and grandfathers for generations back in the Carnegie history;
and the boy was doubtless expected by his parents to carry on the
established vocation of the family. But, as so often happens,
circumstances unforeseen and impossible to anticipate abruptly
changed the whole life-work of a community, and in the change the
small boy’s life was directed into a new channel which was destined
to bring him the greatest material rewards. The Carnegies wove with
hand-looms. Suddenly, invention gave the power-loom to the world.
Gone immediately was the demand for the now more costly product of
skilled and patient fingers. The swift machines destroyed a trade to
build an industry, and in the destruction the Carnegie family was
swept into new work and a new environment.
With his only means of earning a living destroyed, necessity
compelled the elder Carnegie to seek occupation somewhere beyond
the limits of the quiet Scotch town. Across the Atlantic a great
new republic was just reaching its young manhood. Its fast-sailing
clippers had made the Stars and Stripes of its flag known on
every sea, and tales of the daring Yankee skippers had brought to
complacent England a rude awakening from her peaceful sense of
maritime supremacy. Within its boundaries even greater developments
were taking form under the firm hands of the Americans. A rich
inland empire was disclosing wealth beyond dreams of men: mines of
iron and coal and various metals, forests unexplored and seemingly
limitless, millions of rich acres unturned by the ploughshare and
destined in time to come to feed the world. Already minds of vision
were organizing railroads to bring together these riches and to make
them accessible to the nation as a whole. All over the world people
were turning from war-scarred and time-worn nations oppressed by the
rule of kings to this free land of promise. Men and women and little
children crossed the broad Atlantic to live happily in a country
where men ruled themselves by self-imposed laws, and where education
gave to all an equal opportunity. And with these went also the
Carnegie family, to add their sturdy strength to the great Republic.
[Illustration: Andrew Carnegie (signature)]
There were four in the little family—the father, mother, and two
boys, Andrew and Thomas. Andrew was thirteen years old and his
brother four when this great life-changing event occurred—too young
to realize its significance or to find in it much else but the
romance and adventure of a sea-voyage and the excitement of seeing
new places and strange faces. There was a considerable cotton
manufacture in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, and there the Carnegie
family settled, in a neighborhood known as Barefoot Square in a part
of the city called Slabtown. Andrew was old enough to work, and money
was needed to meet the higher costs of living in this new land; so
both father and son found work in the same cotton mill, Andrew as a
bobbin-boy at a wage of $1.20 a week.
This was the first step in Andrew’s career, and other steps came
with what seemed a marked rapidity. But it was not that unusual
opportunities confronted the lad; on the contrary, nothing could
have seemed to offer a more slender promise than the arduous and
elementary work which he gladly accepted. The promise lay rather in
the boy; and, as is ever the case, Andrew was in those early years
proving the old truism that the right kind of a boy rises above
adversity and grows strong by battling with discouragement.
Andrew was soon promoted, at a slight increase in pay, to be
engineer’s assistant in the factory. For twelve long hours each day
he shoveled coal under the boilers and ran the engine. His pay was
now $1.80 a week, and all of it went into the family purse; for not
only was all the money earned by father and son required for the
household expenses, but Mrs. Carnegie added her mite by taking in
washing from the neighbors. And it is interesting to recollect that
of these neighbors one named Phipps, a shoemaker, had a son Harry, a
chum of Andrew’s, who also, in later years, became a man of wealth
and importance in the nation’s business affairs.
A year later Andrew again made an advance; for, leaving his work in
the cellar of the factory, he took a job as district messenger boy
for the telegraph company, at $3.00 a week. Now came an opportunity
which his conscientious study enabled him to grasp. Ever since he
had obtained his job with the telegraph company he had studied
telegraphy and spent all his spare time in practice. “My entrance
into the telegraph office,” he once said, “was a transition from
darkness to light—from firing a small engine in a dirty cellar
into a clean office with bright windows and a literary atmosphere;
with books, newspapers, pens, and pencils all around me, I was the
happiest boy alive.” One morning, before the telegraph operator
reached the office, a message was signaled from Philadelphia. Andrew
was always early at work, and although the boys were not supposed
to know anything about the instruments or allowed to touch them,
he jumped to the receiver and took down the message with accuracy.
His resourcefulness and willingness to assume responsibility were
immediately recognized, and he was promoted to operator, at a salary
of $300 a year.
In addition to his study of telegraphy Andrew, during this period,
became a constant reader of good books. A gentleman living in the
neighborhood had opened his private library to Andrew and a few other
boys every week-end, and gave them permission to take certain books
home with them. Andrew made full use of the opportunity. “Only he who
has longed as I did for Saturdays to come,” he said in after years,
“can understand what Colonel Anderson did for me and the boys of
Allegheny. Is it any wonder that I resolved, if ever surplus wealth
came to me, I would use it imitating my benefactor?”
The boy’s earnest attention to his work was not long unnoticed,
and the divisional superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
hearing of his quickness and enthusiasm, appointed him railway
operator in his own office, increasing his salary to $35 a month.
A second opportunity to assume responsibility occurred. During the
superintendent’s absence from the office early one morning, an
accident was reported on one of the lines, which tied up the road
and threatened a costly blockade. Andrew at once took charge of the
situation, and knowing exactly what the superintendent would do in
such a situation, wrote out the necessary orders, to which he signed
the superintendent’s name, to set the trains again in motion, and
straightened out the whole difficulty. When his chief arrived, Andrew
reported what he had done. The superintendent said nothing to him,
but to the president of the railroad he wrote that he “had a little
Scotchman in his office who would run the whole road if they would
only give him a chance.”
When Andrew was sixteen his father died, and the boy became the
head of the family; and it was at this time that he made his first
investment, although it was necessary, with his mother’s help, to
borrow the required money.
“One day Mr. Scott [the superintendent of his division], who was the
kindest of men and had taken a great fancy to me, asked if I had or
could find five hundred dollars to invest.... I answered promptly:
“‘Yes, sir, I think I can.’
“‘Very well,’ he said, ‘get it. A man has just died who owns ten
shares in the Adams Express Company, that I want you to buy. It will
cost you sixty dollars a share. I will advance the remaining hundred
dollars.’
“The matter was laid before the council of three that night and the
oracle spoke. ‘Must be done. Mortgage our house. I will take the
steamer in the morning for Ohio and see uncle and ask him to arrange
it. I am sure he can.’ Of course her visit was successful—where did
she ever fail?
“The money was procured; paid over; ten shares of Adams Express
Company stock was mine, but no one knew our little home had been
mortgaged ‘to give our boy a start.’
“Adams Express then paid monthly dividends of one per cent, and the
first check arrived....
“The next day being Sunday, we boys—myself and my ever-constant
companions—took our usual Sunday afternoon stroll in the country,
and sitting down in the woods I showed them this check, saying,
‘Eureka! I have found it.’
“Here was something new to all of us, for none of us had ever
received anything but from toil. A return from capital was something
strange and new.”
Concentrating his entire efforts on his work, Andrew learned all
that there was to know about train-dispatching and began to improve
on the existing methods. Time passed, and Colonel Scott becoming
vice-president of the railroad, Andrew promptly stepped into the
position of division superintendent which Colonel Scott vacated.
Carnegie was now twenty-eight years old and by careful saving and
investment he had acquired a tidy capital. A chance to invest in one
of the first sleeping-car companies had been accepted by him, and a
large profit was ultimately made out of the investment, although at
the time Carnegie had to borrow the money for the stock of a banker
in Altoona and repay the loan at the rate of $15 a month. A fortunate
speculation in oil, which his savings permitted him to make, gave him
his first real profit, and put him immediately in a position to play
with larger affairs in a larger way.
In the year 1865 Carnegie was thirty years old. As division
superintendent of the Pennsylvania he had won for himself a
place from which he could view a wider horizon; a large field of
opportunities was visible. Also, he had saved his money; he was in a
position to seize an opportunity when it appeared.
During the great Civil War Carnegie had been put in charge of the
government telegraph and had done well the important work which
fell to him. But with the close of the war and the beginning of the
period of reconstruction, he saw a greater field for the exercise
of his business abilities. Iron was in great demand. Carnegie had
already been active in the foundation of a mill for the production
of structural iron; for three years the company had stood on the
brink of failure; but Carnegie was not a “quitter,” and he hung on
to his faith. Now, with his brother and several other partners, he
formed the Union Iron Mills. The profits were enormous. Vast railroad
development throughout the country required rails and structural
iron. Steel rails were worth from $90 to $100 a ton. The manufacture
of steel seemed to offer even greater prospects than iron.
In 1868 Carnegie visited England. In the early days of the nineteenth
century England controlled the iron business of the world; and when
Carnegie made his first trip abroad, there were fifty-nine Bessemer
Steel plants in Europe and only three in the United States. To-day,
the United States produces over two fifths of all the steel and iron
in the world, and the beginning of this great American industry can
be found in the enterprise of the son of the poor Scotch weaver.
Carnegie had faith in steel. By the Bessemer process steel of high
quality was economically produced by decarbonizing cast iron by
forcing a blast of air through the mass of metal when it is in a
molten condition. Carnegie saw the merits of this process, brought
the idea home with him, and adopted it in his mills. The vindication
of his faith was immediate. In an incredibly short time he had
obtained control of seven great plants in the vicinity of Pittsburgh:
the Homestead, the Edgar Thomson, the Duquesne Steel Works and
Furnaces, the Lucy Furnaces, the Keystone Bridge Works, the Upper and
Lower Union Rolling Mills. In the town to which he had come a poor
lad from a foreign land, Carnegie was now assuming the proportions of
a giant of industry.
Nothing was too good or too costly for the perfecting of the
industry. “Carnegie was the first steelmaker in any country who
flung good machinery on the scrap heap because something better
had been invented. He was the first to employ a salaried chemist,
and to appreciate science in its relation to manufacturing. In his
early days he was the biggest borrower in Pennsylvania; and when
the profits grew large they were poured back, to fertilize the soil
from whence they grew.... So it is clear that, primarily, the aim of
Andrew Carnegie was not to make large dividends or to sell stock,
but to establish a solid and enduring industrial structure. First of
all, he was a business builder; and the present unequaled prosperity
in our iron and steel trade is largely due to the fact that American
steel-makers have adopted the Carnegie policy of ranking improvements
above dividends.”
To protect the supply of coal which his vast steel manufacture now
required, in 1889 Carnegie joined forces with Henry C. Frick, who
dominated the coke-making industry. As a result, his companies
soon “owned and controlled mines producing 6,000,000 tons of ore
annually; 40,000 acres of coal land, and 12,000 coke ovens; steamship
lines for transporting ore to Lake Erie ports; docks for handling ore
and coal, and a railroad from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh; 70,000 acres
of natural-gas territory, with 200 miles of pipe-line; nineteen blast
furnaces and five steel mills, producing and finishing 3,250,000 tons
of steel annually. The pay-roll of the year exceeded $18,000,000.”
Gradually consolidating his interests, Carnegie formed in 1890,
the Carnegie Company, with a paid up capital of $160,000,000, and
in 1899 his interests were merged into the Carnegie Steel Company.
Although still as active in affairs as ever, Carnegie now determined
to retire from active business. In an address delivered at Pittsburgh
he gave his reasons. “An opportunity to retire from business came
to me unsought, which I considered it my duty to accept. My resolve
was made in youth to retire before old age. From what I have seen
around me, I cannot doubt the wisdom of this course, although the
change is great, even serious, and seldom brings happiness. But this
is because so many, having abundance to retire upon, have so little
to retire to. I have always felt that old age should be spent, not
as the Scotch say, in ‘making mickle mair,’ but in making good use
of what has been acquired; and I hope my friends will approve of my
action in retiring while still in full health and vigor, and I can
reasonably expect many years of usefulness in fields which have other
than personal aims.”
The “opportunity” to which Carnegie referred was the merging, in
1901, of the Carnegie Steel Company into the United States Steel
Corporation. For his personal interest Carnegie received $420,000,000.
Freed from business, the iron-master turned to follow the paths to
which his idealism had constantly called him. Always a reader and a
student of books, he now found himself able to make, through public
libraries, books everywhere available, and in various cities and
towns he contributed for library buildings more than $60,000,000.
Still further to advance education and bring its advantages to all
who sought it, he made other gifts, consisting of $24,000,000 to the
Institute at Pittsburgh, $22,000,000 to the Carnegie Institute in
Washington, and $10,000,000 to the Universities of Scotland. At the
time of his death in 1919, it was estimated that he had given away to
education and other worthy causes over $350,000,000.
Behind this generous distribution of his great wealth was a desire
to distribute his fortune before his death. “The day is not far
distant,” he once said, “when the man who dies leaving behind him
available wealth which was free to him to administer during life,
will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung,’ no matter to what use
he leaves the dross that he cannot take away with him. Of such the
public verdict will be: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’”
Many other worthy causes held Carnegie’s interest from his retirement
from business to his death. Of all his public activities, he took
perhaps greatest interest in the cause of world peace. He believed in
arbitration instead of war, and aided in the organization of various
leagues and commissions to that end.
But although Carnegie was one of the world’s most generous givers he
had no desire to abolish poverty. “We should,” he said, “be quite
willing to abolish luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious,
self-denying poverty would be to destroy the soil upon which mankind
produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher
civilization than it now possesses.” Not to help men were his
millions given, but to help men to help themselves. In his long
list of philanthropies, education is the goal. “Nothing for the
submerged,” was his motto; but for the boy or man who honestly strove
to force his way upward Carnegie would give all.
During the latter years of his life honors came to him. He was made
Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, in 1903, and
received from the same university the degree of Doctor of Laws in
1905. In 1907 France made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and
in the same year the Queen of Holland conferred on him the Order of
Orange-Nassau. By his adopted country he was held in high regard, and
among other honors was made an honorary alumnus of the University of
Princeton.
Simple, as his parents had been before him, in spite of his vast
wealth which opened the world to him, Carnegie desired that the world
should know his pride in his own hard struggle and in the poverty of
his birth. On the crest which he designed for himself is a weaver’s
shuttle, indicating his father’s occupation, and there is a coronet
turned upside down, surmounted by a liberty cap, and supported by
American and Scots flags. The motto is “Death to Privilege.” To
radical minds there is food for thought in this strange crest and
its motto, for they who cry death to privilege often mean death to
ambition, and without ambition the son of the weaver would never have
become the world benefactor who made himself able to give wealth by
the hundreds of millions for the good of humanity.
On the day following his death, in the summer of 1919, a great New
York newspaper began an account of his life with these paragraphs, a
final tribute to an American by adoption:—
“Andrew Carnegie, the outstanding figure of nineteenth-century
industrialism, will go down through the ages as the very
personification of ‘Triumphant Democracy.’
“Overcoming almost insuperable obstacles by his unusual energy
and sheer tenacity of purpose, Andrew Carnegie rose from a humble
messenger-boy to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He rose from
obscurity to a unique position in the world.
“Yet despite the tremendous effort put into everything he undertook,
Andrew Carnegie’s meteoric rise was due entirely to the opportunity
offered to all in a land of freedom and of free speech. This
fact he emphasized in all his writings, and in all his speeches.
Moreover, it had a profound effect upon the course he adopted for the
administration of his vast fortune, for the development of mankind,
and the furtherance of science.”
VII
JAMES J. HILL
_Born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1837_
_Died in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1916_
A hundred years ago Napoleon, with the sword, carved out of Europe
an empire. To accomplish this, the lives of men by the thousand were
sacrificed. With misery and bloodshed its boundaries were extended,
and in a few years it had vanished into the history of the past. In
like manner, for centuries have men of dominance changed the maps of
the world, with armies and the sword.
But within the memory of men who live to-day another kind of
empire-builder gave to the new world an empire of another kind. With
peace and prosperity, year by year, he developed its vast square
miles of territory. With rails of steel he pushed its boundaries each
year still further into the wilderness. Each year he opened up to the
world new acres of fertile fields, rich mines, and the tremendous
natural resources of a virgin country. It is an empire that time can
never destroy. It is an empire that has brought prosperity to the
world.
All this was done by a poor Canadian boy, born in a log-cabin at the
edge of the forest in the Province of Ontario, in the year 1837.
James Jerome Hill was his name.
[Illustration:
_Copyright by Pach Brothers_
_Jas. J. Hill_ (signature)]
On his mother’s side the boy inherited the sturdy characteristics
of Scotch ancestry; on his father’s side he found the brilliance
and spirit of the Irish race. The soil was the sole source of their
livelihood. Born in a wilderness where dark forests still sheltered
wolves and deer, and where the Indians still roamed, the boy, from
earliest childhood, received impressions that moulded his life’s
destiny. He was born to see man subdue the wilderness, to see his
struggle with the forces of primitive nature, to see his inevitable
victory. As his own father hewed his few acres from the forest, so
in the coming years was James J. Hill to redeem vast wilderness
territories and give them to the use of man.
Characteristically, the father’s foresight sought more than an
ordinary frontier education for his eldest son; and with equal
eagerness the boy grasped at the opportunities that were offered him.
At eleven he left the little district school where his education had
begun, and entered an academy in a nearby village, conducted by an
Englishman of college education.
There were no libraries, and in that remote outskirt of civilization
newspapers were rarely seen. But a few books in the Hill household
gave the growing boy an insight into literature, and the long hours
of out-of-door labor which filled that part of the day when he was
not at school developed him physically and gave him a foundation of
good health which in later years made possible his tireless energy.
When he was fourteen his father died, and realizing the
responsibilities which were now resting on his shoulders, the
boy gave up his hope of a professional career and for four years
supported his mother and her household with such small wages as he
earned as clerk in the village store.
For several years, in the imaginative brain of the boy had grown the
hope of some day crossing the Western plain and sailing across the
Pacific to the Orient. Eagerly he had read all he could find that
told him of those far countries. To his imagination they seemed to
hold a definite promise of opportunity. He had but little money; but
he had faith in himself and in his future. Each year the longing grew
until, when he was eighteen, he could stand it no more and his new
life began.
Without money, friends, or influence, he crossed the boundary into
the United States, and after visiting several of the large Eastern
cities, made his way to St. Paul, then a small town situated at the
head of navigable water on the Mississippi River. North and west the
unbroken prairie and the forests were peopled only by the Indians;
buffalo roamed the prairies. Only along the navigable rivers were the
cultivated farm-lands of the settlers.
The young man had no money; it was necessary for him to devote
himself for a time to some profitable occupation. He was eighteen
years old, but he was willing to turn his hand to any honest work,
and his vivid imagination inspired him to work hard so that his
future hopes might be realized. All of the business activity of St.
Paul centred on the levees along the river, where merchandise brought
up the Mississippi by boat was unloaded for shipment by ox-teams to
the outlying settlements.
Hill was attracted by this kind of business. The position of shipping
clerk in the office of the agents of a steamboat company was open,
and he grasped it. The work was varied: he received incoming and
outgoing freight, ran the warehouse, inspected its contents, kept an
open eye for new business, and when labor was scarce, helped the men
load and unload the steamboats. On this early experience was to be
built the great triumph of coming years.
Not content with performing well his daily work, young Hill spent
his evenings largely in studying the more technical and theoretical
aspects of the transportation business and the possibilities,
dependent upon adequate transportation, of the development of the
great unexplored Northwest. Moreover, he saved his money, realizing
that a time would come when his savings, however small, might prove
vital to the grasping of an opportunity.