by Peter Krass
Could the 1907 panic and the failed Hague Conference alone have inspired such a marked turn in Carnegie’s thinking? No. His philanthropic endeavors were having a major impact on him, too. He was literally a new man, a result of his foundations, trusts, and institutions, which acted as a rewired and refurnished nervous system feeding him with impulses never felt before. Since 1901, the Relief Fund’s annual reports unequivocally showed that hundreds were being killed each year at Carnegie Steel operations. Since 1904, one of the top reasons the Hero Fund Commission presented rewards was for acts of rescue from industrial accidents. And the Carnegie Institution of Washington was pioneering research to cure disease and aid the suffering. All of this made him more cognizant of torment and anguish. In addition, The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and exposés on the harsh underside of American industry by Jack London and Ida Tarbell all contributed to a rising national consciousness regarding the plight of labor. That new sense of responsibility toward the working class affected Carnegie, who had always been a creature of his environment. He respected and befriended Samuel Gompers, chief of the American Federation of Labor and who supported labor’s “Bill of Grievances” sent to Roosevelt. He had joined and hosted dinners for the National Civic Federation, which brought together prominent capitalists and labor leaders. John Mitchell, once a child laborer in the mines and now president of the United Mine Workers, was at many of the National Civic Federation meetings and had Carnegie’s ear. It was difficult to ignore Mitchell, who eloquently spoke out against child labor as he struggled “to reconcile the humanity and flaunted intelligence of this era with the wholesale employment of children in industry. Childhood should be a period of growth and education.”29 The words struck Carnegie to the core, especially when he cast his eye on his Baba.
All of this, along with the media’s recent and brutal attacks on Rockefeller and Morgan, forced Carnegie to realize “the day of the multi-millionaire is over, the people won’t have it,” as he wrote industrialist Sir Charles Mac-mara.30 And in explaining his position on the tariff to Seth Low, a former mayor of New York, he said, “You will have to agree that time brings changes, and it is fully time that the Tariff was changed to meet present conditions. As far as protection is concerned, great reductions can be made without injuring our manufacturers in any degree.”31 Roosevelt calling it quits also had affected Carnegie, for the president, a worthy ally and foe, had inspired him like no president before. Carnegie yearned to extend the Progressive Era; he desperately desired a better world for Margaret, his Baba, now eleven years of age, the age of thousands of girls in the textile factories and boys in the mines.
In the twilight of his life, the startling essays and proclamations acted as a confession, an act of self-absolution as he reacted to the times and his self-realization.
Notes
1. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, March 12, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 140.
2. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, April 7, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 141.
3. M. M. Bosworth to AC, May 4, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 142.
4. John Morley to AC, September 30, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 133.
5. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, August 6, 1906, ACLOC, vol. 132.
6. AC to Wilhelm II, January 19, 1907, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, pp. 311– 313; AC to Theodore Roosevelt, February 14, 1907, quoted in Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 310.
7. Andrew Carnegie, “The Next Step—a League of Nations,” Outlook (May 25, 1907); AC to John Morley, n.d. (probably early June 1907), ACLOC, vol. 142.
8. John Morley to AC, June 14, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 142.
9. Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 354–357.
10. AC to James Donaldson, July 3, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 143.
11. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 315.
12. Ibid., pp. 317–319.
13. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, November 18, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 145.
14. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, November 19, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 145.
15. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, January 22, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 148.
16. AC to Theodore Roosevelt, December 15, 1907, ACLOC, vol. 146.
17. Strouse, pp. 593–594.
18. Jane Fleming Lovejoy to AC, September 14, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 156.
19. AC to George Lauder Jr., April 20, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 152.
20. Andrew Carnegie, “The Worst Banking System in the World,” Outlook (February 29, 1908); Wall, Carnegie, p. 960.
21. Andrew Carnegie, “My Experience with Railway Rates and Rebates”; “My Experience with, and Views upon, the Tariff,” Century Illustrated Monthly (December 1908); Wall, Carnegie, p. 960.
22. AC to Sereno Payne, December 17, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 159.
23. AC to George Lauder Jr., December 19, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 160.
24. Wall, Carnegie, pp. 964–965; AC statement before Tariff Revision Committee, December 21, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 160.
25. AC to Elbert H. Gary, December 23, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 160.
26. George P. Hampton to AC, January 1, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 147.
27. Theodore Roosevelt to AC, March 4, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 149; see also Carnegie, “The Conservation of Ores and Related Minerals,” reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings, vol. 2.
28. Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 1908.
29. Cahn, p. 194.
30. Wall, Carnegie, p. 957.
31. AC to Seth Low, September 22, 1908, ACLOC, vol. 156.
CHAPTER 33
Covert Deal with Taft
Failure at The Hague, the economic chaos, and the troubling ruminations as the progressive reformer emerged from his chrysalis caused Carnegie to lose his bearing in his philanthropic ventures. As he walked the two-mile loop around the Central Park reservoir in the bitterly cold month of January 1908, he mulled over what new direction he should take, how to continue to best spend the surplus wealth with which he had been entrusted.
To reorient himself, he sent a questionnaire to about a dozen top American authors, educators, scientists, and statesmen that contained but one question for them: How could he spend $5 or $10 million to best uplift society? He offered a prize for the most insightful, useful answer. Grover Cleveland, who had resumed his law practice in Princeton, New Jersey, and become a trustee of Princeton University, jumped at the chance to offer advice after having been on the receiving end of it for years. The former president replied with alacrity, “If in asking the question propounded in your note, you had followed the formula so often used and had written, ‘If you were in my place what would you do’ in the circumstances mentioned, I would not compete for the prize offered for the ‘best answer.’” Cleveland must have smiled as he wrote the line; how many times had he received a Carnegie letter with the clause, “If I were in your place . . .”
“Perhaps you will remember that once,” Cleveland continued, “while enjoying your delightful hospitality, I confessed to mental but unexpressed criticism touching the direction of your benevolences; and it may be that you will recall that I thereupon put myself under bonds never to allow myself to again harbor the thought that anyone could impose upon your own generous and correct impulses related to the distribution of your noble gifts.” But since Carnegie had asked, he added unhesitatingly that a liberal sum for the Graduate School of Princeton would be most welcome. The program was just a few years old and required equipment, facilities, and an endowment.1 The suggestion hardly benefited the general public, and Carnegie never did award the prize.
Not until his return to Skibo did Carnegie reinvigorate himself and decide to continue to pursue his own course of action in the name of peace. This mission would involve not only straightforward benefactions for additional temples of peace and the usual propaganda, but covert dealings with Taft, who would be elected president in November, allowing both men to further their respective agendas. The one man they both had to be wary of was Roosevelt, who was still very much in the public eye.
At the prompting of Elihu Root, Carnegie’s first action was to offer $100,000
to build a Central Court of Justice to be erected in Cartago, Costa Rica. Root had been involved with the Central American Peace Conference, which had been held in Washington the prior December and attended by Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador, as well as invited guests from Mexico and the United States. Nine treaties were signed, and the countries agreed to build a court to settle any disputes—thus the need for funding. “One more step in the right direction—the peace of our hemisphere,” Carnegie congratulated Root in June. He would also give $850,000 in total gifts toward a building for the Pan American Union, the Washington-based organization dedicated to promoting better communication and peace in the Americas.2 Again, Root, who was honorary chairman of the Pan American Union (subsequently renamed the Organization of American States), was instrumental in tapping the philanthropist. These two buildings, dedicated in 1910, and the one in The Hague became Carnegie’s triumvirate of temples of peace, of which he was exceptionally proud—all accomplished without the endorsement of Roosevelt.
That summer of 1908, with Carnegie closing in on age seventy-three, the prolific entertaining continued unabated at Skibo. When Woodrow Wilson visited in August, he reported to his wife, Ellen: “They have a perfect stream of visitors at Skibo: I should think that a season of it would utterly wear poor Mrs. Carnegie out. The Castle is like a luxurious hotel. Some twenty or thirty persons sit down to every meal. Guests are received, for the most part (if— say—of less than cabinet rank) by the servants; shown to their room; and received by the host and hostess when all assembled for the next meal.”3
Across the Atlantic, the Republican Convention offered a flash of excitement when Roosevelt was greeted with a forty-nine-minute ovation. Carnegie and much of America thought Roosevelt might consider running for reelection after such a show of support, but Taft was nominated. At three hundred pounds, the obese, roly-poly Taft, who had twists on the end of a full mustache, was almost comic looking, and cynics chuckled over his last name being an acronym for “Take advice from Teddy.” The 1908 presidential election was hardly inspiring, with the Democrats nominating William Jennings Bryan, yet again, to run against Taft. A future Democratic congressman from Manhattan who refused to vote, Herbert C. Pell, observed, “I couldn’t see much difference in the candidates. One had a big head and no brains, and the other had a big belly and no guts.”4 Taft won with 52 percent of the votes to Bryan’s 43, the latter losing a chunk of votes to labor leader Eugene Debs, who garnered 3 percent. While cynics like Pell derided Taft, Carnegie, who gave $20,000 to the Republican Campaign Fund, harbored hope that the nation’s rotund, triple-chinned leader did have the guts to move forward on arbitration treaties as suggested by Root after The Hague Conference. “Mr. Taft is going to secure what Roosevelt rendered securable. He’ll prove a good binder of the sheaves,” he predicted to Morley.5
Since The Hague, Secretary of State Root had succeeded in negotiating twenty-five bilateral arbitration treaties with most nations in the Americas and Europe. To ensure these agreements would be acceptable to the fastidious Senate, he wisely included a clause that provided for the Senate’s involvement in giving advice and consent of arbitration. The treaties, however, left much to be desired for the peacemakers. As in the agreement with Austria ratified by the Senate in January 1909, the treaties were restricted to arbitrating matters that didn’t affect a nation’s vital interests, independence, and honor, nor involve the interests of third parties. In February, for example, the United States and Britain arbitrated a Newfoundland waters fishing dispute at The Hague, a relatively harmless issue. While limited in scope, the treaties were a small step in the right direction. Now Carnegie desired Taft to improve on them, but there was one potential complication: Philander Knox was Taft’s secretary of state, not Root. As secretary of state, Knox’s statesmanship, shaped in the age of the robber baron by robber barons, was oafish and heavy-handed. And although Carnegie had first supported his ascent to national office, Knox had harbored a grudge against him ever since the Frick conflict and was planning to fight any meddling by him.
Oblivious to the fact he had an enemy in the jovial Taft administration, Carnegie was eager to pursue elusive unconditional arbitration treaties. (With Roosevelt on his way to Africa for a yearlong safari, a potential roadblock was removed.) It was time to begin wooing Taft. After a March visit to the White House, Carnegie sent the president a barrel of fine Scotch. The other key player in the quest for peace remained the kaiser. But actually winning Wil-helm’s cooperation was futile, according to Root, who bluntly told Carnegie: “The fact is, and no well informed person can doubt it, that Germany under present Government, is the great disturber of peace in the world. At every turn, the obstacle to the establishment of arbitration agreements, to the prevention of war, to disarmament, to the limitation of armament, to all attempts to lessen the suspicion and alarm of nations toward each other, is Germany, who stands, and has persistently stood since I have been familiar with foreign affairs, against that kind of progress.”6
Regardless, Carnegie was spurred on by supporters. “America is in advance in many things over Europe—but in the peace-movement the advance is a stupendous one. And most of it is due to you,” Baroness Berthe von Sutt-ner wrote him in May.7 And Samuel Gompers, vice president of the Peace Congress meeting held in Chicago, noted, “The United States has had no more earnest worker for world-peace than Andrew Carnegie who gave time and money to the cause.”8
Enduringly faithful to the hope the kaiser could be turned, it dawned on Carnegie that only one man had a chance of influencing him: Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, the man who before leaving for Africa, at a breakfast in his honor, was found “roaring as only a human volcano can roar!—leading the laugh and singing and shouting, like a boy out of school, pounding the table with both noisy fists when they sang:—‘There’ll be a hot time, in the Jungle, To-night.’”9 After the safari concluded in the spring of 1910, he was to travel through the capitals of Europe, visiting cities and dignitaries he had been barred from seeing as a country-locked president. The German emperor was not on the itinerary, but Carnegie calculated this would be an opportune time for Roosevelt to meet with him and discuss European hostilities and the armament buildup. Ideally, if Roosevelt could win some expression of desire from the kaiser to end the tensions, it might very well lead to permanent peace. Now Carnegie just had to convince Roosevelt, recently considered a roadblock, to meet the emperor and then come to London for a debriefing with top diplomats. It was a daunting challenge, and Carnegie enlisted a sympathetic Root to assist.
Roosevelt’s safari was purportedly a scientific expedition to collect specimens, from bugs to lion skins, for the National Museum, but it more closely resembled a military expedition designed to aid his lust for big-game hunting. Although well financed, after just five weeks he started to worry over his rapidly dwindling funds. From Nairobi, on June 1, he humbly wrote Carnegie that he needed another $30,000 to complete his scientific expedition. In the four-page letter, he admitted the cost was much greater than he had foreseen, with having to buy four tons of salt to preserve the skins and hiring so many porters for carrying supplies, including fifty-seven of Roosevelt’s favorite books, like Paradise Lost. In his defense, Roosevelt also claimed he had already collected over a thousand specimens to ship to the National Museum. (The expedition as a whole would collect 4,900 mammals, 4,000 birds, 500 fish, and 2,000 reptiles.)10 Once again, Roosevelt played the hypocrite; even though he bad-mouthed Carnegie’s ostentatious lifestyle behind his back, he was willing to take the multimillionaire’s money to fulfill his own pleasures.
Carnegie, who had just arrived at Skibo after touring the Continent and having had an audience with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, was in a buoyant mood when he received Roosevelt’s request and only too happy to oblige. The unexpected communiqué gave him the very opening he needed to coerce the former president into sitting down with the kaiser. “Rest easy. I will arrange,” he cabled. Roosevelt’s call for help ope
ned a flood of correspondence from Carnegie in which he cajoled and complimented and otherwise buttered up his anointed instrument of peace. Roosevelt eventually cracked and agreed to a summit with the kaiser. “I’ve told the President the Big game he should hunt is the Emperor, Germany, France, Russia, & especially You big fellows in London,” Carnegie informed Morley in late June 1909.11 Incredibly eager to be in the fray, in another note, he lamented, “I wish I were Prime Minister. . . . I’d settle matters finally, Peace or War for Peace.”12
Into autumn, Carnegie kept the fire lit under Roosevelt, playing to his ego as he was so good at doing: “If any man can get the Emperor in accord for peace, you are that man. He will go far to act in unison with you, of this I am certain. You are sympathetic souls.”13
Roosevelt responded to the heavy-handed encouragement with a touch of sarcasm: “When I see the Kaiser, I will go over the matter at length with him, telling him I wish to repeat our whole conversation to you; then I will tell it all to you when I am in London. . . . I only fear, my dear Mr. Carnegie, that you do not realize how unimportant a man I now am, and how little weight I shall have in the matter.”14 Undaunted, Carnegie’s persuasive magic was in peak form in November when he convinced Roosevelt to add Sweden to his itinerary and accept the Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded in 1906 for settling the Russo-Japanese conflict; it was another opportunity to make a statement in the name of peace.15
Carnegie also busied himself with logistical matters. He was frequently in contact with Ambassador Hill, now serving in Berlin, and Ambassador Reid in London, not to mention Morley, who set aside his gloomy skepticism to aid in organizing a London conference expected to follow Roosevelt’s triumphant détente. Top British politicians were to attend and debrief the former president. “Do take care of yourself,” Carnegie wrote his old friend enthusiastically, “for believe me you are going to be in position to do great work in May when Roosevelt is with us there or I am mistaken. . . . It is time for statesmen (not politicians) to understand each other & act in Unison re War.”16
