Andrew Carnegie was one of the great pioneers of modern business and industry, creating numerous jobs for Americans during the 19th century.
At the time, Carnegie was one of the most wealthy men in the world. His area of industry was steel, and was a primary mover and shaker in the early days of steel construction. This perspective will explore Andrew Carnegie’s path to the successful and inspirational individual as well one of the most influential drivers of big business ever known in America.
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"Was Andrew Carnegie a Hero Essay".
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835 into a very poor family who eventually emigrated to America, Carnegie took his first job as a bobbin boy at a cotton factory in Alleghany, Pennsylvania. Carnegie, the son of a poor Scottish weaver, possessed a voracious thirst for and drive to acquire knowledge and was a frequent visitor to the public library. As he grew older and more knowledgeable, Carnegie traversed the business world from lowly bobbin boy to Western Union courier to upper management of Pennsylvania Railroad’s western division.
Carnegie established his first company, Keystone Bridges, in 1865. By 1873, he had opened a steel works to produce the material that fed Keystone Bridges. This was the Homestead Mill.
Carnegie frequently stated that believed in the rights of laborers, but his actions do not reflect this. Carnegie was obviously a man in deep conflict. Noted Carnegie historian, William Kashatus, notes that Carnegie was so embroiled in his public image that he allowed others to commit heinous acts of behind the scenes violence against the workers, refusing to own his support of those acts.
In 1892, a conflict arose between Carnegie and his general manager, Henry Frick, and the unions and laborers at the Homestead Mill. The conditions were so bad in so many iron and steel facilities that unions were really very necessary to protect the workers since no labor laws were in existence at the time. Unions are organized groups of workers who utilize the premise of “strength in numbers” to leverage for betters wages, working hours, safety, benefits and many other workplace issues. The conditions at many facilities, but particularly at the Homestead Mill, where Henry Frick – with the background support of Carnegie – cut wages, increased hours and allowed unsafe conditions to exist, were very bad and ripe for unionization.
Some historians tell us that Carnegie allowed Frick to run with his own ideas about breaking the strike that occurred at this time. Frick was determined to lower costs and wages and definitely wanted the union – Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers – one of the strongest in the nation – out of Homestead Mill. Carnegie publicly espoused labor rights, but behind the scenes, it was a much different story. The happenings at Homestead, including the import of hundreds of hired Pinkerton thugs severely damaged Carnegie’s reputation as a champion of labor rights and friend to his employees.
In spite of Carnegie’s public position, he supported Frick’s methods, allowing Frick to cut the already low wages of the laborers, locking out laborers, inciting the unions and refusing to negotiate with them.
When Frick brought in the Pinkertons, essentially a private band of thugs, popular with and regularly used by industrial leaders of the time, is when the tragedy at Homestead Mill occurred. The Pinkertons were brought in by the hundreds. They were warned by the unionized crowd of laborers not to step off of the boats that had brought them in, but step off they did. While they did eventually retreat back to the ships that had brought them, it was fourteen hours later that the fire-fight stopped. The strikers made many and varied attempts to get rid of the Pinkertons, including floating oil on the surface of the river and setting it on fire. The Pinkertons eventually surrendered, with casualties of three Pinkertons and nine strikers. The laborers viewed this as a victory; however, many of them were later unjustly prosecuted with charges ranging from assault to treason. Ultimately it was Henry Frick who “won” this battle, having “busted” the strike, sent the unions from the mill and even surviving an assassination attempt.
The Pinkertons were hated across the land, but labor leader at the Homestead, John McLuckie, seems to have despised them with the heat of a thousand suns as reflected in the quote, “Our people as a general thing think they are a horde of cut-throats, thieves and murderers, in the employ of unscrupulous capital for the oppression of honest labor.”
The state militia took over the mill and trainloads of strikebreakers – also known as scabs – were brought in to work the mill. Carnegie and Frick successfully beat down the workers until the union was removed from the Homestead Mill.
Carnegie later stated that this event was “the most devastating trial” of his life and that “nothing, before or since, wounded me so deeply.” The fact remains that Carnegie retreated to his vacation home in Scotland, left Frick to his own devices and destroyed the lives of thousands of his workers. In this writer’s view, Carnegie was a hypocrite of great proportion.
Carnegie liked to espouse his “belief” that partnership was the perfect way to achieve success in any business, rather than support a corporate structure. If his workers felt invested in the companies for which they worked, they would work harder. However, the reality was that his workers worked long hours for poor wages, in poorly ventilated and unsafe conditions. At this time, there were no wage laws or worries about safety conditions. The improvements that Carnegie finally did make to ensure the safety and livelihood of his workers were under pressure.
Through the building up, purchasing and finally selling his businesses over a period of time, Carnegie not only amassed a great deal of wealth, but he further established a business plan that has been often copied and reproduced, proving Carnegie’s methods – developed during one of the country’s darkest economic times – are sound and solid business practices still utilized by corporate America, although viewed as somewhat unscrupulous.
By 1901, Carnegie was ready to step out of the world of big business and showed this by selling out to one of his contemporaries, J. P. Morgan. Carnegie then embraced the pursuit of a variety of philanthropic endeavors with as much zeal and enthusiasm as he had once pursued success in the business world, perhaps to assuage his personal guilt for his involvement of the oppression of the laborers he claimed to champion. His pet recipients, aside from the public libraries, were organizations devoted to learning and education. He also established a number of specialty foundations to continue on with his good work. It is estimated that during Carnegie’s lifetime, he gave away over 350 million dollars. Carnegie’s legacy lives on in his endowments and foundations, from which much grant funding comes for a variety of programs.
- Carnegie Corporation of New York (2009), About Andrew Carnegie. Retrieved from http://carnegie.org/about-us/foundation-history/about-andrew-carnegie/
- Livesay, Harold C., Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, Pearson, Third Edition, 26 March 2006, 240 pages.
- Kashatus, William C., Iconic Ironworks, Citizen’s Voice, 6 March 2011
