March 26, 2018 • 40 mins
Carnegie was a child of poverty who became one of the richest men on Earth. But his life, while largely charmed, had a massive scar of bad judgment on it. He also decided that the most important thing he could do with his money was to give it away.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, have
you ever wondered how Pittsburgh got the nickname steel Town?
I have some ideas. It's thanks in part to today's
(00:24):
podcast subject. We're talking about Andrew Carnegie, and that's I
want to make a note about his last name, because
you'll hear it said Carnegie pretty frequently. UM. Carnegie with
more of an A sound is also not uncommon, and
we've talked about him on the show, and I think
we've used probably both of those pronunciations because there's so
much variants. Um. For the purposes of this, since it
(00:45):
is all about his life, we're gonna go with Carnegie
because that sounds the closest to the way his family
seems to pronounce it. Uh. So I might say, we're gonna,
we're gonna try to do that. Yeah, But it's one
of those things where when you have said something a
certain way or entire life, and then you try to
say it a different way, sometimes you mess it up
and you don't notice until you're queueing the podcast and
(01:08):
then it's too late to do it over. That is correct,
and because it isn't of those things like I don't
think I have ever heard anybody utter the words Carnegie Hall,
but they say Carnegie Hall all the time. Yeah, same
same thing. So keep in mind that's just part of
like that cultural pronunciation shift that sometimes happens. We're going,
we're going for the correct one. We may slip up.
(01:29):
But the point is that his life story is one
that is pretty inspiring in some ways. It's uh the
story of a child who started out and just abject
poverty and then went on to make more money than
he ever could have possibly imagined when he was that
child that was part of a family that was really struggling.
But his life while largely charmed, and I don't I
(01:52):
don't want to make it sound like he didn't earn anything,
because he worked really hard and he was really good
at seeing opportunities and then working really hard to make
those opportunities work for him. Um, But there was some
charm in it that those opportunities did come up in
his life. He did, however, have one sort of massive
scar of bad judgment in his life. Um. But then
(02:15):
famously and what he's probably most known for today is
the fact that he decided that the most important thing
that he could do with his millions and millions and
millions of dollars was to give it all away. Yeah.
One of the things that's really interesting to me about
him is, like today you will hear a lot of
people talk about wealth disparity as a problem, and he
(02:36):
had he had no issues whatsoever with wealth disparity. He
was like, he just sort of thought that was how
its life's gonna be. It's no problem with that, but
that the people that had all the wealth should be
doing useful things with it, uh, which to me is
an interesting point of view. Yeah. Andrew Carnegie was born
on November five and done Farmland, Scotland. His father, will
(03:00):
Him was a weaver and Dunfermline had been known for
quite some time for beautiful linen and particularly for its
damask Lennon. William struggled in his trade as industrialization became
more and more common and hand loomed goods couldn't keep
up as steam powered looms became more and more popular.
The family really struggled to make ends meet, but William
(03:22):
was obstinate that he wanted to remain a weaver, even
though he couldn't really support his family doing that, and
as a Chartist, William Carnegie believed that the way to
make change was to get working men elected into parliament
so that they could make change at the legislative level
that would help working men like him. If you're not
familiar with the term chartists, that sort of sums up
(03:42):
the whole thing. It was a national working class effort
at parliamentary reform. So William and his brother in law,
Tom Morrison both were committed to the Chartist cause. They
were organizing strikes, they were writing for Chartist publications, and meanwhile,
Andrew's mother, Margaret Morrison Carnegie, stepped up by taking work
mending shoes and running a small grocery to try to
(04:04):
keep the family afloat. Seeing his parents struggle and also
living in poverty as a child deeply impacted the young Andrew. Yeah,
he wrote about it later in his life, we'll talk
about that, but basically he seeing his father have to
beg for work really really stuck with him forever. Margaret's sister,
in the meantime, had moved to the United States and
(04:25):
settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was there for like eight
years before it started to become a possibility for the
Carnegies to follow, and Margaret's sister was writing letters back
to Scotland assuring Margaret the conditions were far better in
the US, particularly for working people, and these missives really
started Margaret thinking about across atlantic move as one of
(04:47):
the family's few remaining options at making a better life.
She managed to convince William that it was worth the risk,
and to be clear, this was a lot of risk.
Once they got to the United States, they would have
less than nothing. They had to sell all their belongings
and then borrow money on top of that, just to
pay for the voyage. The Carnegie's that's William, Margaret, Andrew,
(05:11):
and Andrew's younger brother Thomas, crammed into small quarters on
the Wickessett, which was a ship sailing from Glasgow for
a fifty day voyage. No surprise, this was not a
great way to spend nearly two months. Passengers were often
asked to help out with tasks aboard the underman ship,
but many were too sea sick or just weak from
poor nutrition. This was not a luxury cruise. They weren't
(05:34):
really getting everything they needed. And Andrew would volunteer for
various additional duties in exchange for favors or a little
extra food or some other benefit for his family. The
Carnegiees made their trip across the Atlantic in and Ellis
Island wouldn't open for another forty four years. The Wickessett
(05:54):
landed on the southern tip of Manhattan at the Battery.
They had several more legs of the journey, you though,
to make by boat. First, they took a steamer to
Albany along the Hudson River. Then they made their way
to Buffalo via the Erie Canal, and from there they
took several more smaller legs to get to the north
side of Pittsburgh, which at that point was Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
(06:16):
Yeah that that Allegheny township eventually got absorbed into the
larger Pittsburgh metro area. But if you look at a
map and you chart out this route that they took,
it becomes immediately obvious that it was really a long
way to do it. Uh. And these were, as I
mentioned a moment ago, about as distant from luxury cruises
as you could get. The family was, of course very poor,
(06:38):
and they were traveling at the cheapest rates that they
could get, and it took three weeks to get from
the battery in Manhattan to the Pittsburgh area, a trip
that today takes about six hours by car or ninety
minutes by direct flight. Margaret might have had romantic ideas
about the new life that she and her family were
going to start in pennsylvani You, but once they got there,
(07:02):
they had some harsh realities waiting for them. For one,
the city was already dealing with pollution from industrialization. A
fire that had ravaged the downtown area three years before
they got there from Scotland left the city with a
coat of soot that was still there. Carnegie would later
(07:22):
write that if you washed the soot off your face
and your hands, they would be coated again an hour later.
And it wasn't a place where a newcomer family with
no money could live in any kind of comfort. He
described this as a more or less miserable situation. William
Carnegie did find work. He got a job working in
a cotton factory, and for a while Andrew worked in
(07:44):
the same factory as a bobbin boy. He was paid
a dollar twenty per week to run Bobbin's two the
weavers as needed, and on occasion to perform maintenance tasks
on the machines. Later in his life, Carnegie wrote of
this time quote, it was a hard life in the winter, father,
and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness,
reach the factory before it was daylight, and with a
(08:05):
short interval for lunch, work till after dark. The hours
hung heavily upon me, and in the work itself. I
took no pleasure, but the cloud had a silver lining,
as it gave me the feeling that I was doing
something for the world, my family. I've made millions since,
but none of those millions gave me such happiness as
my first week's earnings. Soon, the young Andrew moved into
(08:28):
a different factory job, working with a boiler and a
steam engine. This was hard work, but it offered a
substantial rays over being a bomb and boy. Now he
was making two dollars a week. Through a connection of
his uncle's, Andrew transition to another job as a messenger
for the City Telegraph Office in eighteen fifty, when he
(08:49):
was fourteen. He was a really hard worker, and he
took these duties very seriously. He made a point to
memorize all the streets of Pittsburgh, as well as the
names and addresses of singer recipients that were frequent, so
that he could be as efficient as possible in his job.
Part of this was so he could recognize any of
the gentlemen that might be receiving a telegram message or
(09:11):
any of their servants on the street and be able
to hand something off without maybe always having to go
full distance to deliver it, so he could be way
faster and get more done. Initially, he was not sure
if he could handle this job, and in his interview
he told the hiring manager as much, but he also
said that he would do his best and that he
would like a trial, and his worries were unfounded. He
did really well, and he had moved up to earning
(09:33):
two dollars and fifty cents a week, and he found
the position he wrote quote in every respect a happy one.
He only had one suit that was appropriate to wear
to work, and it was the same suit that he
would normally wear it to church on Sunday, So when
he got hole blade on Saturday nights, his mother would
wash and press the suit so it would be ready
for the next day, and he wrote adoring lee about her, saying, quote,
(09:56):
there was nothing that Heroin did not do for the
struggle we were making for elbow room in the Western world. Yeah,
Andrew was very close to his mother, and that relationship
will be uh really important to how his life plays
out a little bit later. But even though he was
working in these, you know, sort of relatively menial jobs,
even though it had gotten much better as a messenger boy,
(10:19):
throughout all of this he was really drawn to both
culture and information. So when he found out that he
would have to deliver a telegraph message to a theater,
for example, he would arrange that to be one of
his last tasks of the day so that he could
then stay and watch the performances. And he also took
advantage of every possible opportunity he had when he had
access to books, and he read voraciously. We're going to
(10:42):
get into his transition in some more lucrative work after
we first take a little sponsor break. As a messenger,
Andrew would sweep the office in the morning before the
telegraph opera readers arrived, and one morning he actually took
(11:02):
a message that came through when no operators had yet
begun their shift, and he did a good enough job
that the operators started asking him to keep an eye
on the telegraph when they needed to step away. He
eventually learned to take messages by years, so without the
help of a running slip of paper to print the
message out, he would just write it down as he
heard it. A significant promotion followed when he subbed in
(11:24):
for another operator on a two week trial, because people
realized he was actually quite good at this, and he
was soon given the title of assistant operator and he
was making twenty five dollars a month. While working for
the telegraph office, Andrew met a man named Thomas A. Scott.
At the time, Scott was superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
(11:44):
Scott noticed how diligent and driven the young Carnegie was
and made him an offer to leave the telegraph office
and become Scott's private secretary and also run his personal
telegraph machine. Carnegie was offered thirty five dollars a month,
and to him it seemed like a fortune, so he
took this job and started learning about the railroad industry.
(12:06):
Carnegie was once again doing really well because he carried
that same work ethic into every position he had, and
he was making a name for himself at the Pennsylvania Railroad,
but his father, in the meantime, had not met with
success in the United States. After struggling to make enough
money through weaving jobs, William Carnegie made a stab at
entrepreneurship and he tried manufacturing his own cloth and then
(12:29):
selling it as a traveling salesman, but that really never
took off. William died in eighteen fifty five when Andrew
was twenty, and that left the eldest son as the
primary breadwinner in the family. A year after William's death,
Andrew started to expand out his business efforts. He invested
in the Woodroft sleeping car Company with a loan, and
(12:50):
it paid off. Soon he was making five thousand dollars
a year from his investment, which was so much more
than he had been learning from his railroad income. He
was also promoted to railroad superintendent in eighteen fifty nine,
and he used his increased income to move himself and
his mother and to a nicer home. Yeah, there's an
interesting thing that plays out over and over where he
(13:12):
starts making more and more and more money on investments.
But for quite a while he actually still kept as
much lower paying job, which is kind of interesting to me.
When the Civil War began, Thomas Scott, his boss, was
hired by the Union to manage transportation of its troops.
It was pretty natural since he ran a railroad that
they were like, hey, why don't why don't you run
a similar set set up for us? Uh. Carnegie was
(13:34):
also hired. He was working alongside his boss as part
of the war effort, And meanwhile, his earnings from that
Sleeping Car company investment went toward a new business venture.
He invested eleven thousand dollars in oil in eighteen sixty one,
and he almost doubled his money in the first year.
I think he took in something like eighteen thousand dollars.
From there, he began diversifying his investments further and soon
(13:58):
he was earning more than forty and dollars a year
from them. That was a massive sum in the eighteen sixties.
Andrew Carnegie was drafted in eighteen sixty four, but he
didn't wind up serving. As part of the draft terms,
he had the option to pay a sum of three
hundred dollars or find a replacement to serve in his stead.
So he opted to pay another man eight hundred and
(14:20):
fifty dollars to fail to fill his slot, and by
the time the war ended, Andrew Carnegie had come to
the realization that the iron industry had great potential, and
in a surprising move, he left the Pennsylvania Railroad and
he started a new company in eighteen sixty five called
the Keystone Bridge Company. Keystone's entire business was upgrading existing
(14:42):
wooden bridges to startier iron structures, and this proved to
be extremely lucrative. Just a few years into it, he
had made himself wealthy. In eighteen sixty seven he started
the Keystone Telegraph Company, which cut such a lucrative deal
with the Pennsylvania Railroad to run telegraph wire on the
railroad's polls that Carnegie and his partners were able to
(15:04):
flip the business and triple their money in a very
short period of time. His estimated worth in eighteen sixty
eight was four hundred thousand dollars, so caveat it is
always really tricky to convert historical worth into modern value,
but a rough estimate is that this was about five
million dollars. He was only thirty three, Yeah, and I
(15:27):
did want to point out that, you know, he was
making these deals still with the Pennsylvania Railroads, So even
though he had left, he really left on good terms
and maintained business dealings with them for a long time
that were always quite positive. And riding high on his
string of successes, Andrew Carnegie decided that he was only
going to give business two more years before turning to
(15:48):
a life of philanthropy. He wrote this plan out in
a letter to himself in eighteen sixty eight, and he
had calculated out that he could live comfortably off the
money he had made by allocating himself fifty thousand dollars
each year and then using the rest of the money
to benefit causes that he believed in. But in eighteen
seventy he wasn't quite ready to say goodbye. It's all
(16:10):
these various industries. That same year, he also met a
young woman named Louise Whitfield through a mutual friend, and
Andrew became social with the Whitfield family. Yeah, he was
interested in Louise, but he was interested in a lot
of women. It was pretty casual um. But then, when
Carnegie was almost thirty seven, he learned about Henry Bessemer's
(16:31):
refining process that could convert large amounts of iron into steel,
and he learned about that while he was visiting Bessemer's
plants in England. Carnegie believed so strongly in this process
and the steel that it turned out that he invested
all of his money plus alone, so that's a lot
of money at that point to build a steel plant
in Pittsburgh. The plant was completed in eighteen seventy five
(16:54):
and it was named the Edgar Thompson Works after the
head of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And a teen eighty Andrew
began a relationship with Louise Whitfield, and this courtship was
a bit of a May December romance because Andrew was
forty five at the time and Louise was twenty three,
but it appears to have stayed pretty innocent, in part
because Andrew had promised his mother that he would never
(17:17):
marry while she was still alive. Andrew and his mother
were incredibly close, and as he became the primary breadwinner
in the family, he had assured his mother that he
would provide for the comforts that she had gone without
when he was growing up, so they were together a
great deal of the time, and his mother, Margaret was
even known to walk into business meetings along with her son. Yeah.
(17:40):
I think he was trying to make up for the
the bad times they had had in the past, and
so he really was a little bit indulgent of her,
But he adored her. And while some people might have
been chagrined at this kind of obstacle, Louise was actually
in a unique position to understand Andrew Carnegie's prioritization of
his mother. Louise was also very very close to her mother,
(18:02):
who needed ongoing medical care. In eighteen eighty one, Andrew
became business partners with Henry Clay Frick by practising a
controlling interest in Frick's Coke Company. Coke was a coal
based fuel. That same year, he took his mother, Margaret
back to Scotland, and he asked Louise Whitfield to join
them on the trip. His mother, though, shut that idea
(18:23):
completely down. Yeah, she was not cool with it. Two
years later, Andrew bought an additional steel mill, the Homestead Works,
and he also became secretly engaged to Louise in the
autumn of eighteen eighty three. Content it seemed to just
wait out the remainder of Margaret Carnegie's life. This is
something we would describe as in modern terms, not having
(18:47):
healthy boundaries. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because Louise's mother
was very close to Louise, but really was kind of
the opposite. She was like, no, I want you to
go out and be with other people and live your
own life, whereas Louise was like, but I want to
take care of you. And Andrew Carnegie's mother seemed like, no, no,
this you promised me me first. So three years into
(19:11):
this engagement, in the summer of eighteen eighty six, Andrew
wrote to Louise, quote, I have not written to you
because it seems you and I have duties which must
keep us apart. Everything does hang upon our mothers. With
both of us, our duty is the same to stick
to them to the last. I feel this every day.
An essay written by Andrew Carnegie was published in Forum
(19:34):
magazine in eight six, and in it he wrote passionately
about workers rights, specifically their right to unionize. That was
a big year for Carnegie and the writing department. He
also published a book entitled Triumphant Democracy, and this work
celebrated the United States Republic and suggested that Great bit
(19:54):
Britain could benefit from following a similar model to the
one that was in place in the States. Yeah, it
was very Uh. It kind of suggested that the the
United States had become the next step kind of an
evolution of of Great Britain society, like in going out
and colonizing. They had kind of gotten to that next
(20:15):
level in his opinion. Carnegie lost both his brother and
his mother in a very short period of time. Thomas
died in October from pneumonia that he had initially thought
was just a cold, and the following month, Margaret Carnegie
died also from pneumonia. She had already been quite ill
(20:36):
when Thomas, who was living in Georgia at the time, died,
and nobody actually told her of her younger son's passing
for fear of upsetting her while she was so ill. Similarly,
when Margaret died, Andrew was sick with typhoid and his
mother's death was not immediately relaid to him. Uh. They
actually lowered her coffin out of a bedroom window so
he would not see it passing in the hallway. After
(20:59):
Margaret Carnegi died, it removed that obstacle that had kept
Andrew and Louise from beginning of life together, but the
couple waited to announce their plan to marry out of
respect for Margaret and because Andrew was still quite sick
for a while. But as he later wrote, quote I
recovered slowly in the future began to occupy my thoughts.
There was only one ray of hope and comfort in it.
(21:21):
That comfort, of course, was Louise. And while Andrew had
spent time with other women, it was more apparent to
him than ever that she was the one he wanted
to spend his life with, and their engagement had been
on again, off again. It wasn't like they were two
people so passionately in love that they were like anything,
We'll get through anything. For example, when he wrote her
that letter and was like, that's pretty much all about
(21:43):
our moms. That was kind of like a break up,
a down period. Yeah, it was kind of like not
really going to happen. And so when he first reached
out after having this revelation and was like, I am
ready you and me, he was initially a bit surprised
that she kind of came off a little indifferent to him.
She had also spent time with potential suitors as well,
(22:05):
some of whom were younger than Carnegie and closer to
her own age. But more importantly, she really wanted to
be an important contributor in her spouses life, and she
just wasn't sure that a man was so much money
could ever really need her. She visited him while he
was staying with some friends, and she saw, in Andrew's
words quote that I needed her. I was left alone
(22:26):
in the world. So Andrew and Louise were married on
April seven. The ceremony took place in Louise's family home
with just thirty guests and no attendants. Andrew was fifty
one when he married Louise, who was thirty. Before the
wedding took place, Louise actually signed a pre nup indicating
that she did not want any of her fiance's money
(22:48):
and that he intended to give her nothing in the
will other than an allowance to live comfortably. In a moment,
we'll talk about how Andrew Carnegie's steel mill and homestead
Pennsylvania became the side of of the most violent conflicts
over workers rights in the United States history. But we're
going to take a little sponsor break before we get
to it. Carnegie's business interests had continued to yield a
(23:17):
massive income over the years, and throughout his life he
had always continued to champion the cause of the working man,
at least in word. Indeed, the situation was not actually
so rosy. In seven, the same year that he married Louise,
Carnegie had friction with Frick over a labor strike. Frick
(23:39):
wanted to form a coalition with other companies to shut
out laborers that wanted to strike, cutting off their source
of income. But at that point Carnegie and not Frick,
had the controlling share of the company, and he was
able to force a settlement. But this is really a
temporary stay in another conflict between mill workers at the
(24:01):
Carnegie owned Homestead Steel Mill and the management resulted in
a deadly conflict that contradicted the image of Carnegie as
a worker's rights advocate. The steel workers employed by Carnegie
and Frick faced incredibly dangerous working conditions for very poor pay.
Two years earlier, in nine, steel revenues had started to decline,
(24:24):
and then in Henry Frick slashed workers pay and set
out to break the steel workers union. And Andrew Carnegie
was not blameless in this conflict. For one thing, In
anticipation of the union contract expiring, Carnegie had told Frick
to increase production so that they would have the leverage
to shut down the plant if the workers didn't accept
(24:46):
the new terms without losing any ground in their production schedule.
Carnegie was in Great Britain as all this was playing out,
and he sent word to Frick that he supported Frick
in whatever he chose to do. Frick, embolden by the statement,
severely reduced the workers wages, and the workers who had
invested so much time and labor in increasing the mills revenue,
(25:09):
even some of them experiencing terrible accidents in the process.
We're not willing to back down. Frick declared that he
would not negotiate with the union and he would only
talk to individual workers. The dissolution of the union was
a point in the negotiations that just could not be resolved,
even after all the others were and then Frick closed
(25:30):
down the mill and locked all the workers out. Yeah,
at this point, it was kind of like one of
those situations where you know, there's a company that people
have been part of for a long time and they
feel like they are not necessarily part owners in the company,
but like that they own. They have a sense of
ownership over what the company is and the culture and
(25:52):
and that's really part of why these workers were so
invested in this. They were like, no, this is like
our home. We want to make it better and the
workers actually he tried to reach out to Carnegie, but
he was on vacation in Scotland and contact just couldn't
be made. Carnegie had wanted to do away with the
union because they stipulated a need for more men than
he wanted to pay, and he had left it to
(26:13):
Frick to organize a new setup, and he didn't think
the maintenance of a union at the mill was really
going to be the big issue that it turned out
to be. So Frick turned the mill into a veritable fort,
setting up a fence perimeter with rifle stations. Eventually he
also called in three D men from the Pinkerton Private Police.
(26:33):
When the Pinkerton detectives arrived, they were met by a
full force of mill workers and a twelve hour battle began.
Throughout this shootout, the Pinkerton's were trying to make landfall
because they had arrived at the mill on river barges,
but the workers were preventing most of their men from disembarking.
The Pinkerton forces actually tried to surrender four different times
(26:57):
over the course of the day that this shootout played out,
but their white flag was shot down each time, and
on the fifth try, the surrender was finally accepted, but
the aftermath was horrifying, with nearly a dozen people already dead.
The surrendering Pinkerton's were brutally beaten as a crowd of
reporters and onlookers watched the Pinkerton's left homestead, but then
(27:20):
Frick called in the National Guard so that strike breakers
could enter the mill to start working. Martial law was
declared over the mill, and the strike breaking workforce staffed
the mill basically up to normal production levels in a
matter of weeks, but the tensions in the town remained.
Strikebreakers were refused service in most businesses, and they risked
(27:43):
being attacked on the street if they actually left the mill.
An armed organized attack on the fifty black families who
had moved in to find work during the strike resulted
in multiple injuries, some of them very serious. The violence
that started with the Pinkerton's arrival in July of two
finally came to an end in November after the union
(28:04):
gave up. Strike leaders were charged with murder, and additional
charges were leveled at a hundred and sixty of the strikers,
but none of the men were convicted of their crimes.
And initially Carnegie, who had experienced the worst of this
stuff going on while he was across the Atlantic Ocean,
kind of saw the union giving in as a victory.
(28:25):
He was at that point able to increase the length
of the work day and cut wages as the mill
reorganized post strike to become more profitable. But he soon
felt regret over what had happened, and particularly over how
he had handled things, and a letter to William Gladstone,
Carnegie wrote, quote, such a foolish step contrary to my ideals,
(28:46):
repugnance every feeling of my nature. Our firm offered all
it could offer, even generous terms. Our other men had
gratefully accepted them. They went as far as I could
have wished. But the false step was made. And trying
to run the homestead works with new men, that is
a test to which working men should not be subjected,
(29:07):
is expecting too much of poor men to stand by
and see their work taken by others. That pain and
I suffer increases daily. The works are not worth one
drop of human blood. I wish they had sunk. Yeah,
he really really, pretty much for the rest of his
life regretted that whole thing in his part in it. Well,
and he's also like, simultaneously, uh makes it about him? Yeah, yeah.
(29:34):
And then also was like, the other men gratefully expected
these terms, right, well, so allegedly, and I didn't look
at the financial breakdown, but the terms that he had
offered in other mills, it seemed like the men could
potentially make more money, but they would not be able
to have a union, and that was so important to them.
(29:55):
Like to him, it seemed like, of course everybody would
want this, like it's just a union, you don't need that,
But he didn't realize that that was a vital part
of their well being as workers. Well, the fact that
they were working in a very dangerous environment for very
little pay kind of suggests that they did need the union, right,
exactly exactly, But to him, you know, I mean, I
(30:15):
think that happens in business all the time, where sometimes
people at the top of the food chain just look
at it as columns of numbers, and they don't think
about like the actual human lives that are involved in
producing the thing that their company makes, or uh, you know,
creating this environment where it's actually like safe and good
to work. Uh So, yeah, I think it was kind
(30:37):
of that situation. Uh. But despite the horrific violence of
the homestead strike, somehow Andrew Carnegie's business interests survived and
even thrived, and some historians have pointed to the fact
that the striking workers became so violent that they lost
a little bit of the sympathy in the public eye.
But his company, Carnegie Steele, was out producing Great Britain's
(30:59):
in tire steel industry just a few years later at
the turn of the century. But by hundred Andrew Carnegie,
who was in his mid sixties, was finally feeling ready
to spend more time with his family and less time working.
He and Louise had had a daughter named Margaret after
Andrew's mother in so even though he seemed to genuinely
(31:20):
love business, he was also probably in the right frame
of mind when the opportunity presented itself to sell everything
he had. JP Morgan offered to buy Carnegie out that year,
and after thinking the matter, over Andrew Carnegie decided that
it was indeed time to leave business and begin philanthropy
and earnest. He had been doing philanthropic works prior to that,
(31:41):
but he decided that was kind of going to be
a second career. And so he wrote down his asking
price just on a little slip of paper, and he
had an employee of his hand deliver it. Morgan made
no counter offer, but immediately accepted the deal, and bart
And bought Carnegie Steel for four hundred and eighty million dollars.
Of that, some Rneggie walked away with two d and
(32:01):
fifty million dollars. The portion that went to Carnegie has
been estimated and a modern value somewhere between four and
five billion dollars. Yeah, and that's one of those things. Uh.
Sometimes you'll see it reported a little bit in a
confusing way, because since there are two figures involved there,
that four hundred and eighty million purchase price versus the
(32:22):
two fifty million that was Carnegie's out of that deal,
you'll sometimes see one or the other just reported on
its own. So I wanted to make sure we included
both of those for clarity. Uh. And right in the
midst of this Sellout, by the way, was the time
that Cassie Chadwick was fading to be Carnegie's daughter in
a massive fraud scheme, and since Andrew Carnegie never really
knew anything about that until it came to light during
(32:45):
Chadwick's arrest and her trial, which he did attend, it
didn't really impact his life. It was not something he
really thought a whole lot about other than being uh, um,
kind of amused about it. But I wanted to contextualize
it on the timeline since that previous episode about Cassie
does mention Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie spent the rest of his
(33:06):
life trying to give away all his money. In nine
two years before the homestead strike, he had written a
popular book titled The Gospel of Wealth, in which he
wrote about the duty that wealthy men have to better
the lives of people with less. He was intent on
living up to that writing. He focused on giving money
away in ways that were enriching and would have lasting impact. Yeah,
(33:30):
he was He did not just want to hand people money.
He wanted to figure out how he could build something
into the world that would keep people enriched long term.
And as part of his philanthropic efforts. He built a
library and a concert hall in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and he
set up retirement funding for the workmen under the Andrew
Carnegie Relief Fund, writing that it was quote as an
(33:53):
acknowledgement of the deep debt which I owe the workman
who have contributed so greatly to my success. He funded
nearly three thousand libraries in the United States and abroad.
The library where I get most of my materials for
this podcast is in fact a Carnegie Library. He felt
that with access to knowledge and a desire to learn,
(34:15):
anyone could become educated, even outside of the formal education structures. Yes,
since that was really how he had become educated and
become a successful person, he thought like, I want to
give that avenue to everyone who might want it. But
he also funded many actual formal institutes of higher learning,
so uh. Carnegie Mellon University is the modern day outgrowth
(34:37):
of a two million dollar endowment that Andrew Carnegie established
in nineteen hundred to set up technical schools in the
Pittsburgh area. In nineteen o two, he founded the Carnegie
Institution of Washington with twenty two million dollars, all allocated
towards scientific discovery, and in two thousand seven this organization
became the Carnegie Institution for Science. The Carnegie Corporation of
(35:01):
New York was formed in nineteen eleven to give away
the remainder of the Carnegie fortune, and that entity remains
and continues to fund trusts and educational institutions. The Carnegie
Council for Ethics and International Affairs was initially named the
Church Peace Union, and it was established in nineteen fourteen
with a two million dollar endowment with the goal of
(35:21):
finding alternatives to war. The Carnegie Foundation was established to
build a courthouse and the library in the Hague for
the permanent Court of Arbitration. That was one point five
million dollars in funding that was given by Carnegie to
build what was called the Peace Palace, and the Foundation
continues that building's maintenance to this day. There are many
(35:45):
more such institutions funded by Andrew Carnegie than. As we
mentioned in the Kathie Chadwick episode, You've probably seen a
building or a school or a library that he funded
after he retired from business to pursue philanthrop be As
this second career, Carnegie began writing his recollections of his
youth and his rise to wealth from poverty, and in
(36:07):
the foreword to his autobiography, which was published in nineteen twenty,
his wife Louise wrote of their time in Scotland when
World War two broke out. Quote, he delighted in going
back to those early times, and as he wrote, he
lived them all over again. He was thus engaged in
July nineteen fourteen, when the war clouds began to gather,
and when the fateful news of the fourth of August
(36:28):
reached us, we immediately left our retreat in the hills
and returned to Skibo to be more in touch with
the situation. These memoirs ended. At that time, World War
one was hugely upsetting to Andrew Carnegie. He had been
so focused on the idea of world peace that was
a jarring shock to see this conflict unfold. Carnegie was
(36:50):
willing to put his remaining fortune to work to try
to end the war. He would have offered Kaiserville him
the second massive sums of money to end the conflict,
but President Teddy Roosevelt blocked that effort. Andrew Carnegie never
fully recovered from this failure, and he's often described as
having been heartbroken over the matter, and his last several
(37:10):
years of life. Andrew Carnegie died in nineteen nineteen, two
months after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He had
distributed three hundred and fifty million dollars of his fortune
and the rest was moved to the Carnegie Corporate Endowment.
And as he said throughout his life, the man who
dies rich dies in disgrace. Yeah, as Tracy and I
have discussed, it's an interesting thing. He is is certainly
(37:34):
lauded for his great generosity at the end of his life,
but he would not have had as much to give
away had he not been letting people live in fairly
mediocre circumstances having worked dangerous jobs. Yeah, he's simultaneously advocated
for the rights of workers. And then like was also
(37:57):
like the people working for him were we're not necessarily
living comfortably, and his own idea of living comfortably, and
we said that part about he could live comfortably on
something like fifty dollars a year, like really comfortably, capital
see comfortably. That was sort of a pretty luxurious amount
of comfort. Yeah. Yeah. Uh So, on the one hand,
(38:22):
I'm like, thank you, because there's a lot of times
I have benefited from his generosity, you know, in going
to a library or also just research that's been done
that we have benefited from. But yeah, a lot of
the libraries are really beautiful. A lot of the buildings
that he funded were really quite spectacularly gorgeous, like he
(38:47):
had a good eye for picking good architects for sure.
Do you want to hear about microbiology a little bit?
I definitely do, because that's in our listener mail today.
It's our listener Stephanie and she's writing about the Antony
von Levin Hook episode, and her email was titled Anthony
von Levin Hook made my research possible. She writes. I'm
(39:07):
an aquatic scientist completing my PhD in Australia. I loved
your podcast on Antony von Levin Hook, as I do
a lot of work with microscopes and I love hearing
about early techniques. I study a group of alga called dietoms.
They're special because their cell walls are made of glass.
To our I they look like clumps of brown pond
scum that you'd find on rocks, but under the microscope
(39:28):
they're very beautiful. I've attached some pictures I took on
my modern microscope. Von Levin Hook was probably the first
person to observe diet tom's. Ever, sadly, he wasn't able
to describe them in details, so he isn't the official discoverer.
That credit goes to an anonymous person who sent a
letter of reply to the Royal Society regarding von Levin
Hook's work with a lovely illustration of the dietom table
(39:51):
area in sevent three. I found this super interesting since
these observations were made more than a century before formal
diet classification started. Uh so cool. I love it. I
also thank anybody who is working in the sciences to
better understand our world so that we can all better
understand our world together. Uh If you would like to
write us, you can do so at History Podcast at
(40:13):
how stuff Works dot com. You can also find us
on the internet at missed in history dot com and
across pretty much any social media platform as missed in History.
If you want to visit our website at missed in
history dot com. There you can find every single episode
of the show that has ever existed, long before Tracy
and I were hosts, and if you look at the
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(40:35):
also find show notes for those episodes, So come and
visit us and explore some history with us at missed
in History dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, have
you ever wondered how Pittsburgh got the nickname steel Town?
I have some ideas. It's thanks in part to today's
(00:24):
podcast subject. We're talking about Andrew Carnegie, and that's I
want to make a note about his last name, because
you'll hear it said Carnegie pretty frequently. UM. Carnegie with
more of an A sound is also not uncommon, and
we've talked about him on the show, and I think
we've used probably both of those pronunciations because there's so
much variants. Um. For the purposes of this, since it
(00:45):
is all about his life, we're gonna go with Carnegie
because that sounds the closest to the way his family
seems to pronounce it. Uh. So I might say, we're gonna,
we're gonna try to do that. Yeah, But it's one
of those things where when you have said something a
certain way or entire life, and then you try to
say it a different way, sometimes you mess it up
and you don't notice until you're queueing the podcast and
(01:08):
then it's too late to do it over. That is correct,
and because it isn't of those things like I don't
think I have ever heard anybody utter the words Carnegie Hall,
but they say Carnegie Hall all the time. Yeah, same
same thing. So keep in mind that's just part of
like that cultural pronunciation shift that sometimes happens. We're going,
we're going for the correct one. We may slip up.
(01:29):
But the point is that his life story is one
that is pretty inspiring in some ways. It's uh the
story of a child who started out and just abject
poverty and then went on to make more money than
he ever could have possibly imagined when he was that
child that was part of a family that was really struggling.
But his life while largely charmed, and I don't I
(01:52):
don't want to make it sound like he didn't earn anything,
because he worked really hard and he was really good
at seeing opportunities and then working really hard to make
those opportunities work for him. Um, But there was some
charm in it that those opportunities did come up in
his life. He did, however, have one sort of massive
scar of bad judgment in his life. Um. But then
(02:15):
famously and what he's probably most known for today is
the fact that he decided that the most important thing
that he could do with his millions and millions and
millions of dollars was to give it all away. Yeah.
One of the things that's really interesting to me about
him is, like today you will hear a lot of
people talk about wealth disparity as a problem, and he
(02:36):
had he had no issues whatsoever with wealth disparity. He
was like, he just sort of thought that was how
its life's gonna be. It's no problem with that, but
that the people that had all the wealth should be
doing useful things with it, uh, which to me is
an interesting point of view. Yeah. Andrew Carnegie was born
on November five and done Farmland, Scotland. His father, will
(03:00):
Him was a weaver and Dunfermline had been known for
quite some time for beautiful linen and particularly for its
damask Lennon. William struggled in his trade as industrialization became
more and more common and hand loomed goods couldn't keep
up as steam powered looms became more and more popular.
The family really struggled to make ends meet, but William
(03:22):
was obstinate that he wanted to remain a weaver, even
though he couldn't really support his family doing that, and
as a Chartist, William Carnegie believed that the way to
make change was to get working men elected into parliament
so that they could make change at the legislative level
that would help working men like him. If you're not
familiar with the term chartists, that sort of sums up
(03:42):
the whole thing. It was a national working class effort
at parliamentary reform. So William and his brother in law,
Tom Morrison both were committed to the Chartist cause. They
were organizing strikes, they were writing for Chartist publications, and meanwhile,
Andrew's mother, Margaret Morrison Carnegie, stepped up by taking work
mending shoes and running a small grocery to try to
(04:04):
keep the family afloat. Seeing his parents struggle and also
living in poverty as a child deeply impacted the young Andrew. Yeah,
he wrote about it later in his life, we'll talk
about that, but basically he seeing his father have to
beg for work really really stuck with him forever. Margaret's sister,
in the meantime, had moved to the United States and
(04:25):
settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was there for like eight
years before it started to become a possibility for the
Carnegies to follow, and Margaret's sister was writing letters back
to Scotland assuring Margaret the conditions were far better in
the US, particularly for working people, and these missives really
started Margaret thinking about across atlantic move as one of
(04:47):
the family's few remaining options at making a better life.
She managed to convince William that it was worth the risk,
and to be clear, this was a lot of risk.
Once they got to the United States, they would have
less than nothing. They had to sell all their belongings
and then borrow money on top of that, just to
pay for the voyage. The Carnegie's that's William, Margaret, Andrew,
(05:11):
and Andrew's younger brother Thomas, crammed into small quarters on
the Wickessett, which was a ship sailing from Glasgow for
a fifty day voyage. No surprise, this was not a
great way to spend nearly two months. Passengers were often
asked to help out with tasks aboard the underman ship,
but many were too sea sick or just weak from
poor nutrition. This was not a luxury cruise. They weren't
(05:34):
really getting everything they needed. And Andrew would volunteer for
various additional duties in exchange for favors or a little
extra food or some other benefit for his family. The
Carnegiees made their trip across the Atlantic in and Ellis
Island wouldn't open for another forty four years. The Wickessett
(05:54):
landed on the southern tip of Manhattan at the Battery.
They had several more legs of the journey, you though,
to make by boat. First, they took a steamer to
Albany along the Hudson River. Then they made their way
to Buffalo via the Erie Canal, and from there they
took several more smaller legs to get to the north
side of Pittsburgh, which at that point was Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
(06:16):
Yeah that that Allegheny township eventually got absorbed into the
larger Pittsburgh metro area. But if you look at a
map and you chart out this route that they took,
it becomes immediately obvious that it was really a long
way to do it. Uh. And these were, as I
mentioned a moment ago, about as distant from luxury cruises
as you could get. The family was, of course very poor,
(06:38):
and they were traveling at the cheapest rates that they
could get, and it took three weeks to get from
the battery in Manhattan to the Pittsburgh area, a trip
that today takes about six hours by car or ninety
minutes by direct flight. Margaret might have had romantic ideas
about the new life that she and her family were
going to start in pennsylvani You, but once they got there,
(07:02):
they had some harsh realities waiting for them. For one,
the city was already dealing with pollution from industrialization. A
fire that had ravaged the downtown area three years before
they got there from Scotland left the city with a
coat of soot that was still there. Carnegie would later
(07:22):
write that if you washed the soot off your face
and your hands, they would be coated again an hour later.
And it wasn't a place where a newcomer family with
no money could live in any kind of comfort. He
described this as a more or less miserable situation. William
Carnegie did find work. He got a job working in
a cotton factory, and for a while Andrew worked in
(07:44):
the same factory as a bobbin boy. He was paid
a dollar twenty per week to run Bobbin's two the
weavers as needed, and on occasion to perform maintenance tasks
on the machines. Later in his life, Carnegie wrote of
this time quote, it was a hard life in the winter, father,
and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness,
reach the factory before it was daylight, and with a
(08:05):
short interval for lunch, work till after dark. The hours
hung heavily upon me, and in the work itself. I
took no pleasure, but the cloud had a silver lining,
as it gave me the feeling that I was doing
something for the world, my family. I've made millions since,
but none of those millions gave me such happiness as
my first week's earnings. Soon, the young Andrew moved into
(08:28):
a different factory job, working with a boiler and a
steam engine. This was hard work, but it offered a
substantial rays over being a bomb and boy. Now he
was making two dollars a week. Through a connection of
his uncle's, Andrew transition to another job as a messenger
for the City Telegraph Office in eighteen fifty, when he
(08:49):
was fourteen. He was a really hard worker, and he
took these duties very seriously. He made a point to
memorize all the streets of Pittsburgh, as well as the
names and addresses of singer recipients that were frequent, so
that he could be as efficient as possible in his job.
Part of this was so he could recognize any of
the gentlemen that might be receiving a telegram message or
(09:11):
any of their servants on the street and be able
to hand something off without maybe always having to go
full distance to deliver it, so he could be way
faster and get more done. Initially, he was not sure
if he could handle this job, and in his interview
he told the hiring manager as much, but he also
said that he would do his best and that he
would like a trial, and his worries were unfounded. He
did really well, and he had moved up to earning
(09:33):
two dollars and fifty cents a week, and he found
the position he wrote quote in every respect a happy one.
He only had one suit that was appropriate to wear
to work, and it was the same suit that he
would normally wear it to church on Sunday, So when
he got hole blade on Saturday nights, his mother would
wash and press the suit so it would be ready
for the next day, and he wrote adoring lee about her, saying, quote,
(09:56):
there was nothing that Heroin did not do for the
struggle we were making for elbow room in the Western world. Yeah,
Andrew was very close to his mother, and that relationship
will be uh really important to how his life plays
out a little bit later. But even though he was
working in these, you know, sort of relatively menial jobs,
even though it had gotten much better as a messenger boy,
(10:19):
throughout all of this he was really drawn to both
culture and information. So when he found out that he
would have to deliver a telegraph message to a theater,
for example, he would arrange that to be one of
his last tasks of the day so that he could
then stay and watch the performances. And he also took
advantage of every possible opportunity he had when he had
access to books, and he read voraciously. We're going to
(10:42):
get into his transition in some more lucrative work after
we first take a little sponsor break. As a messenger,
Andrew would sweep the office in the morning before the
telegraph opera readers arrived, and one morning he actually took
(11:02):
a message that came through when no operators had yet
begun their shift, and he did a good enough job
that the operators started asking him to keep an eye
on the telegraph when they needed to step away. He
eventually learned to take messages by years, so without the
help of a running slip of paper to print the
message out, he would just write it down as he
heard it. A significant promotion followed when he subbed in
(11:24):
for another operator on a two week trial, because people
realized he was actually quite good at this, and he
was soon given the title of assistant operator and he
was making twenty five dollars a month. While working for
the telegraph office, Andrew met a man named Thomas A. Scott.
At the time, Scott was superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
(11:44):
Scott noticed how diligent and driven the young Carnegie was
and made him an offer to leave the telegraph office
and become Scott's private secretary and also run his personal
telegraph machine. Carnegie was offered thirty five dollars a month,
and to him it seemed like a fortune, so he
took this job and started learning about the railroad industry.
(12:06):
Carnegie was once again doing really well because he carried
that same work ethic into every position he had, and
he was making a name for himself at the Pennsylvania Railroad,
but his father, in the meantime, had not met with
success in the United States. After struggling to make enough
money through weaving jobs, William Carnegie made a stab at
entrepreneurship and he tried manufacturing his own cloth and then
(12:29):
selling it as a traveling salesman, but that really never
took off. William died in eighteen fifty five when Andrew
was twenty, and that left the eldest son as the
primary breadwinner in the family. A year after William's death,
Andrew started to expand out his business efforts. He invested
in the Woodroft sleeping car Company with a loan, and
(12:50):
it paid off. Soon he was making five thousand dollars
a year from his investment, which was so much more
than he had been learning from his railroad income. He
was also promoted to railroad superintendent in eighteen fifty nine,
and he used his increased income to move himself and
his mother and to a nicer home. Yeah, there's an
interesting thing that plays out over and over where he
(13:12):
starts making more and more and more money on investments.
But for quite a while he actually still kept as
much lower paying job, which is kind of interesting to me.
When the Civil War began, Thomas Scott, his boss, was
hired by the Union to manage transportation of its troops.
It was pretty natural since he ran a railroad that
they were like, hey, why don't why don't you run
a similar set set up for us? Uh. Carnegie was
(13:34):
also hired. He was working alongside his boss as part
of the war effort, And meanwhile, his earnings from that
Sleeping Car company investment went toward a new business venture.
He invested eleven thousand dollars in oil in eighteen sixty one,
and he almost doubled his money in the first year.
I think he took in something like eighteen thousand dollars.
From there, he began diversifying his investments further and soon
(13:58):
he was earning more than forty and dollars a year
from them. That was a massive sum in the eighteen sixties.
Andrew Carnegie was drafted in eighteen sixty four, but he
didn't wind up serving. As part of the draft terms,
he had the option to pay a sum of three
hundred dollars or find a replacement to serve in his stead.
So he opted to pay another man eight hundred and
(14:20):
fifty dollars to fail to fill his slot, and by
the time the war ended, Andrew Carnegie had come to
the realization that the iron industry had great potential, and
in a surprising move, he left the Pennsylvania Railroad and
he started a new company in eighteen sixty five called
the Keystone Bridge Company. Keystone's entire business was upgrading existing
(14:42):
wooden bridges to startier iron structures, and this proved to
be extremely lucrative. Just a few years into it, he
had made himself wealthy. In eighteen sixty seven he started
the Keystone Telegraph Company, which cut such a lucrative deal
with the Pennsylvania Railroad to run telegraph wire on the
railroad's polls that Carnegie and his partners were able to
(15:04):
flip the business and triple their money in a very
short period of time. His estimated worth in eighteen sixty
eight was four hundred thousand dollars, so caveat it is
always really tricky to convert historical worth into modern value,
but a rough estimate is that this was about five
million dollars. He was only thirty three, Yeah, and I
(15:27):
did want to point out that, you know, he was
making these deals still with the Pennsylvania Railroads, So even
though he had left, he really left on good terms
and maintained business dealings with them for a long time
that were always quite positive. And riding high on his
string of successes, Andrew Carnegie decided that he was only
going to give business two more years before turning to
(15:48):
a life of philanthropy. He wrote this plan out in
a letter to himself in eighteen sixty eight, and he
had calculated out that he could live comfortably off the
money he had made by allocating himself fifty thousand dollars
each year and then using the rest of the money
to benefit causes that he believed in. But in eighteen
seventy he wasn't quite ready to say goodbye. It's all
(16:10):
these various industries. That same year, he also met a
young woman named Louise Whitfield through a mutual friend, and
Andrew became social with the Whitfield family. Yeah, he was
interested in Louise, but he was interested in a lot
of women. It was pretty casual um. But then, when
Carnegie was almost thirty seven, he learned about Henry Bessemer's
(16:31):
refining process that could convert large amounts of iron into steel,
and he learned about that while he was visiting Bessemer's
plants in England. Carnegie believed so strongly in this process
and the steel that it turned out that he invested
all of his money plus alone, so that's a lot
of money at that point to build a steel plant
in Pittsburgh. The plant was completed in eighteen seventy five
(16:54):
and it was named the Edgar Thompson Works after the
head of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And a teen eighty Andrew
began a relationship with Louise Whitfield, and this courtship was
a bit of a May December romance because Andrew was
forty five at the time and Louise was twenty three,
but it appears to have stayed pretty innocent, in part
because Andrew had promised his mother that he would never
(17:17):
marry while she was still alive. Andrew and his mother
were incredibly close, and as he became the primary breadwinner
in the family, he had assured his mother that he
would provide for the comforts that she had gone without
when he was growing up, so they were together a
great deal of the time, and his mother, Margaret was
even known to walk into business meetings along with her son. Yeah.
(17:40):
I think he was trying to make up for the
the bad times they had had in the past, and
so he really was a little bit indulgent of her,
But he adored her. And while some people might have
been chagrined at this kind of obstacle, Louise was actually
in a unique position to understand Andrew Carnegie's prioritization of
his mother. Louise was also very very close to her mother,
(18:02):
who needed ongoing medical care. In eighteen eighty one, Andrew
became business partners with Henry Clay Frick by practising a
controlling interest in Frick's Coke Company. Coke was a coal
based fuel. That same year, he took his mother, Margaret
back to Scotland, and he asked Louise Whitfield to join
them on the trip. His mother, though, shut that idea
(18:23):
completely down. Yeah, she was not cool with it. Two
years later, Andrew bought an additional steel mill, the Homestead Works,
and he also became secretly engaged to Louise in the
autumn of eighteen eighty three. Content it seemed to just
wait out the remainder of Margaret Carnegie's life. This is
something we would describe as in modern terms, not having
(18:47):
healthy boundaries. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because Louise's mother
was very close to Louise, but really was kind of
the opposite. She was like, no, I want you to
go out and be with other people and live your
own life, whereas Louise was like, but I want to
take care of you. And Andrew Carnegie's mother seemed like, no, no,
this you promised me me first. So three years into
(19:11):
this engagement, in the summer of eighteen eighty six, Andrew
wrote to Louise, quote, I have not written to you
because it seems you and I have duties which must
keep us apart. Everything does hang upon our mothers. With
both of us, our duty is the same to stick
to them to the last. I feel this every day.
An essay written by Andrew Carnegie was published in Forum
(19:34):
magazine in eight six, and in it he wrote passionately
about workers rights, specifically their right to unionize. That was
a big year for Carnegie and the writing department. He
also published a book entitled Triumphant Democracy, and this work
celebrated the United States Republic and suggested that Great bit
(19:54):
Britain could benefit from following a similar model to the
one that was in place in the States. Yeah, it
was very Uh. It kind of suggested that the the
United States had become the next step kind of an
evolution of of Great Britain society, like in going out
and colonizing. They had kind of gotten to that next
(20:15):
level in his opinion. Carnegie lost both his brother and
his mother in a very short period of time. Thomas
died in October from pneumonia that he had initially thought
was just a cold, and the following month, Margaret Carnegie
died also from pneumonia. She had already been quite ill
(20:36):
when Thomas, who was living in Georgia at the time, died,
and nobody actually told her of her younger son's passing
for fear of upsetting her while she was so ill. Similarly,
when Margaret died, Andrew was sick with typhoid and his
mother's death was not immediately relaid to him. Uh. They
actually lowered her coffin out of a bedroom window so
he would not see it passing in the hallway. After
(20:59):
Margaret Carnegi died, it removed that obstacle that had kept
Andrew and Louise from beginning of life together, but the
couple waited to announce their plan to marry out of
respect for Margaret and because Andrew was still quite sick
for a while. But as he later wrote, quote I
recovered slowly in the future began to occupy my thoughts.
There was only one ray of hope and comfort in it.
(21:21):
That comfort, of course, was Louise. And while Andrew had
spent time with other women, it was more apparent to
him than ever that she was the one he wanted
to spend his life with, and their engagement had been
on again, off again. It wasn't like they were two
people so passionately in love that they were like anything,
We'll get through anything. For example, when he wrote her
that letter and was like, that's pretty much all about
(21:43):
our moms. That was kind of like a break up,
a down period. Yeah, it was kind of like not
really going to happen. And so when he first reached
out after having this revelation and was like, I am
ready you and me, he was initially a bit surprised
that she kind of came off a little indifferent to him.
She had also spent time with potential suitors as well,
(22:05):
some of whom were younger than Carnegie and closer to
her own age. But more importantly, she really wanted to
be an important contributor in her spouses life, and she
just wasn't sure that a man was so much money
could ever really need her. She visited him while he
was staying with some friends, and she saw, in Andrew's
words quote that I needed her. I was left alone
(22:26):
in the world. So Andrew and Louise were married on
April seven. The ceremony took place in Louise's family home
with just thirty guests and no attendants. Andrew was fifty
one when he married Louise, who was thirty. Before the
wedding took place, Louise actually signed a pre nup indicating
that she did not want any of her fiance's money
(22:48):
and that he intended to give her nothing in the
will other than an allowance to live comfortably. In a moment,
we'll talk about how Andrew Carnegie's steel mill and homestead
Pennsylvania became the side of of the most violent conflicts
over workers rights in the United States history. But we're
going to take a little sponsor break before we get
to it. Carnegie's business interests had continued to yield a
(23:17):
massive income over the years, and throughout his life he
had always continued to champion the cause of the working man,
at least in word. Indeed, the situation was not actually
so rosy. In seven, the same year that he married Louise,
Carnegie had friction with Frick over a labor strike. Frick
(23:39):
wanted to form a coalition with other companies to shut
out laborers that wanted to strike, cutting off their source
of income. But at that point Carnegie and not Frick,
had the controlling share of the company, and he was
able to force a settlement. But this is really a
temporary stay in another conflict between mill workers at the
(24:01):
Carnegie owned Homestead Steel Mill and the management resulted in
a deadly conflict that contradicted the image of Carnegie as
a worker's rights advocate. The steel workers employed by Carnegie
and Frick faced incredibly dangerous working conditions for very poor pay.
Two years earlier, in nine, steel revenues had started to decline,
(24:24):
and then in Henry Frick slashed workers pay and set
out to break the steel workers union. And Andrew Carnegie
was not blameless in this conflict. For one thing, In
anticipation of the union contract expiring, Carnegie had told Frick
to increase production so that they would have the leverage
to shut down the plant if the workers didn't accept
(24:46):
the new terms without losing any ground in their production schedule.
Carnegie was in Great Britain as all this was playing out,
and he sent word to Frick that he supported Frick
in whatever he chose to do. Frick, embolden by the statement,
severely reduced the workers wages, and the workers who had
invested so much time and labor in increasing the mills revenue,
(25:09):
even some of them experiencing terrible accidents in the process.
We're not willing to back down. Frick declared that he
would not negotiate with the union and he would only
talk to individual workers. The dissolution of the union was
a point in the negotiations that just could not be resolved,
even after all the others were and then Frick closed
(25:30):
down the mill and locked all the workers out. Yeah,
at this point, it was kind of like one of
those situations where you know, there's a company that people
have been part of for a long time and they
feel like they are not necessarily part owners in the company,
but like that they own. They have a sense of
ownership over what the company is and the culture and
(25:52):
and that's really part of why these workers were so
invested in this. They were like, no, this is like
our home. We want to make it better and the
workers actually he tried to reach out to Carnegie, but
he was on vacation in Scotland and contact just couldn't
be made. Carnegie had wanted to do away with the
union because they stipulated a need for more men than
he wanted to pay, and he had left it to
(26:13):
Frick to organize a new setup, and he didn't think
the maintenance of a union at the mill was really
going to be the big issue that it turned out
to be. So Frick turned the mill into a veritable fort,
setting up a fence perimeter with rifle stations. Eventually he
also called in three D men from the Pinkerton Private Police.
(26:33):
When the Pinkerton detectives arrived, they were met by a
full force of mill workers and a twelve hour battle began.
Throughout this shootout, the Pinkerton's were trying to make landfall
because they had arrived at the mill on river barges,
but the workers were preventing most of their men from disembarking.
The Pinkerton forces actually tried to surrender four different times
(26:57):
over the course of the day that this shootout played out,
but their white flag was shot down each time, and
on the fifth try, the surrender was finally accepted, but
the aftermath was horrifying, with nearly a dozen people already dead.
The surrendering Pinkerton's were brutally beaten as a crowd of
reporters and onlookers watched the Pinkerton's left homestead, but then
(27:20):
Frick called in the National Guard so that strike breakers
could enter the mill to start working. Martial law was
declared over the mill, and the strike breaking workforce staffed
the mill basically up to normal production levels in a
matter of weeks, but the tensions in the town remained.
Strikebreakers were refused service in most businesses, and they risked
(27:43):
being attacked on the street if they actually left the mill.
An armed organized attack on the fifty black families who
had moved in to find work during the strike resulted
in multiple injuries, some of them very serious. The violence
that started with the Pinkerton's arrival in July of two
finally came to an end in November after the union
(28:04):
gave up. Strike leaders were charged with murder, and additional
charges were leveled at a hundred and sixty of the strikers,
but none of the men were convicted of their crimes.
And initially Carnegie, who had experienced the worst of this
stuff going on while he was across the Atlantic Ocean,
kind of saw the union giving in as a victory.
(28:25):
He was at that point able to increase the length
of the work day and cut wages as the mill
reorganized post strike to become more profitable. But he soon
felt regret over what had happened, and particularly over how
he had handled things, and a letter to William Gladstone,
Carnegie wrote, quote, such a foolish step contrary to my ideals,
(28:46):
repugnance every feeling of my nature. Our firm offered all
it could offer, even generous terms. Our other men had
gratefully accepted them. They went as far as I could
have wished. But the false step was made. And trying
to run the homestead works with new men, that is
a test to which working men should not be subjected,
(29:07):
is expecting too much of poor men to stand by
and see their work taken by others. That pain and
I suffer increases daily. The works are not worth one
drop of human blood. I wish they had sunk. Yeah,
he really really, pretty much for the rest of his
life regretted that whole thing in his part in it. Well,
and he's also like, simultaneously, uh makes it about him? Yeah, yeah.
(29:34):
And then also was like, the other men gratefully expected
these terms, right, well, so allegedly, and I didn't look
at the financial breakdown, but the terms that he had
offered in other mills, it seemed like the men could
potentially make more money, but they would not be able
to have a union, and that was so important to them.
(29:55):
Like to him, it seemed like, of course everybody would
want this, like it's just a union, you don't need that,
But he didn't realize that that was a vital part
of their well being as workers. Well, the fact that
they were working in a very dangerous environment for very
little pay kind of suggests that they did need the union, right,
exactly exactly, But to him, you know, I mean, I
(30:15):
think that happens in business all the time, where sometimes
people at the top of the food chain just look
at it as columns of numbers, and they don't think
about like the actual human lives that are involved in
producing the thing that their company makes, or uh, you know,
creating this environment where it's actually like safe and good
to work. Uh So, yeah, I think it was kind
(30:37):
of that situation. Uh. But despite the horrific violence of
the homestead strike, somehow Andrew Carnegie's business interests survived and
even thrived, and some historians have pointed to the fact
that the striking workers became so violent that they lost
a little bit of the sympathy in the public eye.
But his company, Carnegie Steele, was out producing Great Britain's
(30:59):
in tire steel industry just a few years later at
the turn of the century. But by hundred Andrew Carnegie,
who was in his mid sixties, was finally feeling ready
to spend more time with his family and less time working.
He and Louise had had a daughter named Margaret after
Andrew's mother in so even though he seemed to genuinely
(31:20):
love business, he was also probably in the right frame
of mind when the opportunity presented itself to sell everything
he had. JP Morgan offered to buy Carnegie out that year,
and after thinking the matter, over Andrew Carnegie decided that
it was indeed time to leave business and begin philanthropy
and earnest. He had been doing philanthropic works prior to that,
(31:41):
but he decided that was kind of going to be
a second career. And so he wrote down his asking
price just on a little slip of paper, and he
had an employee of his hand deliver it. Morgan made
no counter offer, but immediately accepted the deal, and bart
And bought Carnegie Steel for four hundred and eighty million dollars.
Of that, some Rneggie walked away with two d and
(32:01):
fifty million dollars. The portion that went to Carnegie has
been estimated and a modern value somewhere between four and
five billion dollars. Yeah, and that's one of those things. Uh.
Sometimes you'll see it reported a little bit in a
confusing way, because since there are two figures involved there,
that four hundred and eighty million purchase price versus the
(32:22):
two fifty million that was Carnegie's out of that deal,
you'll sometimes see one or the other just reported on
its own. So I wanted to make sure we included
both of those for clarity. Uh. And right in the
midst of this Sellout, by the way, was the time
that Cassie Chadwick was fading to be Carnegie's daughter in
a massive fraud scheme, and since Andrew Carnegie never really
knew anything about that until it came to light during
(32:45):
Chadwick's arrest and her trial, which he did attend, it
didn't really impact his life. It was not something he
really thought a whole lot about other than being uh, um,
kind of amused about it. But I wanted to contextualize
it on the timeline since that previous episode about Cassie
does mention Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie spent the rest of his
(33:06):
life trying to give away all his money. In nine
two years before the homestead strike, he had written a
popular book titled The Gospel of Wealth, in which he
wrote about the duty that wealthy men have to better
the lives of people with less. He was intent on
living up to that writing. He focused on giving money
away in ways that were enriching and would have lasting impact. Yeah,
(33:30):
he was He did not just want to hand people money.
He wanted to figure out how he could build something
into the world that would keep people enriched long term.
And as part of his philanthropic efforts. He built a
library and a concert hall in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and he
set up retirement funding for the workmen under the Andrew
Carnegie Relief Fund, writing that it was quote as an
(33:53):
acknowledgement of the deep debt which I owe the workman
who have contributed so greatly to my success. He funded
nearly three thousand libraries in the United States and abroad.
The library where I get most of my materials for
this podcast is in fact a Carnegie Library. He felt
that with access to knowledge and a desire to learn,
(34:15):
anyone could become educated, even outside of the formal education structures. Yes,
since that was really how he had become educated and
become a successful person, he thought like, I want to
give that avenue to everyone who might want it. But
he also funded many actual formal institutes of higher learning,
so uh. Carnegie Mellon University is the modern day outgrowth
(34:37):
of a two million dollar endowment that Andrew Carnegie established
in nineteen hundred to set up technical schools in the
Pittsburgh area. In nineteen o two, he founded the Carnegie
Institution of Washington with twenty two million dollars, all allocated
towards scientific discovery, and in two thousand seven this organization
became the Carnegie Institution for Science. The Carnegie Corporation of
(35:01):
New York was formed in nineteen eleven to give away
the remainder of the Carnegie fortune, and that entity remains
and continues to fund trusts and educational institutions. The Carnegie
Council for Ethics and International Affairs was initially named the
Church Peace Union, and it was established in nineteen fourteen
with a two million dollar endowment with the goal of
(35:21):
finding alternatives to war. The Carnegie Foundation was established to
build a courthouse and the library in the Hague for
the permanent Court of Arbitration. That was one point five
million dollars in funding that was given by Carnegie to
build what was called the Peace Palace, and the Foundation
continues that building's maintenance to this day. There are many
(35:45):
more such institutions funded by Andrew Carnegie than. As we
mentioned in the Kathie Chadwick episode, You've probably seen a
building or a school or a library that he funded
after he retired from business to pursue philanthrop be As
this second career, Carnegie began writing his recollections of his
youth and his rise to wealth from poverty, and in
(36:07):
the foreword to his autobiography, which was published in nineteen twenty,
his wife Louise wrote of their time in Scotland when
World War two broke out. Quote, he delighted in going
back to those early times, and as he wrote, he
lived them all over again. He was thus engaged in
July nineteen fourteen, when the war clouds began to gather,
and when the fateful news of the fourth of August
(36:28):
reached us, we immediately left our retreat in the hills
and returned to Skibo to be more in touch with
the situation. These memoirs ended. At that time, World War
one was hugely upsetting to Andrew Carnegie. He had been
so focused on the idea of world peace that was
a jarring shock to see this conflict unfold. Carnegie was
(36:50):
willing to put his remaining fortune to work to try
to end the war. He would have offered Kaiserville him
the second massive sums of money to end the conflict,
but President Teddy Roosevelt blocked that effort. Andrew Carnegie never
fully recovered from this failure, and he's often described as
having been heartbroken over the matter, and his last several
(37:10):
years of life. Andrew Carnegie died in nineteen nineteen, two
months after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He had
distributed three hundred and fifty million dollars of his fortune
and the rest was moved to the Carnegie Corporate Endowment.
And as he said throughout his life, the man who
dies rich dies in disgrace. Yeah, as Tracy and I
have discussed, it's an interesting thing. He is is certainly
(37:34):
lauded for his great generosity at the end of his life,
but he would not have had as much to give
away had he not been letting people live in fairly
mediocre circumstances having worked dangerous jobs. Yeah, he's simultaneously advocated
for the rights of workers. And then like was also
(37:57):
like the people working for him were we're not necessarily
living comfortably, and his own idea of living comfortably, and
we said that part about he could live comfortably on
something like fifty dollars a year, like really comfortably, capital
see comfortably. That was sort of a pretty luxurious amount
of comfort. Yeah. Yeah. Uh So, on the one hand,
(38:22):
I'm like, thank you, because there's a lot of times
I have benefited from his generosity, you know, in going
to a library or also just research that's been done
that we have benefited from. But yeah, a lot of
the libraries are really beautiful. A lot of the buildings
that he funded were really quite spectacularly gorgeous, like he
(38:47):
had a good eye for picking good architects for sure.
Do you want to hear about microbiology a little bit?
I definitely do, because that's in our listener mail today.
It's our listener Stephanie and she's writing about the Antony
von Levin Hook episode, and her email was titled Anthony
von Levin Hook made my research possible. She writes. I'm
(39:07):
an aquatic scientist completing my PhD in Australia. I loved
your podcast on Antony von Levin Hook, as I do
a lot of work with microscopes and I love hearing
about early techniques. I study a group of alga called dietoms.
They're special because their cell walls are made of glass.
To our I they look like clumps of brown pond
scum that you'd find on rocks, but under the microscope
(39:28):
they're very beautiful. I've attached some pictures I took on
my modern microscope. Von Levin Hook was probably the first
person to observe diet tom's. Ever, sadly, he wasn't able
to describe them in details, so he isn't the official discoverer.
That credit goes to an anonymous person who sent a
letter of reply to the Royal Society regarding von Levin
Hook's work with a lovely illustration of the dietom table
(39:51):
area in sevent three. I found this super interesting since
these observations were made more than a century before formal
diet classification started. Uh so cool. I love it. I
also thank anybody who is working in the sciences to
better understand our world so that we can all better
understand our world together. Uh If you would like to
write us, you can do so at History Podcast at
(40:13):
how stuff Works dot com. You can also find us
on the internet at missed in history dot com and
across pretty much any social media platform as missed in History.
If you want to visit our website at missed in
history dot com. There you can find every single episode
of the show that has ever existed, long before Tracy
and I were hosts, and if you look at the
episodes that Tracy and I worked on together, you will
(40:35):
also find show notes for those episodes, So come and
visit us and explore some history with us at missed
in History dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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