34 Carnegie’s tainted image had certainly been cleansed in the twelve years since Homestead; as B. C. Forbes noted toward the end of the benefactor’s life, “It is as a giver, not as a maker, of millions that Carnegie will live in history.”35
Once back in New York, Morley was the honored guest of the Knights of the Cloth literary dinner on November 22, hosted by Gilder at the Carnegie residence, while poor Carnegie suffered in his bedroom. The hospitality overwhelmed Morley; as he reflected on his visit, he was a bit kinder than Matthew Arnold, who, in the prior decade, condemned the Philistines. “Materialistic, practical, and matter-of-fact as the world of America may be judged,” Morley observed, “or may perhaps rightly judge itself, everybody recognises that commingled with all that is a strange elasticity, a pliancy, an intellectual subtlety, a ready excitability of response to high ideals, that older worlds do not surpass, even if they can be said to have equaled it.” Since Arnold’s visit, the philanthropy of men like Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller was bringing culture to America and a higher awareness of the fine arts and music.
“House quiet since our swell visitor left us,” a melancholy Carnegie wrote to Morley the first week of December. “I am over my gout, but careful these stormy days. . . . Am busy on Watt. . . . It has been a source of great pleasure to me while cooped up.” He was writing a biography of James Watt, the Scottish inventor who lived a century ago and pioneered work on steam engines. The book would be published by Doubleday, Page in 1905, and while it didn’t become part of the literary canon, it did help Carnegie better understand the roots of the Industrial Revolution that destroyed his father and he himself rode to prominence. He comprehended that it was an unstoppable force that his father had no choice but to submit to.
There was one guest at the literary dinners who was never charmed by Carnegie and was openly contemptuous of his host: Hamlin Garland, a reputable author who ten years earlier had written the scathing piece on Homestead. He complained how pathetic it was that “money could command genius and genius would obey”; at one dinner, he whispered to Burroughs that without his millions Carnegie “would not interest any of us.” He was particularly disgusted by the ostentation, from the Scotch pipers leading the guests to the dining room to the butler handing Carnegie note cards to read from. In a bitter mood, Garland observed that Carnegie was in “a false position . . . it was clearly evident that he would have been helpless without the actual text of his commendation.” Regardless of how Garland viewed him in light of Homestead, Carnegie knew his Shakespeare, appreciated scholarship, and was never at a loss for words, with or without a text. Garland’s other cause for complaint was that each of them had to pay a witty tribute to the guest of honor, and he sarcastically noted his words were his price for a sumptuous meal. While attending one literary dinner, he refused to speak, and to Burroughs he said, “I shall accept no more of these invitations.”
“You may not have another,” replied Burroughs. He was quite right.36
Despite harsh comments by Hamlin Garland, the literary community continued to embrace Carnegie for his genuine interest in literature and his library work. At Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday party, held at Delmonico’s in November 1905, Carnegie and Louise were two of only half a dozen nonlit-erary types out of two hundred guests that included the eminent John Burroughs, Willa Cather, Richard Watson Gilder, William Dean Howells, and Emily Post. After a cocktail reception, dinner was served in the Red Room, decorated with potted palms and huge gilt mirrors and air enlivened with the music of the Metropolitan Opera’s forty-piece orchestra. The meal included fillet of kingfish, saddle of lamb, terrapin, quail, and redhead duck, washed down with champagne. Claret was served to soften five hours of toasts and speechmaking. Mixing the absurd with humor, Twain amused the audience in advising on how to reach seventy: “I stopped frolicking with mince pie after midnight. . . . I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. . . . As for drinking I have no rule about that. When the others drink, I like to help. . . . I have never taken any exercise, except for sleeping and resting.”37 At the end of the evening, the
group had its photo taken and each guest received a cheap plaster cast of Mark Twain that reportedly did not compliment the author.38
As Twain’s health deteriorated, Carnegie visited him often in New York. Like much of America, except Gilder perhaps, he appreciated Twain’s coarse humor, but he also said that there was more to the “amusing cuss, Mark Twain”—there were his political and social convictions, such as his anti-imperialism work—to be greatly respected. On Twain’s death in 1910, Carnegie wrote a moving tribute for the North American Review: “Mark Twain gone!—such is the refrain that comes to my lips at intervals. The gaiety of nations eclipsed, the most original genius of our age and one of the sweetest, noblest men that ever lived. Fortunate was I that we met so many years ago upon the ocean and became friends. . . . No man I ever knew could throw such pathos into a single sentence.”39
Carnegie’s relationship with Gilder also strengthened as both men slid into old age. When Carnegie embarked on a tour through Ohio and Canada in April and May of 1906 to collect a basketful of honorary doctorates for his library and educational work, Gilder accompanied him and subsequently provided insight into why he had befriended the capitalist. At the first stop, Kenyon College in Ohio, Carnegie delivered a speech honoring hometown hero Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s war secretary, which included stories that fascinated Gilder. “A.C.’s address was remarkably brilliant and vital this morning, on Stanton whom he knew”; he wrote a friend, “after which we had a reception at the Bishop’s and then lunch with the ladies, and speeches. A.C. again was brilliant.” Gilder found his friend “dramatic, willful, generous, whimsical, at times almost cruel in pressing his own conviction upon others, and then again tender, affectionate, emotional, always imaginative.” Once in Canada, he again reflected on Carnegie:
A.C. is truly a “great” man, i.e., a man of enormous faculty and a great imagination. I don’t remember any friend who has such a range of poetical quotation, unless it is Stedman. (Not so much range as numerous quotations from Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, etc.) His views are truly large and prophetic. And, unless I am mistaken, he has a genuine ethical character. He is not perfect, but he is most interesting and remarkable; a true democrat; his benevolent actions having a root in principle and character. . . . He has greatly grown since I first knew him. As he himself said, his life is now so much more worth while than if he had kept on making money. “I wouldn’t have known you and Butler!” “I have changed my views”—I should think so! I remember how he attacked any one who said a good word for higher education, and now he has done more for it from the point of view of moneyed contributions, than any other man who ever lived. He is inconsistent in many ways, but with a passion for lofty views; the brotherhood of man, peace among nations, religious purity. . . .
The affection was mutual, and when Gilder died in November 1909, Carnegie mourned his passing in a letter to Roosevelt: “Gilder’s death gives me a keen pang indeed. He went often with me to the golf links at St. Andrews and no one can take his place. One of the whitest souls that ever lived.”40
Before Gilder and Twain passed on, they joined Carnegie in a venture the newspapers ridiculed as a monstrous, barbarous absurdity. It was an assault on spelling. Melvil Dewey, the New York State librarian who developed the Dewey decimal system, wrote a letter to Carnegie in which he promoted the idea of simplifying the spelling of English words, to make the language more phonetic like Italian or Spanish. Dewey argued that with the simplification, English could then take its place as the world language.41 How could the race imperialist Carnegie resist? What the usually sentient benefactor failed to notice was that Dewey’s letter was dated April 1, 1903—April Fools’ Day. Was it coincidence or not?
A group of distinguished Americans—men of letters, politicians, businessmen—organized the Simplified Spelling Board, its mission to “gradually substitute for our present caotic spelling, which is neither consistent nor eti-mologic, a simpler and more regular spelling.” Carnegie, Dewey, Henry Holt, Andrew White, Gilder, scholars at Columbia, Yale, and Oxford, and even Teddy Roosevelt, among others, signed a pledge to adopt the simplified versions of twelve common words, including altho, catalog, tho, thoro, thru, and thruout. The board created a list of some three hundred words to be reformed, and advocated the dropping of “u” in such words as labour and the “e” at the end of a word if it didn’t indicate a long vowel, as in love, the omission of other useless or silent letters, and using “f” to phonetically render the “gh” and “ph,” among other phonetic butchery.
Roosevelt adopted the core changes in all White House correspondence, a major boost to the movement’s legitimacy that prompted Carnegie to write him, “The reform of our language may seem a small task compared to the establishment of arbitration instead of war, and so it is, yet the former is no mean accomplishment. If we can ever get our language as fonetic as the Italian and Spanish, as Pioneer you will have rendered no small service to the race. . . . I have just received from the editor of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram his issue of August 27th, the first paper publisht with the improved spelings—the world moves.”42 Carnegie, who endowed the group with $170,000 and pledged $25,000 a year, went too far in his reforms, according to Twain, who said, “Torquemada had never committed any crime comparable to ‘St. Andrew’s’ treatment of the English language.” Twain then admitted that he regretted the scheme “won’t make any hedway. I am sory as a dog. For I do lov revolutions and violens.”43 The cynics also ridiculed the “moovment” with glee, an editorial in the New York Times noting sarcastically, “The Bored of Speling start with their own names: Androo Karnege . . .” Cartoonists also satirized Roosevelt, one depicting him with pistol in hand taking aim at the dictionary.
Convinced the simplified language would indeed be adopted as the world language—a critical step toward better communication between nations and world peace—Carnegie refused to drop the idea. “The editors who are disposed to ridicule the effort themselves use words, and especially spellings, which their predecessors of a century ago would have denounced as degrading to literature,” he said in a rebuttal to the critics. “The editors of the next century will, in turn, marvel at the uncouth spelling of our present scribes.” He pointed out that in Queen Anne’s reign spite was spelled “spighte” and in Queen Elizabeth’s time fish was spelled “fysshe.” Reformed spelling would prove a passing fad for most everyone except Carnegie, who, at times, had unshakable convictions and didn’t know when to quit.44
Even as Carnegie pushed forward into what he believed to be the more enlightened literary and academic realms, he could not escape his robber baron past. Hamlin Garland’s appearance at the literary dinners was merely a vague, ghostly reminder of the Homestead violence compared to a more striking token of remembrance that appeared in 1903. It was a book written by James Bridge, Carnegie’s former literary assistant, which was called The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company. As the title suggests, it was assumed to be a juicy tell-all from an insider with access. In fact, two other insiders were behind the book, Frick and Phipps, who passed along valuable information to Bridge. Not only did Frick and Phipps have an agenda, which was to portray themselves in a better light now that Carnegie had captured all the glory, but Bridge, due to a dispute with Carnegie two years earlier, was seeking revenge.
When Bridge had helped Carnegie with the monumental Triumphant Democracy in 1886, Carnegie duly noted in the preface, “I acknowledge with great pleasure the almost indispensable aid received in the preparation of this work from my clever secretary, Mr. Bridge.” According to Bridge, Carnegie later gave him the copyright to Triumphant Democracy as a reward, which permitted him to issue revisions over the years and reap the profits. But when he was working on a revision in 1901, Carnegie attempted to thwart the project; Bridge, intent on knocking Carnegie down a notch, then decided to write his insider’s story.45 He presented a plethora of useful facts, but there was plenty of bias, too, as he gave more credit to Phipps and Frick and disparaged Carnegie;
specifically, in the opening chapters of the story, Bridge claimed Carnegie used underhanded tactics to push out Thomas Miller and to sink his claws into the Kloman business. Although Bridge’s prejudices were obvious to many, the book succeeded in creating a media stir and in ripping open old wounds.
When Miller learned the book would be issued that June, he warned Carnegie: “Look out for a scorching in which your humble Scot I fear will take a small part. He expects to sell an edition de luxe of 1000 copies at $25 each. Now don’t you go and buy it up for the libraries—I am sure you will enjoy the spice of it all even if you are hard hit by the author—You know Hamlet says ‘treat every man as he deserves, and who shall ’scape whip-ping?’”46 Too distraught to appreciate Miller’s humor and fearing for his legacy, Carnegie couldn’t fathom that he was being charged with stealing the very business that had made him the greatest philanthropist the world had ever witnessed, and he immediately asked his friend to publicly refute portions of the story and verify facts. Miller agreed and wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Leader, clarifying how Carnegie gained control of the Kloman firm. He explained how he had asked Andy to buy him out and stated, “Andy took no advantage of me. He never did; all was strictly straightforward negotiations.” Miller then added one criticism: “The only fault I found, and in the business world it is rarely deemed a fault, was that to Andy, Napoleon that he was in business, blunder was worse than crime. He could forgive the one; he could never excuse the other, and we parted as business associates on this line.”47
The other extremely sensitive point in the book was Homestead. In an attempt to portray Frick more positively, Bridge mercilessly denigrated Carnegie’s behavior, so much so that Carnegie called on the weasel Phipps for help. In January 1904, Phipps submitted to an interview with the New York Herald in an attempt to clear his old partner. To the question of whether Carnegie acted in a cowardly manner by not returning to the United States during the strike, Phipps confirmed Carnegie’s assertion that he had offered to take the first ship home. “I have never known of any one interested in the business to make any complaint about Mr. Carnegie’s absence at that time,” Phipps concluded, “but all the partners rejoiced that they were permitted to manage the affair in their own way.”48
