Andrew Carnegie

by David Nasaw

Overview

A New York Times bestseller!

“Beautifully crafted and fun to read.” —Louis Galambos, The Wall Street Journal

“Nasaw’s research is extraordinary.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Make no mistake: David Nasaw has produced the most thorough, accurate and authoritative biography of Carnegie to date.” —Salon.com

The definitive account of the life of Andrew Carnegie 

Celebrated historian David Nasaw, whom The New York Times Book Review has called "a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst," brings new life to the story of one of America's most famous and successful businessmen and philanthropists—in what will prove to be the biography of the season.

Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. His rags to riches story has never been told as dramatically and vividly as in Nasaw's new biography. Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent to the American public—a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters, lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and capitalism—Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma.

Nasaw explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to give it all away, how he was drawn into the campaign first against American involvement in the Spanish-American War and then for international peace, and how he used his friendships with presidents and prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. With a trove of new material—unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement; diaries of family and close friends; his applications for citizenship; his extensive correspondence with Henry Clay Frick; and dozens of private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as friends Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain—Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this fascinating and complex man, deftly placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master storyteller can.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143112440
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/30/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	896
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.43(h) x 1.58(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Nasaw is a historian, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and bestselling author of The Last Million, named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, and History Today; The Patriarch, a New York Times "Five Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year"; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" and the winner of the American History Book Prize; The Chief, winner of the Bancroft Prize. He was the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the president of the Society of American Historians. In 2023, he was honored by the New York Public Library as a “Library Lion.” Nasaw’s newest book, The Wounded Generation, will be published by Penguin Press in October 2025.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

He was born in the upstairs room of a tiny gray stone weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, to Margaret Carnegie, the daughter of Tom Morrison, the town’s outspoken radical, and William Carnegie, a handloom weaver of fine damasks. He would be called Andrew, following the Scottish custom of naming the firstborn son after the father’s father. Mag Carnegie, unable to afford a midwife, had called on her pregnant girlhood friend Ailie Fargee for assistance. A few months later, when Ailie’s time came, Mag was there to minister to the birth of Ailie’s son, Richard.

The stone cottage in which Andra, as the child was known, was born (and which has been preserved as the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum) was impossibly tiny, with two stories and two rooms. The bottom floor was occupied almost entirely by Will Carnegie’s loom. The top story served as kitchen, dining room, and living quarters. It was all but dominated by the family’s bed. Looking at the cottage today, one wonders how two adults and a child could have lived there.

Carnegie’s birthplace, Dunfermline (the accent is on the second syllable, with a broad, lingering vowel sound), is situated about fourteen miles north of Edinburgh and forty miles east of Glasgow. It was already, in 1835, an epicenter of the social upheaval that we refer to today as the Industrial Revolution. “Beloved Dunfermline” was also, as Carnegie recalled in his Autobiography, a glorious place to grow up in, a town rich in history, the ancient capital of the Scottish nation. It was to Dunfermline that Malcolm Canmore had returned in the year 1057 after seventeen years of exile to take back the throne from the usurper Macbeth. Malcolm built himself a castle on a mound of earth at the foot of a small river that provided the future town with a reminder of its past and a name that would stay with it forever. “Dunfermline,” a word of Celtic origin, is a composite term, meaning “castle” (dun) that “commands or watches over” (faire) a “pond” (linne) or “stream” (loin). In 1070, four years after William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, defeated the English army and made himself king, Malcolm married Margaret, one of the Saxon royal family who sought exile in Scotland. It was Queen, later Saint, Margaret who was instrumental in establishing an ecclesiastical center where once only a fort had stood and bringing what was regarded as a modicum of English civilization to the rough northern land. Malcolm and Margaret ruled Scotland from Dunfermline and were buried there, as in later years were successors to the Scottish throne.

By 1835, the only remnants of Dunfermline’s past glories were the ruins of Malcolm’s Tower and the Abbey, but they loomed large over the horizon. In 1818, while clearing away the earth in order to build a new church on the site of the old, workmen came upon an ancient vault, seven and a half feet in length, within which was a very large body, about six feet long, encased in lead. After laborious examinations of the site and the vault and body, it was determined beyond any reasonable doubt that the body was that of Robert the Bruce, the heroic king who had defeated the English army at Bannockburn in 1314 and restored Scottish sovereignty.

“Fortunate in my ancestors,” Carnegie would later lecture his readers in his Autobiography,

I was supremely so in my birthplace. Where one is born is very important, for different surroundings and traditions appeal to and stimulate different latent tendencies in the child. Ruskin truly observes that every bright boy in Edinburgh is influenced by the sight of the Castle. So is the child of Dunfermline, by its noble Abbey. . . . The ruins of the great monastery and of the Palace where Kings were born still stand. . . . The tomb of The Bruce is in the center of the Abbey, Saint Margaret’s tomb is near, and many of the “royal folk” lie sleeping close around. . . . All is still redolent of the mighty past when Dunfermline was both nationally and religiously the capital of Scotland. The child privileged to develop amid such surroundings absorbs poetry and romance with the air he breathes, assimilates history and tradition as he gazes around. These become to him his real world in childhood—the ideal is the ever-present real. The actual has yet to come when, later in life, he is launched into the workday world of stern reality.

Carnegie’s reflections are testimony to his realization that the portrait of Dunfermline he offered in his Autobiography was a partial one, more ideal than real. Dunfermline was a glorious place to grow up, but only if one was able to close one’s eyes to the misery and dislocation that the Industrial Revolution was going to visit upon it, to look past the poverty and the fear that enveloped the town’s weavers as their livelihoods were taken from them.

Dunfermline at Andra’s birth was a rather prosperous town, with a population that had more than doubled since the turn of the century. Dozens of well-built stone weavers’ cottages like the Carnegies’ were situated on the streets and alleyways that sloped down from the High Street, where the town’s shops and its three banks stood. The town council had begun, in recent years, to spruce up the place. Outside stairways that had obstructed street traffic were ordered removed; new streetlamps installed; public wells more carefully “attended to”; and the streets paved with newly hewn stones and washed regularly, though not enough to clear away the pools of rotting “fluid garbage” that lingered after every rain. The major industry was, as it had been for generations, fine linen weaving.

The weavers spent the daylight hours at their looms, which, too heavy to go anywhere else, took up the ground floors of their stone cottages. The Carnegies had been weavers for as long as anyone could remember. Weaving —of cottons, woolens, silks, and linens—was by far the largest employment in Scotland and Great Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Having destroyed the East India textile industry by import restrictions, and monopolized the Latin American trade during the Napoleonic Wars, the British were now selling their textiles in every major market in the world. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landless migrants from the Scottish Lowlands, from the Highlands, and from Ireland streamed into the towns, villages, and cities of southern Scotland, many of them to take up the weaving trade. The number of handloom weavers more than tripled between 1780 and 1820.

The elites of the trade were the “fine” or “fancy” weavers of silk and linen. To weave cotton yarn into coarse cloth suitable for shirts and shawls required a minimum of skill; to weave delicate threads into ornately decorated tablecloths and napkins took experience, dexterity, and a not inconsiderable degree of hand and arm strength. The handloom weavers of Dunfermline who worked only with the finest of damask linens were, as might have been expected, both proud and protective of their craft. Every weaver in town could recite the recent history of the trade: how James Blake, feigning idiocy, had crawled under a damask loom in Edinburgh to learn the secrets of its construction, memorized what he saw there, and returned to Dunfermline to build his own; how John Wilson of Bridge Street had introduced the flying shuttle, which made it possible for one man to work a loom by himself without need of helpers to position the shuttle; how in 1825 Alexander Robertson and Messrs R. and J. Kerr had imported the Jacquard machine, invented by Monsieur Jacquard, a weaver of Lyons. Before the invention of the Jacquard machine, the linen weavers had had to laboriously refit their looms for each new design. The machines now reduced the preparation time from five or six weeks to a day or less.

The Carnegies arrived in the Dunfermline area in the mid-eighteenth century. Andrew, the eleventh Earl of Elgin, whose land the Carnegies leased on arriving in the south, believes that they had been forced to flee their home in the northeast, in the Dundee area, after the unsuccessful 1745 uprising led by the Stuart pretender, Prince Charles. The English confiscated the estates of rebel landowners, forcing many of their tenants, like the Carnegies, to seek refuge farther south.

The name Carnegie appears for the first time in Dunfermline registers in 1759 with the baptism of Elizabeth, the daughter of James Carnegie. The Carnegies were, at the time, located in Pattiesmuir, a tiny village that was part of Lord Elgin’s Broomhall estates, just outside the royal burgh of Dunfermline. That the Carnegies were weavers we know from the Broomhall “Particular Household Expenses,” kept by Lady Elgin, who noted payments of two pounds in May 1768 and fourteen shillings in January 1769 to “Carnegies for working the coarse web.” A 1771 map of the Elgin lands shows that the Carnegies leased a tiny plot with a garden in the village and a small field just beyond.

James’s eldest son, Andrew, who all his life would be known as “Daft Andrew,” was born in 1769. Like his father, he set up his loom in Pattiesmuir, just outside Dunfermline, perhaps to avoid having to join the burgh’s weavers’ guild, pay its dues, and abide by its regulations. “Daft Andrew,” from whom his grandson of the same name claimed to have inherited the “sunny disposition” that rose-colored his own past, was, according to a local historian writing in 1916, “a ‘brainy’ man who read and thought for himself” and gathered about him the radical-minded weavers of the town.

They called the public house they met in their “college,” and “Daft Andrew,” who may have spent more time there than anyone else, the “professor.” Whether because he was fonder of drink than of his loom or because he spent more time at the “college of Pattiesmuir” than at his cottage workshop, “Daft Andrew” fell heavily into debt to his landlords. An entry in the Estate Record Book of Thomas, seventh Earl of Elgin, who was himself deeply in debt after his costly transplant of the Parthenon marbles from the Acropolis to London, notes that Andrew Carnegie’s “arrears of house rent” of £34. 10s. had been written off as “doubtful and desperate debts” because Carnegie was “very poor and unable to pay anything.”

Andrew’s son William, the third generation of Lowland weavers, was born in Pattiesmuir in 1804, but, on coming of age, left the family holdings and relocated to Dunfermline proper, where in the 1820s there was plenty of work, even for those who did not belong to the guild. By 1834, William was doing so well at his loom that he was able to marry Margaret Morrison of Dunfermline. Mag was taller than her husband, with “a fine dignified carriage; dark in complexion, with black eyes and ‘wee hands and feet,’” one Dunfermline neighbor remembered. William was a little, fair-haired man, handsome in his way, but not terribly imposing. Their first child, Andra, who was born a year after their marriage, would take after the Carnegies in looks—he too was small and fair-haired—but had the Morrisons’ fiery temperament.

The standard rise-and-fall narrative of the Dunfermline weavers attributes their downfall to the coming of power looms and manufactories; but because of the delicacy of their fabric and designs, the linen weavers were protected from industrialization far longer than those who worked with wool or cotton. Through the 1820s and 1830s, they profited from an American export market that remained strong because tariffs on linen were lower (America had no linen weavers to protect) than those on other textiles. In 1833, the Dunfermline weavers reaped the whirlwind when the Americans removed all tariffs on “bleached and unbleached linens, table linen, linen napkins, and linen cambrics,” precisely those products that were exported from Dunfermline. With the tariff removed, the price of fancy linens declined and demand soared. Fine damask table covers, cloths, and napkins—imported from Germany, Ireland, and Scotland—became a mark of distinction and refinement in urban American middle-class homes from Charleston to Providence. The total value of linen goods imported into the United States rose from $2.5 million in 1830 to $6.1 million in 1835, the year of Andrew’s birth.

By 1836, when Andra was a year old, more than half of the fine linens produced in Dunfermline were being shipped to America. Two grand estuaries, the Clyde and the Forth, connected by canals and newly improved roads, linked Dunfermline to the port of Glasgow, which was closer to the New World than competing European ports. Will Carnegie was able to expand his workshop, add a few new looms, and move his wife, young Andra, his workshop, and his associates into more spacious quarters in a larger cottage on Edgar Street in Reid’s Park.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The definitive work on Carnegie for the foreseeable future, and it fully deserves to be."
- John Steele Gordon, The New York Times

"Never has this story been told so thoroughly or so well as David Nasaw tells it in this massive and monumental biography."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"Beautifully crafted and fun to read."
- Louis Galambos, The Wall Street Journal

"The definitive Carnegie biography has arrived."
-USA Today

"Nasaw delivers a vivid history of nineteenth-century capitalism."
-Fortune

Editorial Reviews

“The definitive work on Carnegie for the foreseeable future, and it fully deserves to be.” —John Steele Gordon, The New York Times

“Never has this story been told so thoroughly or so well as David Nasaw tells it in this massive and monumental biography.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“Beautifully crafted and fun to read.” —Louis Galambos, The Wall Street Journal

“The definitive Carnegie biography has arrived.” —USA Today

“Nasaw delivers a vivid history of nineteenth-century capitalism.” —Fortune

“Nasaw’s fine book . . . seems sure to be the final word on ‘the Star-spangled Scotchman.’”—Los Angeles Times

“Nasaw’s research is extraordinary.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A meticulous account of a paradoxical American original.” —BusinessWeek

“Make no mistake: David Nasaw has produced the most thorough, accurate and authoritative biography of Carnegie to date.” —Salon.com

“Nasaw’s . . . very well-written biography is timely and instructive . . . Nasaw does brilliant work in bringing [Carnegie] to life.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“A comprehensive and often engrossing biography . . . compelling.” —Booklist

“In this lucid, meticulous, and finely detailed biography, David Nasaw has delivered the authoritative volume on Andrew Carnegie that we have long awaited. He captures in persuasive fashion the many sides of this energetic and kaleidoscopic personality—the abrasive industrialist, the enlightened philanthropist, the aspiring, often infuriatingly self-deluded author and political polemicist—and thereby makes a valuable contribution to the rich literature of America in the Gilded Age.” —Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton

From the Publisher

Mr. Nasaw tells this tale extremely well. Highly readable despite its length, Andrew Carnegie shows signs of prodigious original research on almost every page: the Wiscasset, the ship that brought the Carnegie family to America, “set sail from Glasgow in early July (not May 17, as Carnegie wrote in his Autobiography and his biographers have repeated). … I expect it will be the definitive work on Carnegie for the foreseeable future, and it fully deserves to be.
— The New York Times

John Steele Gordon

Carnegie…is the giant of the Gilded Age, his only real rival being his contemporary and friendly acquaintance John D. Rockefeller. Never has this story been told so thoroughly or so well as David Nasaw tells it in this massive and monumental biography. Nasaw, who teaches history at the City University of New York and is the author of an excellent biography of William Randolph Hearst, has gotten access to a great deal of material unavailable to previous biographers and has made the most—at times too much—of it. Andrew Carnegie would be a better book had it been pared down from 800 pages of text to, say, 650, because Nasaw is in love with his research and cannot let go of it even when it becomes redundant, but only readers laboring under constraints of time are likely to complain; this is biography on the grand scale, and on the whole it lives up to its author's ambitions.
—The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

Robber baron? Capitalist butcher? Angel? Industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie has been many things to many people, and in this grand biography, he's all of them. Warren Buffett's recent decision to give most of his $30-billion-plus fortune to charity squares neatly with Carnegie's view that it is a mark of shame to die with money in the bank; in that matter, but not alone, Nasaw's overstuffed and very well-written biography is timely and instructive. A poor Scottish immigrant, Carnegie impressed a succession of employers with his skills, intelligence and diligence. He also had a Machiavellian bent, and by the time he was 30, he had built a financial empire based on insider contracts to supply the Pennsylvania Railroad with materials and build iron bridges for it. Carnegie's Protestant ethics became situational; he hired a substitute in the Civil War and guided money into his own pocket as a civilian advisor to the government. A shrewd investor, he survived economic panics and made out fine in booms, shielded by a strategy of using other people's money to expand his interests. The darkest side of Carnegie's character emerged when he and his partners reversed earlier policies of rewarding workers with high wages and benefits, allowing unions to operate freely. Leaving it to lieutenants to manage matters, Carnegie-whose personal fortune probably exceeded Bill Gates's today-spent more and more time in Europe as labor unrest mounted in the 1880s and '90s, exemplified by the bloody strike at his Homestead steel plant. Bowed, Carnegie devoted himself to philanthropy, endowing libraries and scientific institutions and pursuing anti-imperialist and pacifist causes, very unlike most of hisfellow Republicans-from whom he pointedly split. A complex man of parts, then, not all of them good. Nasaw (The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, 2000) does brilliant work in bringing the man to life.

Kirkus Reviews