Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spent
a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital.
That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron business
had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was
still in its infancy.
Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a monthly
pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the future of
iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But “sixty-five” saw the first
steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream. He
went to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the first
successful Bessemer converter. When he started east again he knew what
he was to make his life work.
He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding
faith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating steel
battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses. Later on
he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made it
a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge and
the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his, the
difference only of a month or so, was one of the few disappointments
of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life. That, and Howard's
marriage. And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization that
Howard's middle-class wife would never bear a son.
The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs of
approaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he built his
first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast
iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips of
lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.
He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had,
as time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap and
plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.
Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vast
impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be
had.
The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there was
a struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things. He went to
England to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid,
tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alien
in the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick house
in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and run
on English lines. He soon became the leading citizen. He was one of the
committee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from the very
beginning he took his place in the social life.
He found it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with
dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous
dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his
timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and
the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his
table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrial
pioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the city the
center of great business and great railroads. They talked of its coal,
its river, and the great oil fields not far away which were then in
their infancy. All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision. But not all of
them lived to see their dream come true.
Old Anthony lived to see it.
In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously
interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains,
Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and
coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his own
river boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carried
his steel.
He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone. He was one of a
group of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as its
industries. It was only in his later years that he loved power for
the sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he had
developed a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced compromises
of the new regime as pusillanimous.
He considered his son Howard's quiet strength weakness. “You have no
stamina,” he would say. “You have no moral fiber. For God's sake, make a
stand, you fellows, and stick to it.”
He had not mellowed with age. He viewed with endless bitterness the
passing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of younger
men; with their “shilly-shallying,” he would say. He was an aristocrat,
an autocrat, and a survival. He tied Howard's hands in the management of
the now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.
But he had been a great man.
He had had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl had been the tragedy
of his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.
On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned a
farm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he drove
out there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens,
in the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle for
Sunday afternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those
excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably
through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and
stand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish always,
but a thing of terror in spring freshets. And across was the east side,
already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that killed
the green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and height,
its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the mill laborers.
Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams. He was a sturdy,
dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or flinging stones
over the palisades. Life for Howard was already a thing determined. He
would go to college, and then he would come back and go into the mill
offices. In time, he would take his father's place. He meant to do it
well and honestly. He had but to follow. Anthony had broken the trail,
only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad and easy way.
Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams. Once he
said: “I'll build a house out here some of these days. Good location.
Growth of the city is bound to be in this direction.”
What he did not say was that to be there, on that hill, overlooking his
activities, his very own, the things he had builded with such labor,
gave him a sense of power. “This below,” he felt, with more of pride
than arrogance, “this is mine. I have done it. I, Anthony Cardew.”
He felt, looking down, the pride of an artist in his picture, of a
sculptor who, secure from curious eyes, draws the sheet from the still
moist clay of his modeling, and now from this angle, now from that,
studies, criticizes, and exults.
But Anthony Cardew never built his house on the cliff. Time was to come
when great houses stood there, like vast forts, overlooking, almost
menacing, the valley beneath. For, until the nineties, although the city
distended in all directions, huge, ugly, powerful, infinitely rich, and
while in the direction of Anthony's farm the growth was real and rapid,
it was the plain people who lined its rapidly extending avenues with
their two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tenderness
and quiet, along tree-lined streets, where the children played on the
cobble-stones, and at night the horse cars, and later the cable system,
brought home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens, already
growing dingy from the smoke of the distant mills.
Anthony Cardew did not like the plain people. Yet in the end, it was the
plain people, those who neither labored with their hands nor lived
by the labor of others--it was the plain people who vanquished him.
Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man,
hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved others. He had one
fetish, power. And one pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters.
Howard would be an iron master, and Howard's son.
But Howard never had a son.