Andrew Carnegie

About this book

This masterful biography of a giant of American industry--the first full life of Andrew Carnegie in more than a generation--triumphantly reveals every aspect of the mans complex personality and fabulous career. So varied were Carnegies activities in industry politics education philanthropy and pacificism that his life encompasses much of the general history of the United States and of Great Britain down to the outbreak of World War I. Wall is particularly successful in capturing the excitement of Americas dynamic period of business expansion in the generation after the Civil War. Carnegie the man remains at the center of the book--impulsive haughty idealistic warm loyal and shrewd--and the drama of his life from telegraph boy to millionaire philanthropist is emphasized. His Scottish background is thoroughly investigated: Wall is concerned throughout with Carnegies attempts to reconcile his spectacular business success and position in the American plutocracy with the egalitarian and Radical Chartist ideas of his family and youth. Carnegies letterbooks and early business files in the possession of the United States Steel Corporation and until now inaccessible to historians were made available to the author. This vital and valuable collection of records is unsurpassed in its revelation of how Carnegies own corporations operated and also as an actual example of the development of a great American industry. Wall also consulted the huge collection of Carnegie material in the Library of Congress and the papers of Carnegies business secretary Robert Franks. Carnegies daughter Mrs. Roswell Miller was kind enough to allow Wall to read the private correspondence between Andrew Carnegie and his wife Louise also not previously available to scholars. The epic highly-charged relationship between Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick emerges brilliantly and the story of Carnegies ventures in oil railroad building and financing bridge building telegraphy and iron and steel is clearly and fully presented. The book gives place also to a myriad of fascinating figures in America and Europe including William Gladstone Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer in England and J.P. Morgan George Pullman Mark Twain William Jennings Bryan Booker T. Washington and Presidents Lincoln McKinley Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson in America. It has much to say also about the impact of the Civil War on American industrialism industrial statesmen and robber barons and the influence of Social Darwinism on the business community. This rounded honest biography while compassionate does not hesitate to call Carnegie to task for some of his financial dealings his often arbitrary personal relationships and his occasional hypocrisy or to show him at his worst-when dealing with the tragic Homestead strike of 1892. But the reader takes from the book a full understanding of why to many Americans Carnegies death meant the end of an era in American history.