Carnegie

by Peter Krass

  Morley, who wished he could be whisked across the Atlantic aboard a “rapid aircraft, now devoted to more diabolical purposes,” continued his stream of letters through the winter. “I never get one of the publications of your Peace Endowment,” he wrote in March while the bloody Battle of Verdun raged, “without a warm feeling for the founder of the Endowment, and of the comfort it must be to him to have had such a happy inspiration, in spite of the unspeakable discouragement of the hour. Europe is devastated by Plague and the Black Death, but that is no reason why Pasteurs and Listers should not persevere in search of healings.”29 The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was active in fighting the war, as well as funding the reconstruction of devastated villages in France, Belgium, Serbia, and Russia. The Carnegie Corporation gave $2.5 million to the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Knights of Columbus, among other organizations, for relief efforts. The Carnegie family wasn’t completely paralyzed, either. Louise gave $100,000 to the Netherlands Red Cross Society, as well as money to Edith Wharton, who was raising funds for the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee.30

  The cruelest month, April, found the Carnegies back in New York, and then in Noroton, Connecticut, on the Long Island Sound, for the summer. Carnegie had hoped for a cool breeze off the sound to duplicate the salt air of Dornoch Firth, but, to the contrary, it was hot and muggy. It was made all the more hellish when on July 1, the Allies launched the Battle of the Somme, hoping it would be “an open sesame to final victory.” The British and French soldiers went over the top, intent on cutting the German army in two and marching into Berlin. Instead, by the end of the first day, sixty thousand British corpses lay rotting in the field. At such a cost, Carnegie calculated, ground surely must have been won and the Germans pushed to the brink of suing for peace. Dreaming of peace negotiations at The Hague, Carnegie wrote Morley in August to plan a triumphant return to Skibo the next spring. Morley replied, “You speak of The Hague, and I hope it may come in good time, but whether there is any Hague or not, Skibo will do just as well for you and me to have our own private congress in the spring.”31 Another English friend, Frederic Harrison, tempered Carnegie’s hopes of a return: “There is, I fear, no prospect of your visiting Britain whilst the horrors continue; and I am some years your senior—when this letter reaches you, I shall have completed my 85 years on earth—so there is little chance of my being here should you come across the Atlantic when this war is ended. It must end one day from sheer exhaustion if nothing else. So, whilst I have strength to write I send you a few words to express my grateful sense of our friendship in happier days and my profound sense of admiration for the long and universal efforts you have made in the Old & the New Worlds to avert the cataclysm that is a menace to human civilization.”32 The letter was of little consolation. Neither was the putting green Louise had installed at Ninety-first Street; it was a cruel reminder of the courses at Skibo and Dornoch and their rugged beauty.

  The first presidential election in decades in which Carnegie was not heavily involved, financially or otherwise, came and went in November; Wilson won reelection with the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” Another birthday came and went. Margaret’s coming-out party was held on December 8, a bittersweet celebration for Carnegie as he gazed on her innocent beauty, regretting that she must blossom in a world gone mad. “Baba had at least a hundred bouquets and baskets of flowers”; Louise wrote in her diary, “a wonderful tribute to our little girl. She looked very sweet in her white tulle dress with a few threads of silver and her string of pearls her Daddy and I gave her—so very simple and sweet. We had dinner of twenty-six covers and people began to come at 8:30. About 800 people here. Baba had nine girls receiving with her; all so lovely. Party was over at 2 a.m., a very great success. Daddy very happy greeting guests.”33

  With the Allied and Central Powers hopelessly entrenched in a war of attrition, on January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a peace without victory. Even Carnegie realized this was not possible, so, in a burst of ferocious energy, he dictated an urgent letter to Wilson in which he promoted what he detested most—war.

  Dear Mr. President:

  Sometime ago I wrote you “Germany is beyond reason.” She has ever since become more and more so until today she shows herself completely insane. No wonder the Cabinet in today’s paper shows restlessness. Were I in your place there would soon be an end to this. There is only one straight way of settlement. You should proclaim war against her, however reluctantly, and then settlement would soon come. . . . Let me predict you will have the greatest of all careers before you; hope it will be soon clearly defined. Be of good cheer.

  Yours devotedly,

  Andrew Carnegie34

  At the time, the Germans were withdrawing to regroup and to reinforce positions after the Somme offensive. As they retreated, they systematically razed and poisoned the landscape. Thousands of homes were destroyed, orchards and forests torched, water wells and reservoirs poisoned, and bridges, railways, and roads demolished. By April 5, the Germans were positioned along the Hindenburg Line, a foreboding tier of concrete-revetted fortifications.

  With the kaiser reinstituting unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, and the interception of the Zimmermann communication, in which Germany’s foreign secretary proposed an alliance with Mexico to fight the United States—Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to be given Mexico upon victory— Carnegie didn’t have to wait long for America’s entry. In April, the president asked Congress to declare war; on April 6, it obliged him. Just after delivering his war message on April 2 and receiving a tremendous ovation, the president had turned to his secretary and said, “Think of what it is they were applauding. My message of today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”35 Carnegie was among them. “You have triumphed at last,” he cabled Wilson. “God bless you. You will give the world peace and rank the greatest hero of all.”36

  In May, Congress passed a Selective Service Bill, requiring every able-bodied man between the ages of the twenty-one and thirty-one to serve, and the next month 9.5 million registered to fight. Among them were Harry Whitfield, husband and father and Louise’s younger brother, who was commissioned a lieutenant; and Robert Morrison, their faithful valet, who enlisted in the marines.

  The convulsion of America entering the war racked Carnegie, and he suffered another attack of the grippe and influenza. Nurses attended to him daily from that point on. When allowed in the Highlands’ gardens, he was wrapped in blankets and rested in a steamer chair, the collie at his feet. At least there would be no muggy Noroton this summer; Louise had purchased a glorious nine-hundred-acre estate, the former home of railroad baron Anson Phelps Stokes christened Shadowbrook, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Only one private residence in America was larger than this fifty-four-room native gray stone mansion—the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

  Located in the village of Lenox, a summer community during the Gilded Age, Shadowbrook immediately attracted Louise because the home had a music room with a beautiful organ where Carnegie could listen to music for hours. There was also a lookout tower so the laird could gaze out over the entrancing green hills and blue lakes, including the adjacent Lake Mahkee-nac, where he would often fish and boat. Always accompanied by his personal secretary Poynton on outings, Carnegie was fond of playfully asking him, “How much did you say I had given away, Poynton?”

  “$324,657,399,” was the reply.

  “Good Heaven! Where did I ever get all that money?” an energized Carnegie would say in jest.

  Louise was revitalized, too, writing a friend:

  I am charmed with my first glimpse of it which I had in the setting sun last evening. It is a grand mixture of Aultnagar and the Cottage; the fine trees at the back suggest this; all on the scale of Skibo. The Patersons’ house and furnishings are so Scotch I feel I have crossed the ocean and am in Scotland itself on a fine estate.

  I am now consideri
ng the human element. There are pros and cons, but life is a mixture and we must take it as we find it. Our life here would be an Americanized Skibo, with a fair amount of social life but not as hectic as Bar Harbor. One can be independent here; but more when we meet.37

  There was no need for such a huge estate—Carnegie’s social life was limited to lunches and teas with a few friends—but the feeling of having been transported to Scotland was crucial to sustaining Carnegie. He was desperate to live to see peace restored.

  Events unfolding in Europe were on a revolutionary scale, but none portended the end of hostilities. To the contrary, in fact. Riots struck Petrograd, Russia, in March 1917, the result of severe food shortages. Russian soldiers refused to suppress the uprisings, further undermining the government. Czar Nicholas was forced to abdicate and was exiled to western Siberia, later to be executed along with his entire family. At first, the provisional government pledged to continue the war, but with the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution in November, which put Lenin and Trotsky in power, all alliances were nullified. In March 1918, an armistice with Germany was signed. The capitulation was a potential disaster for western Europe, for it permitted the kaiser to transfer all his troops to that arena.

  Unable to return to Skibo in 1917 due to the war, Andrew and Louise Carnegie summered in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. There, Louise had purchased the second-largest private home in the United States. (Courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh)

  Carnegie and Morley, seemingly oblivious to the events, preferred to take a tour of the past that winter, the catalyst being the publication of Morley’s memoirs. In New York, Carnegie devoured every word and rediscovered fleeting contentment:

  Your wonderful book of recollections has given me rare and unalloyed pleasure. You have dealt with matters of state as no others could in my opinion, especially those of India and Ireland, and everyone here is extolling the book. I have read every word and it is as if I were again talking these things all over with you face to face on the terrace at Skibo. Your references to me are all too flattering, but I am not altogether displeased, though you know my modest nature.

  I feel confident that with America’s help, the great war cannot last much longer, and Madam and I are thinking and talking of the time when we will return to Skibo and have you with us once more.38

  He had good cause to anticipate the war’s conclusion: Wilson had made his seminal Fourteen Points speech, a statement on war aims and a proposal for peace, while troops under John “Black Jack” Pershing prepared to flood the western European theater in the nick of time.

  Reinforced German troops pushed forward in the spring after Russia’s withdrawal, but there was a marked change in the soldiers: new recruits were mostly very green youngsters or men over forty. Due to war, starvation, and disease, the German population was depleted. On the Allied side, by contrast, the Yankee doughboys filling out the ranks were filled with eager anticipation and revitalized the front. By the end of July, a counteroffensive was under way; and by September, all of Germany’s gains from the spring were erased. In mid-September, the Allied forces launched the Saint-Mihiel offensive, and on November 4, the British broke through the German lines. “Now that the world war seems practically at an end I cannot refrain from sending you my heartfelt congratulations upon the great share you have had in bringing about its successful conclusion,” Carnegie wrote Wilson on November 10. “The Palace of Peace at the Hague would, I think, be the fitting place for dispassionate discussion regarding the destiny of the conquered nations, and I hope your influence may be exerted in that direction.”39

  That same day, the kaiser boarded a train bound for the Netherlands, where he would die in exile. On the 11th day of the 11th month at 11:00 a.m. the war was officially declared over. “I know your heart must rejoice at the dawn of peace after these terrible years of struggle,” Wilson replied to Carnegie two days after the signing, “for I know how long and earnestly you have worked for and desired such conditions as I pray God it may now be possible for us to establish. The meeting place of the Peace Conference has not yet been selected, but even if it is not held at The Hague, I am sure you will be present in spirit.”40

  While Carnegie and the world celebrated, Morley remained his gloomy self. He would come to believe the ensuing peace process was a mockery, declaring that “to the end of time” it would “always be a case of ‘Thy head or my head.’”41 Indeed, the humiliating Versailles Treaty forced on Germany would ensure his prophecy. In a birthday greeting to Carnegie, Morley was surprisingly upbeat, reflecting on the old days once again and pondering, “I sometimes dream that you may cross the Atlantic this summer. Shall I? ‘I hae ma doots.’ Do you reproach me? You were always the bolder and more valiant of the two.”42

  With the war concluded, Carnegie pressed his personal physician, Dr. Garmany, for permission to go. Without it, Louise would never agree. “If you go,” the doctor would say, “you may not come back.”

  “What difference does it make if I don’t?”43

  The Great War was the war to end all wars. The Republic had saved Europe. Peace reigned. Order was restored. And Margaret fell in love with Roswell Miller Jr., who had driven ambulances in Europe during the war, before enlisting as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. Carnegie was friends with Roswell Sr., the highly respected former chairman of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, so when the ensign asked for his Baba’s hand in marriage, he didn’t hesitate to answer. “He wept,” Louise wrote in her diary, “but was dear and gave it.”44

  On April 22, the thirty-second anniversary of Andrew and Louise’s marriage, Margaret and Roswell were married at the Highlands home. “Margaret made a very lovely bride,” Louise faithfully noted in her diary. “Decorations of spring flowers were fine. Andrew so well and alert. He and I gave Baba away and later we walked down the aisle together.” But between her private schools and his travels, Carnegie was giving away a daughter he never really knew nor she him; Louise even admitted to Margaret that circumstances prevented her “from ever really knowing your dear Daddy.” She didn’t serve a function in his life other than that of a daughter to be raised by her mother. Unlike Rockefeller and Morgan, who included their sons in their business dealings and desired a dynasty, Carnegie pursued a solitary agenda as he had his entire life.

  Certainly, Carnegie had been a doting father when home, and he had never hesitated to sing her praises and was particularly pleased when Margaret asked hard questions about God. “She is developing fast—puzzles her mother about certain things in Holy Writ now & then that gives Madam some anxiety,” he divulged to Morley. “She does her best & I say, all right, Lou—I’ll not give you away. Do the best you can—but remember she’ll find out the truth before long for herself & Lou agrees, Yes, she won’t rest until she is satisfied.”45 On another occasion, he wrote that “she grows troublesome on Bible Stories, very, her Mother stalled & sometimes appalled at her temer-ity—but she has past the Fairytale period.”46 She had grown up to be much like her father, independent and stubborn, which led to clashes with him. Peace at home was as elusive as peace on the international stage.

  Now a freethinking twenty-two-year-old adult, Margaret was more skeptical of her father’s benefactions in the name of peace than ever before. What purpose did they serve? What had been gained? Over two decades, Carnegie had expended an estimated $25 million toward peace, and yet there were an estimated 13 million military deaths in World War I alone. By now, she was also well versed in the robber baron heritage he embodied and found it impossible to reconcile his business legacy with that of the benevolent philanthropist. As she later directed her father’s official biographer, “Tell his life like it was. I’m sick of the Santa Claus stuff.”47 There was too much hypocrisy for her; she wanted nothing to do with his philanthropic work, along with its pomp and circumstance, which rang so hollow to her.

  When John Barrett, president of the Pan American Union, representing the twenty-one Central and South A
merican countries, expressed his hope Margaret would accept an award and speak on her father’s behalf at a celebration scheduled for that May in Washington, she demurred. Even though she was going to be in town, it was her honeymoon, she complained. Disappointed, Louise wrote her daughter a stern reprimand: “Mrs. Miller told me yesterday that John Barrett was on your track. I know how you will feel about this, but know although you will be firm, you will be polite to him, for he means well; he is a great friend of Daddy’s in carrying out his work for conciliation in Central and South America; besides now that you are married you are no longer irresponsible children, but owe something to the dignity of both your families and I know you will not fail us.”

  Margaret relented and agreed to attend the ceremony. Elated, Louise wrote: “It makes me so happy to know that you are gaining a true appreciation of Daddy and his wonderful work in the world; and to have him still with us, so that you can come back to him with this new attitude in your heart, makes me very happy. . . . If you could have seen the heavenly smile that broke over his face as I rushed up to him after breakfast and told him about your letter it would have made you very happy. I am going to show him his gold medal from the twenty-one Republics. You see how much pleasure you are giving Daddy by being happy and appreciative yourself.”48

  More so than ever, Carnegie, forever desperate to conquer an illusionary world, could proclaim, “All is well since all grows better.”

  Notes

  1. AC to J. Allen Baker, August 2, 1914, ACLOC, vol. 225.

  2. Robert Franks to John A. Poynton, August 3, 1914, ACLOC, vol. 225.

  3. John Morley to AC, August 4, 1914, ACLOC, vol. 225.

  4. Frederick Lynch to AC, August 6, 1914, ACLOC, vol. 225.

  5. Hendrick, Carnegie, vol. 2, p. 347.

  6. Ibid., p. 348.