Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Andrew Carnegie was a man of many paradoxes. He was a giant in business, yet stood but 5 feet tall at the most. Audacious and ruthlessly oblivious of other perspectives in his professional life, he waited until his mother was dead to get married so as not to make her feel abandoned. Though he reached the pinnacle of industrial capitalism, he was more interested in being known as a man of letters and ideas than a man of wealth. He relentlessly pursued profits at the expense of his employees' salaries, jobs, and health and his competition's survival, and then spent his long retirement giving the money away.

In his 2006 biography of the philanthropic steelmaker, Andrew Carnegie, David Nasaw attempts to capture and consider these dueling aspects of Carnegie's personality, which reflect the transitional nature of his times:

Andrew Carnegie was a critical agent in the triumph of industrial capitalism surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. That much is undeniable. But the source materials I have uncovered do not support the telling of a heroic narrative of an industrialist who brought sanity and rationality to an immature capitalism plagued by runaway competition, ruthless speculation, and insider corruption. Nor do they support the recitation of another muckraking expose of Gilded Age criminality. The history of industrial consolidation and incorporation is too complex to be encapsulated in Whiggish narratives of progress or post-Edenic tales of declension, decline, and fall.

Carnegie himself credited his success not to any innate skill or divine selection, but to more or less being in the right place and the right time. He was born in the fall of 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland, a town known then, as now, for its textile industry. His father was a skilled linen weaver who lacked either the ingenuity or the initiative to be successful at his trade, leaving Carnegie's mother to devise small business opportunities to support the family. They departed Scotland in 1848, settling in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, with family members who had preceded them. With the family impoverished, young "Andra" entered the work force at age 13. In short order, he was the main breadwinner:

There was something about the lad that inspired older Scottish men to entrust him with responsibilities he was not quite ready for. The Carnegies had relocated to an American manufacturing city filled with enterprising, upward-rising Scotsmen, ready and able to help out young landsmen. Andra's stint as a bobbin boy for Mr. Blackstock had barely begun when another Scottish expatriate manufacturer, John Hay, offered him a position for two dollars a week, almost double his wages.

Less than a year later Carnegie would move to a telegraph company where he worked as a messenger, then operator, before making the fateful move over to local office of the Pennsylvania Railroad, an association he would maintain for the duration of his career. Starting as a telegraph operator, secretary, and chief assistant to the superintendent, within a few years he was superintendent himself. The 1850s and 1860s were a great time to be in the railroad business, particularly when a railroad executive could invest in the very companies that were building or using the expanding railroad network:

In 1862 Carnegie invited Jacob Linville, the Pennsylvania's chief bridge engineer, and John Piper and Aaron Shiffler, also engineers, to join him, Scott, and Thomson in organizing a new company to build iron railroad bridges in Pittsburgh. The new company, Piper & Shiffler, was a fine example of nineteenth-century crony capitalism. Carnegie would oversee operations and finances from Pittsburgh. Scott and Thomson, who remained silent partners in the enterprise, would make sure the new company received lucrative contracts for iron bridges from the Pennsylvania and its affiliated companies. As he had become the modus operandi of their investment partnership, Carnegie held Scott's stock in his own name. Thomson's shares were put in his wife's name. Linville's participation in the company was also kept secret as, with Scott and Thomson, he remained an employee of the railroad.

The money Carnegie earns in such endeavors is immediately reinvested into new projects, a habit that Carnegie would carry with him into the steel business when he made the move in the early 1870s to put "all my eggs in one basket." Foreseeing the demand for steel railroad lines, Carnegie used his connections and insight in the railroad industry and his continual investment in better technology to claim for himself an enormous share of the booming steel business. He brought vertical integration to the business as well, buying the coke sources needed for steel production and building his own railroads to lower transportation costs. By the time he sold his various enterprises to the newly-created U.S. Steel behemoth, he was by some estimates the second-richest man who had ever lived.

Nasaw does not gloss over the costs the Carnegie empire imposed on its work force and competition. Ever obsessed with reducing costs and boosting profits, Carnegie successfully drove unions out of his steel and iron works, most spectacularly at Homestead in 1892. Nor does he glorify Carnegie the man. Carnegie was remarkably ego-centric, as surely most billionaires are (that's surely part of how one becomes a billionaire), yet needed affection from all quarters:

For all he had accomplished, Carnegie remained, at heart, the undersized outsider with the funny accent who had been uprooted from his home at age thirteen... In his adopted land, he was the intimate of a president in Washington, an ex-president in Princeton, mayors, governors, senators, and cabinet members, as well as Samuel Clemens, America's most famous writer... In Britain, his circle of acquaintances was, if anything, larger, grander, and more regal still. He had conquered every personal, corporate, political, and ancestral foe... It was not enough. His insecurities about class and status were legion. Now approaching seventy, and if not the richest, then surely one of the richest men in the world, he still sought out and gloried in the approval and recognition of his contemporaries.

Carnegie was also an unabashed name-dropper, "wanted to be known and honored not simply for what he had accomplished, but for the company he kept," and yet greatly overestimated the value others placed on his opinion. This was true in business, as demonstrated by his disastrous falling out with Henry Clay Frick, but even more so once Carnegie turned his attention to the cause of world peace. He hounded politicians on both sides of the Atlantic relentlessly in his quixotic, if noble, effort to bind the world's great powers to treaties of arbitration. It is somewhat sad to see him humored by these politicians merely because they desire his campaign contributions. It is even more tragic to see his lengthy quest for peace and his everlasting optimism rewarded by the outbreak of perhaps the most senseless and bloody war to date:

On November 25, 1914, he celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday as always by inviting reporters to his library for an extended conversation. He repeated as he had the year before that "the longer I live on this earth the more of a heaven it becomes to me," but he also "admitted that the war had shaken his proverbial optimism about the goodness of the world."

The main flaw of Nasaw's book is that it is simply too long. Or more to that point, it is bloated with details of vacations and other aspects of Carnegie's personal life that fail to shed light on the man or hold any inherent interest. Particularly painful are the many pages detailing the epistolary courtship between Carnegie and his eventual wife, Louise. I don't mean to seem unduly harsh, as surely most love letters are of little interest for those uninvolved. But the text really bogs down during the seven years it takes for Carnegie to make the leap into marriage. Part of the problem is that Carnegie, for all his fame and all his money, spent the majority of his long life in semi-retirement. He traveled, he read, he wrote, he entertained. Not the makings of a great narrative.

Some of the 800 pages would have been better spent exploring in more detail the various philanthropic endeavors that Carnegie's money has funded. Nasaw does a decent job mentioning the origins of organizations including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Institute, the New York public libraries, and Carnegie Mellon University. But he gives the barest hints of the achievements made by these groups in the nine decades since his death. Surely an epilogue, at the very least, could have provided such details. If the donation of his tremendous wealth was the "most important goal [Carnegie] had set himself," the paths his money traveled are certainly worth exploring.