Carnegie (2002)
There were two sources of trepidation in reading and reviewing this book. First, in keeping with the Brothers Judd full disclosure policy, I'm required to mention that my five year old son says he's going to marry Mr. Krass's daughter, a kindergarten classmate. What father in his right mind is going to disrespect his son's future father-in-law? Second, in the Preface to the book, it sounds almost like we're embarking on a vendetta:
Like many men working in the hellish Carnegie mills,
my great-grandfather William Danziger imbibed quantities of beer and liquor
to soothe his pains and to make him feel alive again.
He didn't reach sixty years of age, while Carnegie lived to the ripe age
of eighty-four.
In the summer of 2001, I visited my great-grandfather's
gravesite in a cemetery not far from his old frame house in Carnegie, Pennsylvania,
a suburb of Pittsburgh. I found a congested
cemetery bordered by busy streets. There was no peace there.
I also visited Andrew Carnegie's
grave in the bucolic Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near
Tarrytown, New York. Carnegie has a spacious corner lot, nestled
among evergreens
and fern. It appears he has found a measure
of peace. The contrast of the two gravesites raises one of the poignant
themes to be explored
in reconstructing the complicated life of a titan
who came to power in America's Gilded Age: the unequal distribution of
wealth that marked
that era in our history.
You just can't read that without warning flags going up about whether what is to follow can possibly be objective. Everything about it, from Carnegie's "hellish" mills, which would presumably make him the Devil, right down to the word "distribution"--as if Mr. Danziger and Mr. Carnegie had merely been handed their respective lots in life--suggests that the muck rakes are poised. So it is a great relief, as one reads on, to find that Mr. Krass has not only written a fair and balanced biography, but one where he seems to have allowed his study of Carnegie to gradually temper his initial judgment of the man. This allows him to judge his subject harshly when Carnegie's dubious financial dealings and his treatment of employees and competitors require such, but to be generous in his assessments where Carnegie's personal achievements and public philanthropy are concerned.
This balancing act suits the subject well, because Carnegie's story
is a mixture of darkness and light. In fact, his life seems to combine
a number of our touchstone myths. As a poor immigrant from Scotland
who rose to be one of the wealthiest men who's ever lived, he's almost
something out of Horatio Alger. This aspect of his tale is helped
greatly by the way he taught himself Morse code, when he was a messenger
as a boy, and stepped in
to operate the key at an important moment. Once he becomes rich
he undergoes a fascinating internal struggle, one as old as Man, as he
wants on the one hand to do well for himself but on the other to do good
in the world. He, of course, did do very well, and stayed in business
far longer than he ever told himself he would. But, as Mr. Krass shows,
he also--almost singlehandedly--created the traditions and institutions
of the private charitable foundation and, by his example, prodded men like
John D. Rockefeller into giving away great portions of their wealth too.
According to Mr. Krass's numbers, Carnegie's fortune at its peak would
have been worth over $100 billion in today's dollars (as compared to Bill
Gates's measly $50 billion). But, by the end of his life, Carnegie
had given away a staggering $350,695,653.40 and had "just" $25 million
remaining. Finally, there's a hint, though underplayed here, of tragedy
at the end of Carnegie's life. One of the chief ways in which Carnegie
had sought to expunge the guilt of his shady business dealings and the
sometimes brutal manner in which he'd betrayed his own ideals about the
relationship between capital and labor, when dealing with his employees,
was to adopt the cause of world peace. Beyond the libraries that
bear his name, it is probably the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and his early advocacy of things
like the League
of Nations which best exemplify what became his "crusade" in life.
Yet, towards the end, even he came to support America's entry into WWI,
a conflict among the "civilized" nations of the world that called into
question the very possibility of establishing an enduring international
peace.
Mr. Krass handles all these various storylines deftly, giving credit when it's due and dealing blame when Carnegie's worthy. The one incident in Carnegie's career with which we're all probably familiar from old school days is the brutal suppression of the Homestead strike. The chapter on that episode is really a model of fairness. Mr. Krass acknowledges the business concerns that drove Carnegie and his partners and the increasing militancy of the labor movement, the combination of which made confrontation almost inevitable. He carefully tracks the actions of both sides, noting how Carnegie's man, Henry Clay Frick, prepared the Homestead plant as a kind of fortress with Pinkerton guards, but also how the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had genuinely become an obstacle to efficiency and had become prone to flex its muscle just because it could. Additionally, he clears Carnegie of the charge that he intentionally fled the country when the strike was coming, showing that he was on a planned trip and didn't anticipate the clash to come. Neither side comes off terribly well in what Mr. Krass rightly calls a tragedy.
Throughout it all, even when handling complex transactions and bewildering
financial arrangements, Mr. Krass keeps the story moving, often balancing
a chapter that's heavy on business with a subsequent one on Carnegie's
personal life, as if he's giving the reader a short breather. The
result is a readable and often fascinating biography of a figure who it's
all too easy to just lump in with the "robber barons" and dismiss as a
predatory oligarch. Instead, blemishes and all, Mr. Krass gives us
a compelling portrait of a man who, though he may not always win our sympathy,
does command our attention and, eventually, I think, a fair degree of admiration.
(Reviewed:24-Nov-02)
Grade: (A)
