An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [88]
While Carnegie was visiting Scotland in 1892, his man Henry Clay Frick had loosed three hundred hired guns—Pinkertons—on unarmed strikers and their families at the Homestead plant up the river, strikers who subsequently beat the daylights out of Pinkertons with their fists. Frick then called in the entire state militia, eight thousand strong, whose armed occupation of the Homestead plant not only broke the strike but also killed all unions in the steel industry nationwide until 1936.
Pittsburgh’s astounding wealth came from iron and steel, and also from aluminum, glass, coke, electricity, copper, natural gas—and the banking and transportation industries that put up the money and moved the goods. Some of the oldest Scotch-Irish and German families in Pittsburgh did well, too, like the sons of Scotch-Irish Judge Mellon. Andrew Mellon, a banker, invested in aluminum when the industry consisted of a twenty-two-year-old Oberlin College graduate who made it in his family’s woodshed. He also invested in coke, iron, steel, and oil. When he was named Secretary of the Treasury, quiet Andrew Mellon was one of three Americans who had ever amassed a billion dollars. (Carnegie’s strategy was different; he followed the immortal dictum: “Put all your eggs in the one basket and—watch that basket.”)
By the turn of the century, Pittsburgh had the highest death rate in the United States. That was the year before Carnegie sold his steel company. Typhoid fever epidemics recurred, because Pittsburgh’s council members wouldn’t filter the drinking water; they disliked public spending. Besides, a water system would mean a dam, and a dam would yield cheap hydroelectric power, so the power companies would buy less coal; coal-company owners and their bankers didn’t want any dams. Pittsburgh epidemics were so bad that boatmen on the Ohio River wouldn’t handle Pittsburgh money, for fear of contagion.
While Carnegie was unburdening himself publicly of his millions, many people were moved, understandably, to write him letters. His friend Mark Twain wrote him one such: “You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer a dollar & a half to buy a hymn book with? God will bless you. I feel it. I know it…. P.S. Don’t send the hymn-book, send the money.”
Among Andrew Carnegie’s benefactions was Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, with its school (Carnegie Tech), library, museum of natural history, music hall, and art gallery. “This is my monument,” he said. By the time he died, it occupied twenty-five acres.
It was a great town to grow up in, Pittsburgh. With one thousand other Pittsburgh schoolchildren, I attended free art classes in Carnegie Music Hall every Saturday morning for four years. Every week, seven or eight chosen kids reproduced their last week’s drawings in thick chalks at enormous easels on stage in front of the thousand other kids. After class, everyone scattered; I roamed the enormous building.
Under one roof were the music hall, library, art museum, and natural history museum. Late in the afternoon, after the other kids were all gone, I liked to draw hours-long pencil studies of the chilly marble sculptures in the great hall of classical sculpture. I sat on one man’s plinth and drew the next man over—until, during the course of one winter, I had worked my way around the great hall. From these sculptures I learned a great deal about the human leg and not much about the neck, which I could hardly see. I ate a basement-cafeteria lunch and wandered the fabulous building. The natural history museum dominated it.
I felt I was most myself here, here in the churchlike dark lighted by painted dioramas in which tiny shaggy buffalo grazed as far as the eye could see on an enormous prairie I could span with my arms. I could lose myself here, here in the cavernous vault with the shadow of a tyrannosaurus skeleton spread looming all over the