Denis Brogan on a capable Scot
Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall (ouP £6.50) As one of the two richest American million- aires, Andrew Carnegie was bound to become a striking example of capitalist wickedness; for left-wing demonology he remained a bad man because of the catastrophe of the Home- stead strike. But the interest of Carnegie is not merely that he alienated the workers of the world at a time when 'The Red Flag' was beginning to circulate in Britain, but that he was the most interesting, amusing and unconsciously humbuggish of the great American entrepreneurs of the second half of the nineteenth century.
He was born in Dunfermline where the linen business was going so rapidly downhill that the Carnegie family made their long, laborious, and almost desperate voyage to Pennsylvania. There a new world was opened to them in which young Andrew Carnegie could exploit his quite remarkable talents and demoniac energy which by 1900 made him, along with Rockefeller of Standard Oil, one of the two richest men in the world. Although Carnegie's original skill was his training as a boy telegraph-operator, he be- came a very competent assessor of the tech- niques of the burgeoning iron and steel industry, and an extremely good judge of men. (He had other advantages which make him more interesting than the elder Rocke- feller. His kinsmen in Dunfermline were Chartists. His mild and ineffective father became a Swedenborgian. though Andrew's mother, like Andrew himself, was not a member of any orthodox Presbyterian church in Scotland, and Andrew, in fact, caused a great deal of scandal by his notorious 'infidelity'.) Carnegie's agnosticism had, of course, dis- advantages as well as advantages. The dis- advantages fell mainly on his employees for, as a good disciple of Herbert Spencer (whom he largely misunderstood, as Professor Wall points out), he was able to work his em- ployees seven days a week, wasting no time in teaching in Sunday schools, as Rocke- feller, father and son. did. His employees wasted no time in Sunday schools either or in any other activities that were non-profit- making for their employers. After a period of being a strong radical in his ancestral country, and an incredibly successful entre- preneur in his adopted country, Carnegie became one of the most widely attacked millionaires after the great fight with the Pinkerton detectives at Homestead.
Carnegie had some attractive qualities, apart from his almost miraculous power of accumulating money. He was a naïve self- improver. He never quite forgot his Chartist ancestry, and in his old age was very here- tical about the immunity of Big Business from public control. In fact, he disliked businessmen. What he wanted was to be received among the intelligentsia. He was proud to be a close friend of John Morley, and reverently admired Mr Gladstone. He found it harder to be successful in finding American intellectuals to admire and sub- sidise (that perhaps showed his good judg- ment). But he stands, with John D. Rocke- feller T. as one of the two greatest 'philan- thropists' in the sense of giving a great deal of money away to good causes, even if some of the causes were rather silly. (He did not turn over the administration of his founda- tions or of his private charities to professional
administrators nearly as completely as the elder Rockefeller did.) By the time he died in 1919, Carnegie had given away most of his immense wealth, although he left what most people would consider a very substantial for- tune—several million dollars—to his wife and only child.
Professor Wall's book is fascinating and irritating. It tells us much more about Carnegie, about his activities, about his ambitions, and even about his faults than does the old life by Burton J. Hendrick. One would like to say that it is a parallel to the lives of Rockefeller by Allan Nevins. Alas, it isn't. Professor Wall is a quite remarkably bad writer, and it is difficult at times to know what language he thinks he is writing. It is not only a question of lacking style but of lacking clarity. And of course it is rarely that there is a flash of humour or of serious criticism of Carnegie who certainly was open to a good deal of criticism. Although Car- negie was the kind of capable Scot that Robert Louis Stevenson detested, he had a gratifying streak of eccentricity, and the very fact that he wasted a good deal of his money on benefactions of moderate interest is rather attractive. So also is his immense optimism and self-satisfaction. It took the First World War to break his belief that the good time was coming or had almost arrived; to shake his optimism it took the discovery that giving away a great deal of money wisely required even more talent than the process of accumulation. Mr Dooley said that Carnegie gave away money 'with no more noise than a waiter falling downstairs with a trayload of dishes'. But very few British millionaires have been anything like as intelligently generous with their funds as Andrew Carnegie was. His foundations sur- vive on the whole very well, which is more than could be said of the various country houses, castles, and the rest built by am- bitious businessmen in this country on their way into the empty and sterile life of being bourgeois gentlemen.
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