An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [87]
PITTSBURGH WASN’T REALLY ANDREW CARNEGIE’S TOWN. We just thought it was. Steel wasn’t the only major industry in Pittsburgh. We just had to think to recall the others.
Andrew Carnegie started out in Pittsburgh as a tiny bobbin boy, and ended up a tiny millionaire; he was only five feet three. When he was twenty-four, having scrambled, he became superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Whenever wrecks blocked the railroad tracks, Carnegie showed up to supervise. He hopped around the wrecked freight cars; he ordered the big workmen to lay tracks around the wrecks or even, quick, to burn the wrecks to save the schedule. He liked to tell about one such night, when an enormous, unknowing Irish workman picked him straight up off the ground and set him aside like a gate, booming at him, “Get out of the way, you brat of a boy. You’re eternally in the way of the men who are trying to do their job.”
The Carnegies emigrated from Scotland when Andrew was thirteen. A bookish family of Lowland Scots radicals, they championed universal suffrage, and hated privilege and hereditary wealth. “As a child,” he recalled, “I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their death a service to the state.” When later Edward VII offered him a title, he refused it.
The then fashionable suburb of Homewood, where young Carnegie moved with his mother in 1859, was part of an old estate. The center of life there was the estate house of eighty-year-old Judge William Wilkins and his wife, Mathilda. Wilkins had served in government under three Presidents and returned to Pittsburgh; Mathilda Wilkins was from a prominent family whose members had served in two cabinets. The Civil War was then heating up, and the talk one social evening was of Negroes. Young Carnegie was among the guests. Mrs. Wilkins complained of Negroes’ “forwardness.” It was disgraceful, she said: Negroes admitted to West Point.
“Oh, Mrs. Wilkins,” Carnegie piped up. He was then only in his twenties, but a man of convictions, which he didn’t shed when he visited the great house. “There is something even worse than that. I understand that some of them have been admitted to heaven!”
“There was a silence that could be felt,” Carnegie recalled. “Then dear Mrs. Wilkins said gravely:
“‘That is a different matter, Mr. Carnegie.’”
Carnegie started making steel. He wrote four books. He preached what he called, American style, the Gospel of Wealth. A man of wealth should give it away for the public good, and not weaken his sons with it. “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
In 1901, when he was sixty-six, Carnegie sold the Carnegie Company to J. P. Morgan, for $480 million. His share came to $250 million. Carnegie added this sum to his considerable other wealth—he had to build a special steel room in Hoboken, New Jersey, to house the bulky paper bonds, pesky things—and set about giving it away. He managed to get rid of $350 million of it before he died, in 1919, leaving for himself while he lived, and his family when he died, very much less than a tithe.
Carnegie’s top steelmen were share-owning partners—forty of them—most of whom had worked their way up from the blast furnaces, smelters, and rolling mills. When J. P. Morgan bought the company he called U.S. Steel, these forty split the rest of the take, and became instant millionaires. One went to a barber on Penn Avenue for his first shampoo; the barber reported that the washing “brought out two ounces of fine Mesabi ore and a scattering of slag and cinders.”
Carnegie gave over $40 million to build 2,509 libraries. All the early libraries had graven over their doors: LET THERE BE LIGHT.
But a steelworker, speaking for many, told an interviewer, “We didn’t want him to build a library for us, we would rather have had higher wages.” At that time steelworkers worked twelve-hour shifts on floors so hot they had to nail wooden platforms under their shoes. Every two weeks they toiled an inhuman twenty-four-hour shift, and then they got their sole day off. The best housing they could afford was crowded