Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Summary

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death. Carnegie begins in Dunfermline, where he was born in 1835 in a weaver's attic. He describes his radical, book-loving father and uncles, his capable mother Margaret, his cousin George Lauder, called Dod, with whom he memorized Scottish history and Burns, and the collapse of hand-loom weaving that drove the family to emigrate in 1848. In Allegheny City he works as a bobbin boy for one dollar and twenty cents a week, then fires a boiler in a cellar, and at fourteen becomes a telegraph messenger in Pittsburgh, which feels to him like being lifted into paradise. Colonel James Anderson lends his four hundred books to working boys on Saturdays, and young Andrew writes to the newspaper to have messengers included. He learns to take telegraph messages by ear, becomes secretary and operator for Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and at twenty-four succeeds him as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division. During the Civil War he helps organize military railways and telegraphs around Washington. Investments in sleeping cars, oil and bridges lead him into iron works and, after seeing the Bessemer process in Britain, into steel with the Edgar Thomson works, whose policy he states as putting all good eggs in one basket and watching that basket. Later chapters describe his partners, including his brother Tom, Henry Phipps, Henry Clay Frick and Charles Schwab; the deaths of his mother and brother in 1886 while he lay ill with typhoid fever; his marriage to Louise Whitfield in 1887; his relations with workmen; and the Homestead strike of 1892, which he says wounded him more deeply than anything else in his career. After the sale of his company to J. P. Morgan in 1901 he turns to what he calls wise distribution: libraries, institutes, the Hero Fund, pensions for teachers and the Peace Palace at The Hague. The final chapters are portraits of friends and public figures, among them Matthew Arnold, Gladstone, John Morley, Herbert Spencer, James G. Blaine, John Hay and Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Top Lessons

• Work as service to one's family

  Carnegie's first job as a bobbin boy was hard and dull, but he says no later millions gave him such happiness as his first week's pay, because it made him a helper of the family. His mother's washing of his one white shirt every Saturday night and his father's long hours appear as acts of love. The book links early work with gratitude and duty at home.

• Books open doors

  Colonel James Anderson's Saturday library gave the working boys of Allegheny the use of four hundred books, and Carnegie wrote his first letter to a newspaper so that messenger boys would be included. He later founded libraries so that other boys might gain what he had gained. The lesson is that a single generous act can shape a whole life and be repaid many times over.

• Seizing responsibility

  In Chapter VI young Carnegie finds the railroad tied up by an accident while Scott is away and, against the rules, sends out train orders in Scott's name to clear the line. He presents this as the moment he showed he could be trusted with authority, and he admits the risk he took. The episode shows both initiative and its dangers.

• The duties of wealth

  Carnegie argued in his essays later collected as The Gospel of Wealth that a rich man should spend his later years distributing his surplus wisely for the public good. After 1901 he tried to do exactly this, funding libraries, science, heroes' families, teachers' pensions and peace. Readers can weigh his reasoning, his methods and the questions about wealth and labor that his life raised for his contemporaries.

• Facing a painful failure

  Carnegie writes that the Homestead strike of 1892 wounded him more deeply than anything else in his career. He defends his firm's offer and blames the union leaders and an inexperienced superintendent, while admitting that the works should not have been reopened with new men. Many in his own day, especially the workers and their supporters, saw the event very differently, so the chapter is best read alongside other accounts.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The memoir has a few medical episodes. During the Civil War Carnegie suffers what he calls something like a sunstroke in Virginia and afterward breaks down from overwork; he says the heat always wilted him and that his physician insisted he avoid American summers, hence his Highland holidays. In November 1886 he lies dangerously ill with typhoid fever, attended by a physician, a consultant from New York and a trained nurse, while his mother and his brother Tom die within days of each other; he describes a calm, painless resignation when he was thought to be dying and only later learns of their deaths. Louise Carnegie's preface records that after 1914 an attack of influenza and two of pneumonia brought on his old age, and that grief at the war broke his heart, in her words. The Hero Fund, founded after a mine disaster near Pittsburgh in 1904, and the pension and relief funds for workmen and teachers belong to the history of social provision for injury and old age.

• Chapter VIII

  A sunstroke on the railway line in Virginia and a breakdown from overwork after his Washington service.

• Chapter XV

  His typhoid fever of 1886 and the deaths of his mother and brother within a few days while he was ill.

• Preface (Louise Whitfield Carnegie)

  Influenza and pneumonia after 1914 and the patience with which he bore old age.