Product Description

In this magnificent biography, celebrated historian David Nasaw brings to life the fascinating rags- to-riches story of one of our most iconic business legends—Andrew Carnegie, America’s first modern titan. From his first job as a bobbin boy at age thirteen to his status as the richest man in the world upon retirement, Carnegie was the embodiment of the American dream and the prototype of today’s billionaire. Drawing on a trove of new material, Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this fascinating and complex man, at last fixing him in his rightful place as one of the most compelling, elusive, and multifaceted personalities of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175714 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 896 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780143112440
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Without education or contacts, Andrew Carnegie rose from poverty to become the richest person in the world, mostly while working three hours a day in comfortable surroundings far from his factories. Having decided while relatively young and poor to give all his money away in his lifetime, he embraced philanthropy with the same energy and creativity as he did making money. He wrote influential books, became a significant political force and spent his last years working tirelessly for world peace. Yet he was a true robber baron, a ruthless and hypocritical strikebreaker who made much of his money through practices since outlawed. Nasaw, who won a Bancroft Prize for The Chief, a bio of William Randolph Hearst, has uncovered important new material among Carnegie's papers and letters written to others, but comes no closer than previous biographers to explaining how such an ordinary-seeming person could achieve so much and embody such contradictions. He concentrates on the private man, including Carnegie's relations with his mother and wife, and his extensive self-education through reading and correspondence. His business and political dealings are described mostly indirectly, through letters to managers, congressional testimony and articles. Nasaw makes some sense out of the contradictions, but describes a man who seems too small to play the public role. While Peter Krass's Carnegie and Carnegie's own autobiography are more exciting to read and do more to explain his place in history, they also leave the man an enigma. 32 pages of photos. (Oct. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Andrew Carnegie was almost the exact contemporary of Charles Sherwood Stratton, better known as Tom Thumb, and easily could have been mistaken for P.T. Barnum's celebrated performing midget. At his tallest, Carnegie never got above five feet, he weighed barely over 100 pounds, and, David Nasaw reports, he "wore high-heeled boots and a top hat to disguise his lack of size." But resemblances ended right there. Any way you measured him, Carnegie was a giant. He established and subsequently dominated the steel industry, he invested early and wisely in oil, he multiplied his millions many times over -- and then he gave away "more than $350 million (in the tens of billions today)" to charities and worthy causes so numerous as to defy cataloguing.

Here in Washington, as almost everywhere else in America, his mark is inescapable. The Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Place, a model of the Beaux Arts style, was donated to the city by him in 1902, along with three branch libraries. The neoclassical building of the Carnegie Institution, on P Street, is one of the city's architectural glories and the headquarters of one of the world's most important centers of scientific research. On Massachusetts Ave., the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace continues its valiant, hopeless struggle against humankind's baser inclinations, and on New York Avenue the Washington office of Carnegie Mellon University conducts many activities of local, national and international importance.

Carnegie's story is right out of Horatio Alger, though he makes Ragged Dick look like a mere piker. The poor Scot arrives in Pittsburgh in 1848, age 12, child of an aimless father and industrious mother. Goes to work at an early age and quickly ingratiates himself to all with "his remarkably sunny disposition, his broad smile, and non-stop, good natured chatter" -- not to mention his capacity for hard work and his nimble mind. Soon he is a messenger boy for the telegraph office -- "the perfect position for an ambitious, affable young man" -- and soon after that becomes a telegraph operator, "the most sought-after operator in the company" because he is the smartest and the quickest. On he moves to the Pennsylvania Railroad, not yet 20 years old, and wins the favor of its president-to-be. He's offered the opportunity to buy shares in another company, and eagerly does so, with a loan from the boss, and later gets his first dividend check.

"I shall remember that check as long as I live," he wrote many years later. "It gave me the first penny of revenue from capital -- something I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow. 'Eureka!' I cried. 'Here's the goose that lays the golden eggs.' " With that he was off. During the Civil War he helped keep the trains running -- he paid $850 to an Irish immigrant to take his place in the army -- and began to make farsighted but prudent investments. "Meteoric" scarcely begins to describe his upward trajectory:

"Almost thirty, Andrew Carnegie was the principal shareholder in several thriving companies, a partner in several more, and a force in local business circles, well known and respected for his acumen and his access to capital. He paid taxes on an income of $17,500 in 1864, with an additional $1 tax for his one-horse carriage. A year later, his income had risen to $38,735 ($5.6 million today), on which he paid a tax of $3,655. Again, he was charged an additional $1 tax for his carriage, $2 for his gold watch, and $4 for his pianoforte."

It is an astonishing story and even now, almost nine decades after his death, one that is familiar to many Americans. Carnegie, after all, 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.

Not the least of its qualities is that Nasaw, unlike most biographers of prominent public figures, does not scant the private side of his subject's life. He trowels on all the details about how Carnegie became richer and richer and richer -- he was both the beneficiary and the victim of what Nasaw wryly calls "the inexorable logic of compound interest" -- and how in March 1901 he sold out to J.P. Morgan for the then-unimaginable sum of $400 million, making possible the formation of U.S. Steel, but he is no less attentive to Carnegie's intimate and inner sides. He admires his subject -- "one of the most fascinating men I have encountered, a man who was many things in his long life, but never boring" -- but sees him with eyes wide open, and thus paints a portrait that is balanced, nuanced and, in the end, fair and probably accurate.

Nasaw doesn't dwell overlong on Carnegie's physical stature, but probably that is where one must start. Samuel Clemens, who was one of his many famous friends, wrote that "Mr. Carnegie is no smaller than Napoleon, . . . but for some reason or other he looks smaller than he really is. He looks incredibly small, almost unthinkably small." To the end of his life Carnegie was "the undersized outsider with the funny accent who had been uprooted from his home" in Scotland and never forgot it. His "insecurities were legion," but he "battled his demons and insecurities in silence. He was a master at compartmentalizing his life, building barriers between Carnegie the lovesick suitor, Carnegie the powerful industrialist, and Carnegie the man of letters, disciple of Herbert Spencer, and confidant of Matthew Arnold."

Apart from his mother and wife, Herbert Spencer almost certainly was the most important influence in Carnegie's life. The British philosopher is now almost entirely forgotten outside academic circles, but in the second half of the 19th century he was one of the most influential and widely read writers in the West. He and Carnegie became friends of sorts -- Spencer seems to have been singularly disagreeable and antisocial -- but that meant less than the philosophical underpinnings Spencer provided for Carnegie. He was a gloomy man but a sunny moralizer: "Spencer offered Carnegie and his generation an intellectual foundation for their optimism, their sense that history was a record of forward progress, by arguing that material progress went hand-in-hand with moral progress, that industrialization was a higher state of civilization than that which preceded it, and that the future would be even rosier than the present."

Spencer taught Carnegie that "his success as a businessman . . . depended on his adherence to the laws of the marketplace, which, because they were embedded in a larger evolutionary schema, were as moral as they were inexorable. The path of evolutionary progress he was following would be strewn with hardships and sacrifice; but these were unavoidable in the short term if mankind was going to benefit over the long term." Hardships and sacrifice were far more likely to be exacted upon the laboring classes than upon their wealthy employer; this was regrettable but also unavoidable, because it was toward the greater goal of putting sufficient money into the hands of Carnegie and his peers so that they could redistribute it for the benefit of all.

Carnegie devoutly believed this: that he was part of a chosen elect -- chosen by whom is unclear, since he was not a religious man -- whose responsibility it was to decide how the wealth of society could be best and most wisely allocated. He was not the first or the last to hold such a belief. It is one of the enduring contradictions of American democracy that on the one hand we believe in rule by popular vote, yet on the other we have acquiesced in the formation of a ruling class whose power comes not from the vote but from the pocketbook. Carnegie, who so passionately believed in America and its institutions that he was known as "the Star-Spangled Scotchman," not merely saw no contradiction but believed that it was natural law and that he had been naturally selected.

Carnegie formulated a "gospel of wealth," relying heavily on Spencer, that rebutted "protests against the unequal distribution of wealth by arguing that the common good was best served by allowing men like himself to accumulate and retain huge fortunes. The more wealth that landed in wise hands, the more that could be given away -- wisely -- by the retired capitalist acting 'as trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.' "

He was as good as his word. Whether the decisions he made were wiser than those that would have been made by an elected government is at least debatable, but the hundreds of libraries built by this man who loved to read enriched the nation incalculably, and his other benefactions similarly made the country a better place. He did himself no honor when he remained silent as his company called in "a private army of detectives to battle its own employees" in the bloody, infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, and the incredible luxury in which he lived with his beloved wife and daughter scarcely suggested sacrifice on his own part, yet on the whole he was honorable and public-spirited. Far more wealth came his way than any human deserves, but he did far better by his good fortune than most others similarly blessed.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Given the vast subject, critics commend David Nasaw's effort. The author combines thorough and much previously unavailable research in only the second full-length biography of Carnegie in nearly 40 years (Peter Krass's Carnegie, 2002). Despite his talent as a biographer, Nasaw—professor of history at City University of New York and winner of the Bancroft Prize for The Chief, his biography of William Randolph Hearst—at times comes up short in his inability to reconcile Carnegie's contradictory ruthlessness and generosity. To be fair, no author has succeeded completely, and Carnegie's true motivation remains hidden to history. At nearly 900 pages, the book might more succinctly make its point. Those interested in Gilded Age history, however, will appreciate the meticulousness of Nasaw's research and his enthusiasm for a time of unprecedented change in America.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An Extraordinarily Thorough Biography
David Nasaw, who previously authored a well-received biography of William Randolph Hearst, has produced in this fine biography undoubtedly the most complete account of Andrew Carnegie that we will ever have. The book runs some 842 pages, including notes, and is based upon prodigious research into published and unpublished sources. The book reminds me very much of the stupendous biography of J. Pierpont Morgan by Jean Strouse, in that it is comprehensive and definitive. The author takes quite a balanced approach to Carnegie, which many other accounts of Gilded Age zillionaires fail to employ. He recognizes Carnegie's talents and philanthropic efforts, but also demonstrates that Carnegie often misled the public about his activities, and sometimes even engaged in self-delusion, especially about the Homestead Strike. Many dimensions of Carnegie with which I was not familiar are skillfully developed by the author, including his involvement in world peace and arbitration efforts, his career as a published author, and his efforts to become a key political advisor to TR, Taft and Wilson. Much like the Morgan volume, this book is also an outstanding business history of the late 19th-early 20th century period in the U.S., especially as regards the development of the steel industry and its eventual consolidation by Morgan into the U.S. Steel Corportation.

The fly in the ointment is that while the author's throughness is the book's greatest strength, it also becomes a major weakness. That is, it is simply too long by far. Sometimes one comes to believe that every letter exchanged between Carnegie and his leadership group, including Henry Clay Frick and Charles M. Schwab for example, has been reviewed by the author and recounted in the text. As a reference work on Carnegie, such inclusiveness is to be commended; but it makes for an overly long and detailed biography that becomes quite an undertaking to read. There can be too much of a good thing and more vigorous editing probably was in order. Nonetheless, it is only fair to say everything about or relating to Carnegie is somewhere within this extensive volume. An interesting cast of characters (in addition to those already mentioned) makes an appearance, including Kaiser Bill, Herbert Spencer, John Morley, various prime ministers, and John D. Rockefeller to name a few.

Carnegie thanks to Nasaw proves to be a much more interesting figure than being simply the "richest man in the world" who was determined to give it all away before his death. If you are interested in Carnegie or the business history of this period, this book is an invaluable resource. The text is supported by 42 pages of helpful notes and a valuable bibliography. The author's command of his subject is evident on every page. An invaluable resource on the man and his period.

A great book
A mentor of mine once told me that 'to learn history, the only books you really need to read are great biographies'.

His point was, of course, that within the confines of a well written story of one life the reader unearths a much larger landscape of the times, events, and issues that surround the subject. Having just finished David Nasaw's excellent 'Andrew Carnegie' I think my teacher would be pleased and fully approve as the book meets any objective criteria of quality and excels on every level.

Here, we follow the figure of Andrew Carnegie from birth and each subsequent chapter of his full life. Carnegie's actions and thoughts are fascinating and Nasaw paints a masterful portrait of his subject. He uses a clear and concise tone to convey all of what is important and none of which that is not. You really feel like there is not a wasted word in the entire narrative.

Along the way we get in depth -but never tedious- lessons on issues as wide ranging as the immigrant experience to a particular brand of evolutionary philosophy to the history of labor to turn-of-the-century American foreign policy....Frankly, I was hooked from the beginning and thanks to the writing style and its intriguing subject the book's 800 pages fly by.

If I have a small criticism it is that in the final couple of hundred pages Nasaw seems to grow slightly, but still discernibly, annoyed by Carnegie's eccentricities and his tendency towards self admiration that developed in retirement and in his relationships with US presidents. In one case he editorializes an admittedly weird Carnegie quote by summing up 'whatever that meant' at the end of a paragraph. This tone is scarce in the book, and who knows, it may be more my problem than anything else but to be fair I bring it up here.

Another positive is the way Nasaw gives the reader credit for being intelligent enough to decipher the facts he provides and then let the reader form his or her own conclusions. I appreciated the linear narrative approach as well, as too many current biographies tend in their laudation of their subject to 'do too much' and jump all over the place. That's not the case here as Nasaw never loses his compass and the reader benefits as a result.

'Andrew Carnegie' by David Nasaw is a book so full, so complete, so well done - and ultimately so wide ranging- that the reader is constantly entertained while absorbing vital information about one of the most important eras of American history and one of that period's most important public figures.

Five Stars. Read it.

Detailed and well drawn biography of Andrew Carnegie
801 pages of biography. This is what David Nasaw has produced--a massive biography of Andrew Carnegie. Well known as a philanthropist, he gave away much of his fortune. For instance, one accounting notes the following (page 801): ". . .at the time of his death, Carnegie had given away more than $350 million (in the tens of billions today). There remained but $20 million of stocks and bonds. . . . In the seventh paragraph of his last will and testament, Carnegie directed that it be bequeathed, in its entirety, to the Carnegie Corporation. And with this he accomplished the final, and to his mind, the most important goal he had set himself." In essence, he had given his entire fortune away.

This book provides cradle to grave coverage of Carnegie, beginning with his origins in Scotland. Early on, the family moved to the United States, settling in the Pittsburgh area. Carnegie's first job was in a cotton mill when he was thirteen. He was close to his mother then and throughout his life. He quickly moved to a position as a messenger with a telegraph company and then, in a stroke of fortune, become a telegraph operator in a company. Here, he began an association at a young age with Thomas Scott and J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania Railroad. By 17, he was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad and on his way.

The volume notes his small stature (barely five feet tall), but by 24, he was superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division of the rail company. Early on, he began to develop "rules for business" (e.g., see page 76). He was in a position to get involved over time with an oil company, with bridge building, with rail, coal, a bank, a grain elevator. And, of course, with iron and then steel. As he became successful, he and his mother enjoyed visiting the old family home in Scotland, Dunfermline.

He married quite late in life (after 50), but appears to have had a happy marriage; he also became a father later in life and appears to have done well in that role. By that time, he had withdrawn some from day to day running of his endeavors and spent much more time in New York and abroad than in Pittsburgh.

The book illustrates the ambitions of Carnegie to be more than an industrial baron. He wrote books, he hobnobbed with political leaders, authors, and scientists. He strove to be recognized as more than a wealthy individual. Nonetheless, he was a hard businessman. At one point, he took pride in developing "win-win" tactics with his employees; by the time of the Homestead strike, he had obviously moved in a different direction, as he supported a touch, hard-nosed attack on unions and employees.

Among his goals developed in the latter part of the 19th Century--to give away his rapidly developing fortune. He donated for development of libraries, he created an organization devoted to peace, he funded an organization aimed at advancing the sciences, he provided support for faculty and students at colleges, he endowed the Carnegie Corporation, he supported music, and so on.

In the end, this book, although very long, is well written, so that the pages fly by. Nasaw does a fair job portraying Carnegie, warts and all. He notes his tough stance against his own workers (after earlier having been praised as a friend of labor), his sometimes ostentatious efforts to become known as a man of letters, his desire to give world leaders a piece of his mind (irritating people like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the process). In the end, despite his diminutive stature, he was a giant in American history.