Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Andrew Carnegie Born November 25, 1835 (Dunfermline, Scotland) Died August 11, 1919 (Lenox, Massachusetts) Industrialist Philanthropist ‘‘There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.’’ 30 D uring his lifetime Andrew Carnegie’s name immediately brought forth thoughts of the immense wealth he made through the steel empire he created almost singlehandedly. The Scottish-born businessman possessed tremendous foresight and sharp managerial skills, and the innovations he brought to American industry revolutionized it and helped make the country a global economic power in the years following his death. Carnegie’s legacy, however, involved more than making money. Carnegie came from a humble background and gave generously in his lifetime. After nearly thirty years in the steel industry, Carnegie sold his company to Wall Street financial backer J. P. Morgan (1837–1913; see entry) in 1901, and the deal made him the richest man in the world. He used it to fund his philanthropic efforts (aid given to promote human welfare), which centered on public libraries and schools in the United States and England. At the time of his death in 1919, Carnegie had given away nearly 90 percent of his fortune. Andrew Carnegie. (AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.) Carnegie background The story of Carnegie’s rise from his poor beginnings became a symbolic success story of the American dream for generations of new immigrants. He was born on November 25, 1835, in Dunfermline, Scotland. Dunfermline was a noted textile center, and Carnegie’s father was a handloom weaver by trade. In the late 1840s, however, steam-powered looms became standard in the mills, and many in Dunfermline found themselves out of a job. Carnegie’s father, William, was among the unemployed. Weavers in Andrew Carnegie 31 Scotland attempted to organize and demand some economic reforms that would protect their livelihoods, but they were unsuccessful. The hardship of these years made a tremendous impression on young Carnegie, and though his own industry was guided by the same principles as those of the mills—favoring productivity over job protection—he would later attempt to improve the lives of the working class through other means. Margaret Carnegie, his mother, believed that a better life could be made in America, and she convinced her husband to relocate the family there. The family, which also included Andrew’s younger brother, Thomas, left in 1848 and settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. They lived in poor quarters, and William Carnegie had a difficult time finding a job that could support the household. Although he was just thirteen, Andrew soon went to work to help out, finding a job as a bobbin boy in a textile mill. His duty was to collect the used spindles of yarn from the looms. He progressed from that to a better job as a messenger in a telegraph office, and from there to being a telegraph operator. The year he turned eighteen he was chosen by the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad company’s western division, Thomas Scott, to become his personal telegraph operator and office assistant. Carnegie spent the next twelve years with the Penn Railroad, which was one of the major transportation lines in its day. Two years into the job, in 1855, his father died, and Carnegie became the sole supporter of his mother and brother. Because he had entered the working world at such a young age, he had little formal education, but he spent his free time reading about a variety of subjects. He was a frequent visitor to the local free library, where anyone could come in to read. He also took night school courses in bookkeeping and advanced to other positions within the railroad company. In 1859, when Scott became a vice president, he made Carnegie the supervisor of the Penn Railroad’s western lines. The division prospered under Carnegie’s shrewd management, and he even invented a military telegraph system for Union Army communications during the American Civil War (1861–65; a war between the Union [the North], who were opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy [the South], who were in favor of slavery). 32 Development of the Industrial U.S.: Biographies The Age of Steel During his years as a railroad executive, Carnegie also began making investments in other businesses. After meeting George Pullman (1831–1897), inventor of the sleeping car for trains, he bought a stake in the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company for $217. Within two years that investment was yielding an annual return of nearly $5,000. Carnegie also began buying partnerships in iron mills and factories, and in 1865 he decided to retire from the Penn Railroad and start his own firm. His Keystone Bridge Company constructed bridges from iron, which was quickly replacing wood as the standard material, and, like nearly everything that Carnegie established, the business prospered. During this time he also sold bonds in both the United States and England for railroad and bridge company enterprises and reportedly earned $1 million in commissions in a five-year period. By 1870 Carnegie was convinced that steel would soon become the building material of choice for the growing United States. Steel was produced by combining iron with carbon, but in its early days the process was difficult. On a visit to England, Carnegie saw huge Bessemer furnaces, in which impurities were removed from molten iron by compressed air. The process had been patented by Henry Bessemer (1813–1898) in 1855. It was an inexpensive way to make steel, which lasted longer than iron and was lighter in weight. Prior to the Bessemer method, steel was made from iron, and about three tons of coke, a fuel made from coal, were needed to fire the furnaces for each ton of steel produced. The extensive Bessemer factories in Sheffield, England, were producing steel using the new method, and Carnegie quickly realized the advantages of it. By 1872 he had two Bessemer-type furnaces in operation at mills he owned in Pennsylvania, and soon he founded his first business devoted fully to the manufacture of steel, Carnegie, McCandless, and Company, which later became simply Carnegie Steel. The company opened its first completely operational plant in 1875 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. It was named the J. Edgar Thomson Works, after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The two companies were linked in another way as well, for the first major order at Carnegie’s new plant came from the railroad for two thousand steel rails. Railroads were Andrew Carnegie 33 the main form of transportation at the time, with hundreds of miles of new tracks being laid down every year as Americans moved westward. Steel for the nation Henry Clay Frick (above) and Andrew Carnegie were business partners for many years. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress.) Carnegie had been correct: steel was cheaper than iron to produce, and the price of rails fell sharply from $160 per ton in 1875 to $17 per ton in 1900. Open-hearth steel production, another innovation he introduced, also lowered the manufacturing costs, and his firm prospered. The openhearth method allowed for greatly increased temperatures which normal furnaces and fuels had been unable to reach, to remove impurities from pig iron. By 1878 Carnegie Steel was worth $1.3 million and was the leading steel manufacturer in the United States. In 1881 Carnegie bought a stake in a thriving Pennsylvania coke company owned by Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919). Coke was in plentiful supply thanks to Pennsylvania’s coal mines, and soon the Carnegie plants were producing two thousand tons of steel daily. The partnership between the two industrial leaders was a successful one for many years. Frick oversaw day-to-day operations, while Carnegie was responsible for expansion and costcutting measures at the plants. He made a wise purchase of a rival in 1883 when he bought the Homestead Works, whose mills churned out the steel structural elements for elevated railways in New York City and Boston, Massachusetts. Homestead also provided the steel beams used in the new skyscrapers rising in American cities, including the first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago, Illinois. Carnegie’s company made large profits over the next two decades, providing steel for thousands of miles of rail and a great number of buildings. The company was also instrumental 34 Development of the Industrial U.S.: Biographies in the creation of landmarks, with both the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia and New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge built using steel from Carnegie’s plants. Even during a serious economic downturn, the Depression of 1893–96, Carnegie’s company remained successful because of his sound management. He was earning a salary of nearly $25 million annually by 1890 and was regarded as one of the country’s most impressive business minds. One major setback came in 1892, however, when workers at the Homestead facility went on strike. Initially Carnegie was not opposed to labor unions, unlike many of his fellow industrialists—in fact, in one of the many articles he authored, he argued in an 1886 issue of Forum Magazine that workers should have the right to form a union. But Carnegie’s view changed and he opposed the unionization of the workers in his plants, believing that unions interfered with good company management. Frick, on the other hand, had always been strongly opposed to organized labor. Strike at Carnegie’s company When the Homestead workers went on strike in mid-1892, Carnegie was in Scotland on his annual summer vacation. Frick, left in charge, was determined to break the hold of the union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, at the company’s mills. He enlisted guards of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who had gained a reputation as dedicated strike-busters, and the Homestead picket line erupted into violence. In the end five workers and three Pinkerton agents died, and many more were left injured. The incident captured national attention, and the Pennsylvania governor sent in the state militia to maintain order. It was a bitter end, and Frick became one of the main enemies of the labor movement, even being targeted for an assassination attempt. The Homestead workers remained locked out, however, and no other union attempted to organize at a Carnegie plant until the 1930s. Carnegie and Frick parted ways in 1899, and the following year a dispute over the market value of the coke that Frick’s plants sold to Carnegie’s had to be settled by lawyers after a lawsuit was filed. Carnegie had already begun his extensive philanthropic efforts by this time, and as the new century Andrew Carnegie 35