by Peter Krass
With Northwestern being one of the rejected schools, President Abram Harris turned to Theodore Roosevelt, who then pleaded the university’s case. The stubborn Scotsman refused to bend, and in reply to Roosevelt he praised the foundation for “doing great work, rooting out denominational control in colleges. . . . Like yourself, we are depending less and less upon the doctrine of grace and more upon the doctrine of works, not what a man believes but what he does, which was the great doctrine laid down.”25 Although Carnegie was rapidly approaching his own mortality, he took no solace in the prospects of an afterlife; rather, he was more convinced than ever that doing good deeds during life on earth was all that mattered. He was also wholly embracing his radical heritage by condemning the church in his continuing search for internal peace. Defending the foundation would soon be unnecessary because it was widely embraced. A century later it was still providing pensions and other benefits under the name of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association.
Carnegie’s creation and management of trusts and foundations continued to impress John D. Rockefeller. On encountering a Pittsburgh institute trustee during a transatlantic crossing aboard the Amerika, the oil baron drilled him with questions about the thinking and the mechanics behind various philanthropic endeavors, which the trustee then relayed to Carnegie:
He placed his hand on my shoulder and, elevating his forefinger, said in a most impressive way: “I want you to tell Mr. Carnegie—for I cannot tell Mr. Carnegie anything myself—never to make a verbal promise. I have had much embarrassment by men telling me that I had promised them so and so when I had never meant to make any promise at all.”
Mr. Rockefeller was particularly solicitous in inquiring how you felt when men misunderstood you or when newspapers enlarged upon incorrect motives, and I told him that you relied upon your work to vindicate you without giving heed to anybody’s rash judgment.
“I wish” he said, “that Mr. Carnegie and I could call others into this splendid field of work. It is the happiest life a man can lead.”26
Carnegie was a pioneer in foundations, to be followed by Rockefeller and Henry Ford, among others, and his pension work is still lauded a century later.
Carnegie and Rockefeller both shared a detestation for the aristocracy and a love for the underdog. A meritocracy was their preference, and this attitude spilled over into their support for smaller educational institutions and, in particular, schools for minorities. For Carnegie, there was no giving to already well-endowed institutions. Even when his friend Andrew White, who was back at his post as Cornell’s president, had requested monetary support, Carnegie shamed him for begging and refused to give. Naturally, White, who didn’t consider it begging, took offense: “Doubtless you are ‘bored to extinction’ with requests and suggestions, and my letter may have been a sort of ‘last straw.’”27
Carnegie, walking next to Woodrow Wilson, was honored at Princeton University for giving the school a lake in 1906. Wilson, then president of the university, would have preferred cash. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)
Woodrow Wilson, who was president of well-endowed Princeton University, made his bid, too. Hoping to impress the capitalist, he neatly listed Princeton’s needs, from endowing a new graduate school to hiring fifty tutors— or “reference librarians,” as he called them—to push the undergraduates. At Wilson’s invitation “to see Princeton from the inside,” Carnegie toured the campus and determined the school needed a lake for rowing.28 It wasn’t on Wilson’s list, but the titan insisted. At the lake’s dedication in December 1906, the students cheered while Wilson ruefully commented, “We asked for bread and you gave us cake.”29 At least the lake was more than White received.
In his dedication speech, Carnegie said he hoped the lake would promote water sports while discouraging football, which to him was another manifestation of raw blood thirst and war. The man who once manufactured projectiles couldn’t stomach boys and men groveling in the dirt like animals.30 Sport, according to Carnegie, should be educative and virtuous according to Victorian sensibilities, not a commercialized bloody affair in Roman coliseum-like arenas.
As with Cornell and Princeton, Carnegie now also considered the Pittsburgh area to be well endowed. When the Pittsburgh College for Women fell on hard times and would cease to exist if the trustees couldn’t raise $150,000, they approached Carnegie for help, but he refused, explaining, “I think that I have already done enough for Pittsburgh from an educational standpoint. Pittsburghers now have an opportunity of showing whether or not they are able to help themselves.”31 But there was another motive behind his decision. The Carnegie Technical Schools (later Carnegie Mellon University) had finally opened, including the Margaret Morrison College for Women, and competition with a school named after his mother wouldn’t be tolerated.
When Stanford president David Starr Jordan solicited funds, Carnegie demurred, explaining, “The colleges I have been helping for two years, already about two hundred in number, do not average more than $200,000 to $250,000 in endowments and after deep consideration, I decided it was better to help smaller colleges than larger ones.”32 He eventually gave almost $20 million to those modest U.S. colleges and universities.33 One of his pet schools was Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, the black vocational school founded by Booker T. Washington, whom he greatly respected because Washington espoused helping one’s self.
Carnegie’s interest in blacks and attempts to uplift them was genuine. In the spring of 1906, he traveled to Tuskegee for the school’s silver jubilee. At the ceremony, he delivered a closing address that while lavishly praising the school’s accomplishments, demonstrated his omnipresent race consciousness: “The colored race having done this here and in several other similar colleges and schools in widely scattered parts of the South, proves that the whole race is capable of being eventually elevated through education to a high state of general civilization.”34 Afterward, Washington was proud to say that Carnegie not only bought shoes from Tuskegee’s shoemaking department, but wore them. Of slightly more importance, he gave $620,000, including a library, to the school, making him the largest single contributor.35
Once made aware that blacks in the South would be barred from entering his libraries due to segregation, Carnegie further demonstrated his concern for them by offering libraries specifically for them in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and other southern cities. And when Carnegie was given the honor to speak before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1907, he delivered an address titled “The Negro in America.” Three years later, he was still helping black schools even though there was little public interest and little recognition compared to giving a large benefaction to a Harvard or a Columbia. He donated $200,000 to the Lincoln Institution and $400,000 to Berea College, and gave annually to Hampton and Tuskegee.36 And he supported Booker T. Washington, whom he considered a “self-sacrificing hero” and a “rare privilege” to know.37 When Washington scheduled a tour of Britain, Carnegie touted his accomplishments to a friend there, unabashedly calling him “the most remarkable man living today, taking into account his birth as a slave and his position now as the acknowledged leader of his people. . . . I should think he would be a drawing card. He has recently made a triumphal tour thru the Southwestern States, being received by white and black—no hall big enough to hold his audiences.”38
Supporting education for blacks made Carnegie feel ever-more enlightened, more tolerant of all races, and more convinced that his mission in life was to be an apostle of goodwill among men. Therefore, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was his last great benefaction to education. It was time to take a more prominent stage where he could play savior as the arms race in Europe continued unabated.
While always quick to condemn war and promote arbitration, it was his October 17, 1905, rectorial address at St. Andrews that marked his ascension as a recognized leader of the peace movement. That was the day Carnegie was credited with the first public call for nations to form a L
eague of Peace. (The concept was, however, on many statesmen’s minds, including that of British prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had used the phrase “League of Peace” earlier in the year.) To make his case against war, Carnegie, a preacher completely absorbed in his fevered sermon, quoted Rousseau, Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, Andocides, Isocrates, Sallust, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch, and Luther, among many other authors, philosophers, and theologians, including his friend Morley. The quotes were pithy and hard-hitting, such as this one from Rousseau: “War is the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of Hell.” And he charged the students “to adopt [George] Washington’s words as your own, ‘My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.’”39 The speech was filled with such vivid imagery and notable phrases that Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, head of the Society for International Conciliation, ordered several hundred thousand copies of the speech printed in thirteen languages to distribute throughout the world.40
Carnegie’s speech was a reaction to the fact that Europe had recently come to the brink of war when Germany challenged France’s domination of Morocco, with the kaiser publicly supporting Morocco’s independence. Fearing Germany’s growing military power, Britain and France entered into a treaty, the Entente Cordiale, which recognized each other’s sovereignty and committed them to defend each other against any German aggression. The longtime antagonists were finally allies. Three years later, Russia would join the two in the Triple Entente and Germany would be completely isolated. The same month of his St. Andrews speech, Carnegie’s essay “Anglo-French-American Understanding” was published in the North American Review. He lavishly complimented England, France, and the United States, but he appeared to work hard, almost too hard, to foster good feelings among the three nations.
His unrelenting public invectives on peace annoyed Roosevelt, an assumed ally in the work for peace. “I have tried hard to like Carnegie,” Roosevelt wrote Whitelaw Reid shortly after the St. Andrews address, “but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war which in almost every case springs from a combination of defective physical courage, of unmanly shrinking from pain and effort, and of hopelessly twisted ideals. All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune.” Roosevelt had no respect for businessmen like Carnegie who ventured outside of their realm and believed he was unfit to speak on matters of war and peace.41 However, Roosevelt found Carnegie and his British connections useful tools to further his agenda, so he kept up the politically astute charade of playing friend. It was, in part, the case of the young and vital forty-seven-year-old president thinking he could take advantage of the doddering seventy-year-old do-good philanthropist.
The idealistic world Carnegie inhabited sorely tested Roosevelt’s patience, too, as was the case when Secretary of State Hay negotiated arbitration treaties with ten countries, all modeled on the British-French Entente Cor-diale. The Star-Spangled Scotchman was exuberantly active in encouraging the negotiations and relaying information to and from his British contacts; this was the first step toward the reunion he had been dreaming of. Meanwhile, a wary Roosevelt ensured each participating country’s national sovereignty and honor was not compromised. Even so, during the ratification process, the Senate, fearing any constrictions and breaking sharply with Roosevelt, amended the treaties to the point where they were essentially useless, characterized as “empty shells.” Roosevelt was furious and refused to sign them. Carnegie fervently urged him to sign them anyway: “Such is the opinion of all of us who have labored for these treaties from Ex-Sec’y Foster down—No one in half a million will ever note the amendments. . . . We shall have the substance and this is what you are after.”42
Humiliated by the Senate, a spiteful Roosevelt didn’t see it that way: “I do not agree with you about the treaties. I am not willing to go into a farce.”43 Carnegie was deeply disappointed and frustrated; at times it appeared civilization would take one step forward, only to take two backward. It was also not the last time the two egoists butted heads over national policy.
Having endorsed disarmament since the first Hague Conference, Carnegie was overjoyed when, on the heels of the failed arbitration treaties, an apparently enlightened Roosevelt promised to him that “from now on I do not wish to increase our navy beyond its present size.”44 This conciliatory decree reopened the communication valve, and that summer of 1906 a gush of correspondence poured forth from Scotland. On July 26, Carnegie informed the president that he had passed along the note on not expanding the navy to Morley who, in turn, showed it to the prime minister. It was well received, and the British cabinet actually hinted at a willingness to reduce its military forces. A week later, the president, resting at the family’s summer home at Oyster Bay, New York, replied, “Your letter is most interesting. Do you know, I sometimes wish that we did not have the ironclad custom which forbids a President ever to go abroad? If I could meet the Kaiser and the responsible authorities of France and England, I think I could be of help in this Hague Conference business; which is now utterly impossible, and as facts are, unad-visable.” He also dredged up regrets over the prior year’s failed arbitration treaties and criticized the peace activists: “I have always felt that our special peace champions in the United States were guilty of criminal folly in their failure to give me effective support in my contest with the Senate over the arbitration treaties.” The peacemakers had wanted too much, were too radical, Roosevelt believed, and a reactionary Senate had found their position so repulsive that it reduced the treaties to nothing more than pieces of paper. It was an indirect shot at Carnegie.
Still, considering himself more useful than he was, Carnegie continued to funnel information on British political positions to Roosevelt. “Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Minister, has read what Secretary Root sent me and is full of sympathy with you,” he wrote from Skibo in late August. “Mr. and Mrs. Morley have been with us for two weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Bryce [the Irish Secretary] are now here. Never was there a British Cabinet so keenly favorable to peace and so anxious for cooperation with America, and especially with you; you have won their confidence.” He went on to suggest to Roosevelt that he should make a statement in support of arbitration, which would then, hopefully, act as an embryo for a League of Peace. Using the very argument White had once used with him to convince him to part with money for a national university, Carnegie said, “The man who passes into history as the chief agent in banishing or even lessening war, the great evil of his day, is to stand for all time among the foremost benefactors.” Being immortalized as a peacemaker was not what Roosevelt desired, however, but he did promise to talk to his newly appointed secretary of state Elihu Root, about Carnegie’s proposal for a statement favoring arbitration.45
Ultimately, Roosevelt was Frick incarnate, a man willing to challenge Carnegie’s authority and unwilling to share power; but unlike Frick, Roosevelt disguised his feelings. Fortunately, for both Carnegie and Roosevelt, they weren’t legally bound to each other, as Carnegie had been to Frick, and the philanthropist could pursue his own peace agenda along different courses than pandering to Washington—especially when, he believed, it was Washington that should have been courting him. Empowered by a sense of destiny, he shook off Roosevelt’s failure to ratify the arbitration treaties or then to publicly support arbitration and persevered. A statement of global proportions was in the making in the summer of 1906 as plans for the temple of peace at The Hague moved forward. There was one problem, however. The modest temple Carnegie envisioned had spun out of control.
The first warning sign flashed when he heard rumors the temple’s cost might run into the millions, well over the $1.5 million he’d g
iven. “It seems clear to me that they must make a fresh start,” he anxiously wrote the U.S. minister to the Netherlands, Dr. David Jayne Hill, who had the unpleasant task of playing go-between. “I fear they found that such a structure as that proposed might run into several millions, and not a dollar more will I ever give. A million and a half, with accrued interest equal to 10 % more, is ample for a simple Temple of Peace and an International Law Library for the use of the court. To me the building proposed is no temple of peace, but shouts all over of the pomp, pride and vain circumstance of inglorious war.”46 When he received news the library alone would consume one-third of his $1.5 million donation, Carnegie’s sensibilities were offended and he protested more vigorously: “A large, showy building would I feel be incongruous. A moderate structure only is needed. The Court, the principal chamber, should be small, so that the members can sit close together, in touch with each other mentally and almost physically, proximity being always conducive to friendly conference and harmony. It dampens excited oratorical discussion.”47 Carnegie was demanding the same functional simplicity he did for his libraries; after all, these buildings were extensions of himself—you are what you build—and he envisioned himself as nobly pragmatic and prudent.
Then came news the temple was to be called the Library and Court of Arbitration, a pathetic name according to Carnegie, who, just two days after his last protestation, injected his feelings into a more strongly worded letter. “This is to me shocking. I am positively wounded. The day that a permanent tribunal was established to settle international disputes humanity took a great step forward, and when a Temple of Peace is erected it will in my opinion be the holiest structure in the world. To speak of ‘The Library and Court of Arbitration’ is as if a bereaved husband were to ask plans for a sacred shrine to ‘my nephew and my dear wife.’”48 Now having reviewed the architect’s drawings, his fears were confirmed. He was severely disappointed that a French architect had been selected over an American—he was not fond of the Frenchy look; it was too ornate and frilly—and that the French architect had indeed debased the high ideal of the temple by turning it into an ostentatious palace.
