Andrew Carnegie's countrymen felt in his lifetime that $350,000,000 worth of power over them was more than any man ought to hold. Accordingly, except when they were asking him to found a library or to endow a college, they did what they could to keep him humble and to persuade him that no one envied him and that no one would bow an inch lower to him out of reverence for his fabulous wealth. This was no doubt sound democratic discipline. He himself must have applauded the spirit of it. "It was long," he says in commenting on his own radically democratic upbringing, "before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and therefore earned the right to public respect." But he knew all the time, and his countrymen knew at heart, that adding up his stocks and bonds would not summarize his talents and virtues. His gifts made him appear the most magnificent philanthropist that the world had ever seen. And by qualities which remained with him after he had distributed his fortune, he was one of the most original, interesting, and representative men of his generation.
The Iron Master possessed intelligence of the first rank in its kind, an open and free spirit coupled with extraordinary firmness of character, indefatigable energy and initiative and a "creative" benevolence, together with abundant humor, poetic sentiment, and deep feeling with regard to the things that matter. Hs was, in short, a personality. He appreciated, furthermore, the significant and picturesque aspects of his own career and savored its contrasts like a man of letters. When in his old age, at his retreat on the Scotch moors, he undertook at the insistence of his friends to compose his memoirs, he had the material, the perspective, and the mood for a book fit to stand on the shelf by Franklin's. Following his own precept and Franklin's example, he wrote out his recollections simply, modestly, blithely, like an old gentleman with a good conscience telling the story of his life to his friends and relatives.
The war diverted him from his work before the manuscript was in shape for publication. He wrote on the margin: "Whoever arranges these notes should be careful not to burden the public with too much. A man with a heart as well as a head should be chosen." Professor John C. Van Dyke was selected as an editor possessing both these qualifications. His task, which he says was little more than to arrange the matter in chronological sequence, he has performed unobtrusively—just a shade too unobtrusively. Carnegie had far more than the ordinary manufacturer's respect for literature, and he clearly hoped that his autobiography would be considered, in the stricter sense, as "literature." It contains, however, more instances of the "dangling participle" than perhaps ever before appeared in a single volume. There should be nothing sacred, to one charged with the editing of an unfinished manuscript, about Mr. Carnegie's dangling participles. Before the book goes into its second edition, these and such like easily corrigible slips should be silently amended. Then the really charming spirit which pervades it—I do not recall a harsh or ill-natured word from the beginning to the end of it—should make it a place in the best company, where it belongs.
Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 at Dunfermline, Scotland, son of a damask weaver who was ruined by the introduction of steam looms, and who in 1848 borrowed twenty pounds to bring his family to America, where "Andy" made his "start in life" at the age of thirteen as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at a dollar and twenty cents a week. A second-rate "self-made man" might have attributed his success to the change of environment and to his own industry. It is a characteristic and attractive trait in Carnegie, creditable to both his heart and his head, that he recognizes and handsomely acknowledges his obligations not merely to his employers and employees and partners, but to a multitude of benign forces co-operating in his success.
Though he had, for example, but a few years of common schooling, he makes it beautifully clear that he received from various directions the incentives of an excellent education. He declares that he was fortunate in his ancestors and supremely fortunate in his birthplace. He is proud of a grandfather on one side who was familiarly known as "the professor," of a grandfather on the other side who was a friend of Cobbett, of an uncle who went to jail to vindicate the right of public assembly, of a father who was one of five weavers that founded the first library in Dunfermline, and of a mother capable of binding shoes to help support the family, in her morality an unconscious follower of Confucius, in her religion consciously a disciple of Channing. As for the town, it had the reputation of being the most radical in the kingdom: the stimulus of political and philosophic ideas was in the air; the editorials of the London Times were read from the pulpit; "the names of Hume, Cobden, and Bright were upon everyone's tongue." Dunfermline was radical, but with a radicalism nourished on history and inclined to hero-worship; for, in the midst of her, Abbey and ruined tower fired the young heart with remembrance of King Malcom and Wallace and Bruce. "It is a tower of strength for a boy," says the old man, "to have a hero." The thought of Wallace made him face whatever he was afraid of, and remained "a real force in his life to the very end."
When the Carnegie family settled in America, their capital was brains, pluck, honesty, willingness to work, and loyalty to one another. The early stages in their pecuniary progress were marked first by payment of their debts, then by purchase of their first little house, and later by their first investment, in five shares of the Adams Express Company. "Andy" did not long remain a telegraph messenger, because he promptly developed his faculty for doing "something beyond the sphere of his duties," which attracted the attention of those over him. He picked up telegraphy while waiting for messages; he learned to receive by ear while others used the paper slip; he mastered the duties of a traindispatching superintendent of division while sending the messages of his superior. When his chief's arrival at the office was delayed one morning and the division was in confusion, he assumed responsibility and sent out the orders in the superintendent's name, saying to himself "death or Westminster Abbey." The union of special knowledge with courage, which made "the little white-haired Scotch devil" a first-rate assistant at the age of eighteen, promoted him in six years to the superintendency of the Pittsburgh Division. "I was only twenty-four years old," he says, "but my model then was Lord John Russell." Two years later he was assistant director of telegraphs and military railroads for the government. After the Civil War, by swift combinations of his forces and rapid marches into new fields he established his position at the centre of the industries on which the internal development of the country most directly depended. At the age of thirty-three, he had an annual income of fifty thousand dollars; its subsequent expansion there is not space to recite.
That the son of an impecunious weaver should, while acting as telegraph operator in Pennsylvania, have taken Lord John Russell as his model strikes one as astonishing—till one studies the portrait of this young man at sixteen. The bearing and the features—the full brow, the clear penetrating eyes, the firm but sensitive mouth, are those of a well-bred, even of a high-bred youth, quite the stuff, one should say, to develop into a Lord Rector of St. Andrews University, laird of Skibo Castle, and conspirator with Lords Morley and Bryce and Grey for the world's welfare. The record of his early life bears out the impression given by the photograph. It shows a boy grounded by family discipline in self-respect, moral purity, and intellectual ambition. It indicates that the wide beneficence of his later years was not the mere after thought and diversion of a satiated money-getter, but the object towards which his efforts tended from the start.
As a messenger boy he was reading Macaulay, Bancroft, and Shakespeare, and was learning the oratorios of Handel. His first note to the press, written at the same period, was a plea to have a certain small library opened to working boys of his class. The 7,689 organs that he afterwards gave to churches and the 2,800 libraries that he founded were his acknowledgment to society for the impulse it had given him. He had worshipped a popular hero, Wallace, from the Dunfermline days; and the hero funds that he established throughout the world were tokens of his lifelong hero-worship. By the school of thought in which he was nourished, war among civilized nations was reckoned an obsolescent and absurd instrument of statecraft; his Palace of Peace commemorated the aspirations of a genuine friend of all the people.
In 1868 he had made a memorandum, indicating it as his intention to retire in two years and to "settle in Oxford and get a thorough education," and then to "take part in public affairs, especially those connected with education and improvement of the lower classes." Like another famous man of our time, he discovered that it is not easy for a leader in the fullness of his power to retire—"he had come to the ring and now he must hop." But he continued his education and his educating, when he could, by reading Plato, Confucius, and Buddha, by travelling in various lands, and by earnestly advising and taking the advice of philosophers, presidents, kaisers, prime ministers, secretaries of state, and other experts. He acknowledged the impulse to intellectual growth that society had given him by gifts of buildings or endowment funds to five hundred educational institutions at home and abroad and by his great central foundation with its liberal charter for "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States."
Some of us criticized him because he did not give away his three hundred and fifty millions stealthily and secretly, as we slip a quarter into the collection box, God alone being aware of our munificence. But he knew that one of the most important of his benefactions was precisely the publicity with which he restored his vast accumulations to the people and put them at the service of the upward-striving members of society. It was for him to declare conspicuously and with magnificent and unmistakable emphasis what money is good for; to promote science and literature and music and peace and heroism. He owed the friendship, he tells us, of Earl Grey, who later became a trustee of the ten-million-dollar fund for the United Kingdom, to the publication in the Times of these sentences from his instructions to the trustees of his gifts to Dunfermline:
To bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more "of sweetness and light," to give them—especially the young—some charm, some happiness, some elevating conditions of life which residence elsewhere would have denied, that the child of my native town, looking back in after years, however far from home it may have roamed, will feel that simply by virtue of being such, life has been made happier and better. If this be the fruit of your labors, you will have succeeded; if not, you will have failed.
Large-scale beneficence—doing good to towns and entire classes of society and nations—establishes one as a member of a privileged order, which the average man regards with a certain uneasy envy. If Carnegie had not taken from us that $350,000,000 we might all and each have had the credit of contributing to the purchase of those organs, the foundation of those libraries, the establishment of those hero funds, the building of that Palace of Peace, the pensioning of those employees, the endowment of those universities, that great fund for the advancement of knowledge. True, we might have contributed. We might have taxed ourselves at that rate. We might have made similar investments in human progress. But we know pretty well that we wouldn't have done so. After we had taxed ourselves for the necessary upkeep and expansion of our army and navy, we should have felt too poor, even had steel sold for some dollars a ton less,—we should still have felt too poor to bear an additional tax for such remote objects as the promotion of heroism or science. We should have felt that we owed it to ourselves and to our families to apportion our little "surplus" to our tobacco funds and our soft-drink funds for the tranquillizing of our nerves and the alleviation of our thirst, or perhaps, if we were a notch above such sensual indulgence, to our fund for the collection of cancelled postage stamps.
In the age of individualism which produced Andrew Carnegie, society had scarcely begun to "tap the resources" of collective effort for any genuine amelioration of common conditions. The people "perished" because they had no vision of powers united. In this present hour, clamoring for a high leadership which fails to appear, we average men may look back a little regretfully at our Carnegies, shrewd and level-headed in their means but whole-heartedly and aspiringly democratic in their ends, being fain to confess, we average men, that it is the pressure of the "hero's" exaction, the spur of high example, a vision not our own, a power not ourselves, that we must depend upon, if we are ever, in Pindar's great phrase, "to become what we are."