Flawed

We Americans have a tendency to view our heroes as perfect and our anti-heroes as totally depraved. Theologically we may agree to the inherent and universal sinfulness of mankind but when it comes to our historical models, it’s hard to remember that no matter how wonderful they were, they had feet of clay. Few in his day thought George Washington a perfect man, but he has been burnished and placed on a pedestal after his death. Since their apotheosis, have any flaws been found in Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr.?

There is a type of historical character that in our day is the symbol of unmitigated evil or less commonly, the paragon of the American success story, but rarely as someone between the poles. The historiography of the “Gilded Age” tends to show the industrial capitalists of the 19th Century as either “industrial statesmen,” or (more often), as “robber barons.” The truth is more complex and far more interesting than the stereotypical cant favored by Marxists, conspiracy theorists, or super-patriots. The industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) helps illustrate my point.

Born in Dunfirmline, Scotland, his family emigrated to the United States in 1848. Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy in cotton mill twelve hours a day, six days a week at the age of thirteen. He was offered a dollar a week raise to become a telegraph messenger boy (from $1.20 per week to $2.20) and with the new work began improving his knowledge of the telegraph business. Andrew was a voracious reader of books, which appealed to his inquisitive nature and honed his memorization skills. He saved his money and at the age of twenty invested $600.00 in sleeping car manufacturing. From there he invested in all sorts of iron and steel manufactures and by 1864 was a millionaire. Over the next thirty years he became the richest man in the world.

With his immense wealth, he built hundreds of libraries across America and in his native Scotland; many famous writers including John Updike and Eudora Welty have acknowledged their debt to the Carnegie libraries. Literally millions of people have been patrons of Carnegie’s philanthropy. The original library of my college Alma Mater was built with Carnegie money. He employed his wealth in “illuminating the spirit” of American communities because he wanted “to leave the earth a better place than I found it.” He built hospitals and a medical laboratory. The great American success story and his immense philanthropy is not what the historians remember Carnegie for.

Carnegie is more remembered for his business philosophy and practices: that the businessman must be ruthless if he wants to succeed. One biographer noted that he ignored the poor and made his millions in steel “while his exploited workers died by the dozens.” He is blamed, in part, for his part in building the dam that broke in the Johnstown flood. The workers strike at his Homestead Steel Plant and the subsequent deaths of ten people and the injuries of hundreds are considered a direct result of his failure to provide livable wages and safe working conditions in the plant. He applied his personal belief in evolution to his business practices (survival of the fittest) and eliminated competition without scruple.

Even Carnegie’s philanthropy has been attacked-he built libraries but gave no money for books, thus burdening towns and cities to fill the empty spaces. The Carnegie endowment today still dispenses millions of dollars to many causes but that is a story for another day. The sum of the matter is that we find both good and bad in every man and we must guard against the Scylla of attributing perfection on the one hand and the Carybdis of consummate evil on the other when analyzing men of the past. Read up on Andrew Carnegie and judge for yourself where he belongs as one of the greatest creators of American capitalism.

Bill Potter