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100 years after Andrew Carnegie’s death, ROBERT J. GANGEWERE writes that the famed philanthropist’s legacy is worthy of a more accurate description
100 years after his death, Andrew Carnegie’s legacy could use a more accurate description.
Andrew Carnegie is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery along the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y., 30 miles north of New York City. Sleepy Hollow is famous for its legend of the headless horseman who terrorizes a superstitious and calculating schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, to scare him off from marrying a rich and beautiful young woman. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) is by Washington Irving, one of America’s first notable authors, who was himself buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in 1859.
Tarry Town, as the Dutch called it, eventually became a scenic burial place for wealthy families who had mansions along the Hudson River. Today it has the graves of Rockefellers and Astors, Walter Chrysler (of automobile fame), singer Florence Nightingale, labor leader Samuel Gompers and makeup tycoon Elizabeth Arden.
Picking a burial place
Why are Carnegie and his wife Louise buried here? Why not in his native Dunfermline in Scotland? It had Pittencrieff Park (donated by Carnegie), a fine bronze statue of him, his birthplace home (now a museum), his first free public library (donated in 1881) and Skibo Castle, a 13th-century castle he purchased in 1898. Scotland was the Carnegies’ first choice, but World War I made it hard to be buried there.
Why wasn’t he buried in New York City? He moved to New York City after the Civil War in 1867 to run his business. There, he created Carnegie Music Hall, dozens of public libraries and the mighty Carnegie Corp., founded with $135 million in 1911 and recorded as worth $3.6 billion in 2018. After Carnegie married Louise Whitfield, a New York City gentlewoman in 1887, their ties to Pittsburgh became less.
Why not Pittsburgh? Here, the colossal Carnegie Institute and Library system and the nearby Carnegie Technical School (now Carnegie Mellon University) were famous. Carnegie’s statue in bronze — as a businessman in a Classical Greek chair — depicts him in the same style as the heroic, seated statues of Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo and Galileo.
But let us remember Pittsburgh’s reputation then as the worst place in America to live, demonstrated by the Russell Sage Foundation’s detailed study “The Pittsburgh Survey: 1909-1914.” The city had the highest annual deaths in America from typhoid, as well as the highest number from industrial accidents. It was filthy with smoke and pollution and inhabited by workers struggling to survive. It was associated with robber barons and corrupt politicians. And, after the bitter 1892 Homestead steel strike damaged the steelworkers’ union, Carnegie never recovered his boasted reputation as the friend and protector of labor.
On the world stage
After spending much of the early 20th century at Skibo Castle, Andrew and Louise left Scotland for good in 1914, hoping to wait out World War I. The couple returned to America and, in 1916, they purchased Shadowbrook, a 600-acre rural estate in Lennox, Mass. By then, Louise desperately wanted the aging Andrew to belong more fully to herself and their daughter, Margaret. The estate was about 120 miles northeast of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Following his death in 1919, Louise described Carnegie’s declining health and spirit in her preface to the autobiography she urged him to complete. She confessed that in his final years he was a broken man.
Optimistic as he always was and tried to be, even in the face of failure in his hopes, the disaster of World War I was too much. His heart was broken. A severe attack of influenza followed by two serious attacks of pneumonia precipitated old age upon him.
Why was his spirit so broken by the war? Before the war, he was an outspoken pacifist. He cultivated personal power with presidents, kings, heads of states and prime ministers, flattering and cajoling them for two decades to avoid inter -national war. And yet his own steel industry had become the basis for new military arsenals around the globe.
The bellicose President Theodore Roosevelt found Carnegie intrusive and hard to like, even as Carnegie tried to bribe him to be a pacifist by paying for his hunting expedition in Africa — as long as Roosevelt could stop and discuss peace with Carnegie’s friend Kaiser Wilhelm II on the return trip. Woodrow Wilson agreed with Carnegie’s vision of world peace and a future League of Nations, but could not deliver it. After Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany finally declared war in Europe, Carnegie felt personally betrayed — he believed he had Wilhelm’s promise not to begin a world war.
Carnegie’s relentless power politics led him to believe he personally could shape future events, by funding Temples of Peace in Washington D.C., and Costa Rica, and the Hague Peace Palace in the Netherlands. Many people believed America had a manifest destiny to colonize the Philippines, Cuba and South America in the 20th century, and control the Pacific — but Carnegie did not. Decidedly anti-imperialist, he had an old Victorian worldview, shaped by Herbert Spencer’s argument that mankind was destined to evolve to higher levels of civilization. But, the new science of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud and others was revealing that many people were controlled by subconscious needs and desires and fears, not by devotion to self-improvement.
WWI was a fatal psychological blow to every 19th-century idealist who believed in social evolution, the idea that the world was growing getting better and safer, and the “masses” would achieve civilized goals through personal effort.
Thus world events ended Carnegie’s beaux arts dream of an ennobled working class rising to a utopian future, as dramatized in Pittsburgh by the large murals of John White Alexander. Alexander himself died in 1915, leaving unfinished his final vision of ordinary people arriving at the moral heights of arts and science.
Reassessing Carnegie’s legacy
The early 20th century confirmed the basic savagery of civilized nations by producing the new arsenals of modern war, in which Pittsburgh was a leader. Millions died by an industrial technology that made mustard gas, flamethrowers, hand grenades, tanks, bombs, cannons, air planes and torpedoes. Still, in 1912, Carnegie naively and hopefully proclaimed his vision of the future:
“We have [passed] the stage of barbarism where there was constant danger, and hence heroism in the profession of arms — all this has gone. The safest occupation in the land today, either in Britain or America, is that of a soldier, who rarely or never sees a battle or fires a hostile shot, but marches from youth to age in perfect safety, unmolested. … The military age is rapidly passing. We cannot imagine that many students who have received years of precious education will hereafter dedicate themselves deliberately to this profession…”
He died on Aug. 11, 1919, wrong about warfare in the 20th century, and his own rags-toriches life-story sadly undermined.
It is clearly time to stop thinking simplistically of Carnegie as either a philanthropist or robber baron. Rather, as Scottish historian Raymond LamontBrown says in his 2005 biography “Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World,” he was like other great leaders, full of complexities and plagued by his shortcomings. As Mr. LamontBrown writes: “Carnegie was more than a Santa Claus dispenser of money: he was a romanticist, a writer, a political opportunist, a traveler, a socializer, a quicksilver and melancholic Celt, and a lover of life.”
He could recite poetry casually at great length, often by Shakespeare and Robert Burns — a skill that once led his friend, the politician and editor John Morley, to hand him a prize of a penny on the spot, for such a display.
Mark Twain said of him: “I like him; I am ashamed of him; and it is a delight to me to be where he is if he has new material on which to work his vanities where they will show him off as with a limelight. … He is an astonishing man in his genuine modesty as regards the large things he has done, and in his juvenile delight in trivialities that feed his vanity.” So many biographers have scrutinized him at length, and concluded he was a complex ragsto-riches phenomenon.
So Andrew and Louise do belong in a romantic American glen along the Hudson, beneath the ancient, enigmatic Celtic stone cross cut from the rocks of Scotland. One can hear the pipes skirling in the background and his own high-pitched voice reciting lines from Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse — On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough, November, 1785”: But, Mousie, you are not alone In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice andmen
Go oft astray
And leave us nothing but pain and grief
For promised joy!
Carnegie’s relentless power politics led him to believe he personally could shape future events.