Authors: Raymond Lamont-Brown
Two incidents on the trip, both associated with Matthew Arnold, particularly impressed Carnegie. While in Hampshire a visit was made to All Saints’ churchyard, Hursley, to see the two large horizontal tombstones covering the graves of John Keble (1792–1866) and his wife. The poet and divine had been Arnold’s godfather and his predecessor as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The inspirer of the Tractarian Movement (which asserted the claim of the Church to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative) and a keen promoter of High Church principles, Keble was vicar of Hursley from 1836 until his death and contributed to the famous
Tracts for the Times
. Carnegie watched Arnold’s reactions at the grave: ‘We walked [in] the quiet churchyard together. Matthew Arnold in silent thought at the grave of Keble made a lasting impression on me.’ Later he would say: ‘Even his look and serious silence charmed.’
5
At Winchester they visited Arnold’s old school, founded by Bishop William Wykeham in 1387. Carnegie bristled at Wykeham’s maxim carved as a motto, ‘Manners mayketh man’, but was mollified when Arnold pointed out that the comment referred not to table manners but to the medieval pursuit of the arts.
6
During the trip Carnegie thought much about Louise. From Dartmoor, on 11 June, he wrote to her describing the tour and telling her that he would be coming home on the SS
Servia
on 5 July to meet up with his mother at Cresson. As before, Carnegie prepared a private note on the tour for circulation to friends; in due course it too was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The Carnegies returned to New York and the relationship with Louise was resumed as if no break had taken place, with horse-rides in Central Park. Louise soon realised, though, that she was no nearer the altar than before. Carnegie advanced and retreated in his ardour each time they met, with Louise assuring him that she was happy with the status quo. At last they were engaged once more on 18 November 1884.
Louise Whitfield, with ‘a light and happy heart’, was to see little of her peripatetic fiancé, who was at that time deep in the reorganisation of his steel assets. It is clear that Louise loved Carnegie – the antithesis of the ideal man that her girlfriends sought – and found strength in the belief that one day he would be hers. In the spring of 1885 Carnegie announced that, despite some reluctance on his part (to leave his mother . . . and Louise), he was to go to England with Mr and Mrs Henry Phipps. His radical newspapers needed his attention and he would be away until 22 August.
On this trip Carnegie corresponded regularly with Louise, expressing his loneliness and wishing ‘a certain young beautiful lady were only here to brighten [the days] with her smiles and silvery laugh . . .’.
7
Louise spent a forlorn few weeks in a resort hotel at Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, with her mother. Carnegie’s letters to her, in which he complained that hers were not affectionate enough, did not lighten her mood. At length, from her stiff reply describing her own dolefulness, Carnegie understood that he was not the only one feeling lonely and ceased to gripe. In fact Carnegie became more literally demonstrative and Louise began to believe that they would eventually marry . . . but when? Margaret Carnegie still stood in the way, although Carnegie, in trying to hide his mother’s selfishness, said that they should hold back for both their mothers’ sakes.
In his biography of Carnegie, Joseph Frazier Wall cites a number of cogent reasons why Carnegie, ‘who had always aggressively gone after and obtained everything he had ever wanted’,
8
was holding back from winning the woman who was more and more in his thoughts:
All of the psychological explanations so dear to the amateur Freudian could be brought forth in way of explanation [of Carnegie’s vacillation concerning marriage]: a weak, ineffectual father who had been unable to provide for his sons; a domineering, ambitious mother who
HAD
provided; an unduly prolonged childhood innocence of sexual knowledge; a sense of competition with a younger brother for his mother’s affection; a personal vanity so strong as to indicate latent narcissism.
9
Whatever the reasons, Louise had the nous to bide her time to get what she wanted: in her copy of Longfellow’s poetry, she underlined a line from ‘A Palm of Life’: ‘Learn to labour and to wait.’
As well as his business interests, Carnegie had been allocating time to writing. Magazine articles and travel notes now gave way to a substantial tome entitled
Triumphant Democracy
. Since 1882 the idea for the book had been buzzing around in his imagination, so much so that when Carnegie met Gladstone at Lord Rosebery’s he was able to give the Liberal Prime Minister ‘some startling figures which I had prepared for it’.
10
These figures proved that, in the English-speaking world at least, republicans outnumbered monarchists and also that America ‘could purchase Great Britain and Ireland and all their realized capital and investments and then pay off Britain’s debt’ without exhausting the national funds. For good measure he added that America was now ‘the greatest manufacturing nation in the world’.
11
This book was Carnegie’s ‘third literary venture’ and he attributed its inspiration to the personal realisation of ‘how little the best informed foreigner, or even Briton, knew about America, and how distorted that little was’.
12
He dedicated the book to his ‘Beloved Republic’ and mocked the ‘old nations of the earth’ as snails compared with America’s speedy economic pace.
13
Lost in a plethora of words, Carnegie damned the monarchy and pontificated on every subject on which he felt strongly, from agriculture to religion. His rose-tinted spectacles, though, did cause him to anger his target audience of radicals with certain statements. For example, ignoring American whore-houses and violent boozers – which he must have seen plenty of in places like Pittsburgh – he made this comment:
As a rule, the American workingman is steadier than his fellow in Britain – much more sober and possessed of higher tastes. Among his amusements is found scarcely a trace of the ruder practices of British manufacturing districts, such as cock-fighting, badger-baiting, dog-fighting, prize-fighting. Wife-beating is scarcely ever heard of, and drunkenness is quite rare.
14
Like Sir William Wallace driving the English out of Perth, Stirling and Lanark in 1297, the best-loved events of his childhood storybooks, Carnegie cut a swathe through everything he disliked, although in the process he left behind clues as to where his future charitable donations would go:
Educate man, and his shackles fall. Free education may be trusted to burst every obstruction which stands in the path of the democracy towards its goal, the equality of the citizen, and this it will reach quietly and without violence, as the swelling sapling in its growth breaks its guard.
15
For the first time in print, too, Carnegie distorted his own family background and his role since emigration. Those who had helped him were sidelined as he gave the impression that all he had achieved had been done entirely by his own unaided efforts. Among those who took offence was T.T. Woodruff – of sleeping-car fame – since Carnegie had portrayed himself as the real promoter of the vehicles. But Carnegie simply brushed aside Woodruff’s criticisms: after all, never in his life did he admit mistakes to others.
The 509-page book was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in a number of editions between 1886 and 1888 under its full title
Triumphant Democracy of Fifty Years of the Republic
. Translations into French, German, Italian and other Continental tongues were ordered. Within a few months hardback sales reached some 17,000 in America, with strong sales in Britain; a cheaper edition of 40,000 at a shilling was issued in Britain for the ‘working classes’.
16
A revised edition would appear in 1893, in which Carnegie proposed a tariff-free reunion between Britain and America. Carnegie wanted the book to stand out in the bookshops and on library shelves so a bold red was chosen for the binding; on the front cover was Carnegie’s own design of two golden pyramids, one firmly based representing the republic, and the other inverted and inscribed ‘Monarchy’. Underneath was a broken sceptre. There was a reverse imperial diadem on the back cover, representing the monarchy which Carnegie really believed was shortly to come to an end. Outer embellishments included pro-American quotes from Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.
17
In America reviewers were divided in their opinions about the book; some thought that Carnegie was excessively biased in his lauding of the American way of life, while others were happy that their country was so extravagantly complimented. Overall the volume was considered to be an adroit and exhilarating picture of the United States, with the only cavil being that it glossed over the country’s imperfections. Few Americans realised that the book was Carnegie’s thesis towards a revolution in Britain to bring about the radical society that had so excited his childhood thoughts. Indeed he became something of a defender-spokesman in British radical circles. He loved to accept speaking engagements to tub-thump for republicanism and lambast royalty. He was intoxicated by the applause which greeted some of his provocative pronouncements, such as: ‘The Prince of Wales got £105,000 per annum or the gross earnings of 30,000 people and the men who fought their country’s battles [in the Crimean War] died in the workhouse.’
18
Consequently left-wing groups and their Liberal bedmates in Parliament received the volume as a justification for their aims. The Tory press saw it as a sinister attack on British society, the
St James’s Gazette
leading the pack with the
Saturday Review
promoting an anti-American line.
Carnegie’s great friends Arnold, Spencer and Morley also had their say. In a letter about the book to the Liberal statesman and author Sir Mountstuart Duff, Arnold remarked:
You should read Carnegie’s book. . . . The facts he has collected as to the material progress of [America] are remarkable. . . . He and most Americans are simply unaware that nothing in the book touches the capital defect of life over [there]; namely that, compared with life in England, it is so uninteresting, so without savour and without depth. Do they think to prove that it has savour and depth by pointing to the number of public libraries, schools and places of worship?
19
Herbert Spencer put to one side Carnegie’s political opinions but hailed the book as ‘a record’ of ‘the triumph of democracy’:
Even recognising in full all you set forth as to the extent of prosperity in the United States, and even admitting that this is all due to the political arrangements, I should still be inclined to make a large discount from the alleged triumph of democracy on the ground that the material activity in America which accompanies it, whether as consequence or simply as concomitant, is a material prosperity by no means favourable to human life. Absorbed by his activities and spurred on by his unrestricted ambitions, the American is, to my thinking, a less happy being than the inhabitant of a country where the possibilities of success are very much smaller; and where, in the immense majority of cases, each has to be content with the hum-drum career in which circumstances have placed him, and, abandoning hopes of any great advance, is led to make the best of what satisfaction in life falls to his share. I believe on the whole that he gets more pleasure out of life than the successful American, and that his children inherit greater capacities for enjoyment. Great as may be hereafter the advantages of the enormous progress America makes, I hold that the existing generations of Americans, and those to come for a long time hence, are and will be essentially sacrificed.
20
John Morley thought the work ‘a substantial, well considered and important book’:
I do not assent to every word in it, and there are some passages where the sentiment is a trifle too republican for a middle-aged monarchist like me: I mean too
aggressively
republican, for there is no difference between us as to the roots of things. . . . The book . . . is a solid contribution on the right side. And it is written in high spirits which give it an attractive literary vivacity.
21
Carnegie had written the book to his entire satisfaction; the bad reviews washed over him and he was happy with the work as a fine piece of self-propaganda. Having established himself in print as a radical, he wanted now to be seen as a visionary – but there was more to it than that . . . his radical soul wanted a revolution in British society, but his inherent pacifism saw it as a new evolution; he was developing into what modern thinkers would call a revisionist. Several biographers have studied Carnegie’s book trying to understand its deeper significance. American writer Robert McCloskey comes close to an answer:
It seems reasonable to believe that he wrote [the book] because he had an imperious need to explain and justify himself and his environment, because he had to convince both the world and himself that what he was doing was good and that the context within which he operated was just. The book appears to be a defence of democracy; actually, it is a defence of nineteenth-century capitalism – and Carnegie.
22
Carnegie admitted that writing the book had exhausted him and he felt unwell through the stress of ‘statistics’.
23
But there were to be more serious family illnesses. As Carnegie flitted back and forth from New York to Cresson, his brother Tom was dangerously ill with pneumonia back in Pittsburgh. Carnegie combined visits to his brother with business trips to the city but could not bring Tom out of his mental torpor. Now 43, Tom was in a seriously debilitated state; it was as if he did not wish to live, and years of heavy drinking had taken their toll. It is a matter of speculation as to what turned Tom Carnegie into an alcoholic. Some have observed that his life in the shadow of his brother had always made him feel inferior and that in the last few years he felt marginalised because of the structure of the company and Andrew Carnegie’s place in it. Certainly his wife Lucy believed that her husband’s mental state was entirely due to Carnegie’s years of bullying behaviour; being a strong character herself, she had had several spats with her brother-in-law on various subjects. Still they remained in contact. Sadly, Tom Carnegie died on 19 October 1886 three days after taking to his bed, leaving his widow and nine children.