Product Description

Majestically told and based on materials not available to any previous biographer, the definitive life of Andrew Carnegie-one of American business's most iconic and elusive titans-by the bestselling author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.

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With a trove of new material-unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement;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 facinating and complex man, deftly placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master storyteller can.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #341121 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 896 pages

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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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

Andrew Carnegie
Insight into a fascinating and complex person living in a fascinating complex time. A man who was unique and had incredible influence on his surroundings, yet in many ways was typical of his era

Very thorough, but with an odd hollowness
David Nasaw succeeded in creating a complete record of the life of Andrew Carnegie. As the reader, you come to know that Carnegie was born to a family of poor weavers in Scotland before moving to the United States, beginning work at a young age and eventually becoming unfathomably wealthy as an investor and entrepreneur in the steel business.

All of the details are there in this book, and in that way, you know the facts of Carnegie's life, but at the same time, you really never get the feeling you know Carnegie. I don't know if that is Nasaw's fault, or if Carnegie is just not a man who allows a biographer to know him very well. Either way, the book feels empty in a way that the best biographies feel full.

You catch glimpses of Carnegie's true personality; he obviously liked to see himself as the wise elder statesman, handing out advice to protoges, even when those protoges were successful 50 year old business men, or even presidents. He seems to wear out his welcome, and relationship with a lot of these people because he only sees the knowledge and advice flowing one way. Carnegie comes across as a man too removed from the realities of life to understand (or maybe care) how he was truly perceived.

Other than that, you never get a real feel for how Carnegie became wealthy, whether he possessed a unique talent or ability which allowed him to become the richest man in the world, or how he fit in to the world in which he lived. I recently finished "Mellon," by David Cannadine, which tackles a similarly tough subject, but I finished that book feeling like I had much more insight into the man than I did in this case.

Recommended for fans of history or biography, but still missing a critical spark required of a five-star biography.

Good Overview of the Original Capitalist
How to describe Andrew Carnegie? Certainly he would have to be one of the most fortunate individuals to have ever been born. Son of a hardscrabble weaver from a small hamlet near Edinburgh, Scotland, Carnegie and family immigrated to Pennsylvania whan he was a young man. Perhaps never before in history, has a particular man, with certain skills, found himself at the right place, at the right time and under the right circumstances as did Andrew Carnegie in 19th century western Pennsylvania.

Despite having no formal education, Carnegie was certainly a very intelligent man. He educated himself over the years to the extent that he was considered a very philosophical author and sought after speaker on many of the issues of the day. He hitched his wagon to the right horse when he became assistant to an up and comer in the Pennsylvania Railroad. From an early age, Carnegie discovered the beauty of dividends and compound interest, money earned not by virtue of labor, but solely by virtue of having money. Due in large part to his connections, he was able to parley inside information into increasingly lucrative investments, to the point that he was soon able to turn over daily operation of his several businesses to very able lieutenants while he enjoyed the good life. These lieutenants, assisted by a series of unique events and developing technologies, made Carnegie the richest man in the world.

While it may sound as if Carnegie was merely an observer and accumulator, he certainly deserves much credit for his success. He was an early pioneer in the concept of cost accounting and through a ruthless system of unit cost reduction, both in the areas of vertical integration and labor cost, was able to successfully grow his business and survive numerous economic downturns which bankrupted his competitors.

Many decry Carnegie's business practices, most notably in the areas of labor/manangement relations and anti-competitive practices. However, this demonstrates a very common failing in many commentators; holding historical personages to current standards. The same people that condemn Carnegie's labor practices, denigrate George Washington for owning slaves, or Harry Truman for making racist comments. Each of these, though immoral by current standards, were men of their times.

Owners of manufacturing entities were expected to battle with labor. Labor, in the mid-late 19th century was heavily connected with the burgeoning socialist movement which was looked upon with disfavor by much of society. In fact, it is no coincidence that those of Carnegie's competitors whose labor forces became organized, were largely those that failed in the repeated economic panics of the day. Carnegie succeeded, and grew, as a result of reinvesting profits and maintaining low unit cost. Ironically, though his Homestead steel works became the symbol for labor/management violence, he considered himself one of the most enlightened managers of the day.

Carnegie is viewed, with Rockefeller, Morgan and Vanderbilt in the class of "Robber Barons" which sprang up during the era, however, Carnegie is vastly different than each of these individuals. While many of his contemporaries benefited and suceeded largely due to watered stock and market manipulation, he was very proud, and quick to point out that he never operated a corporation and never sold a share of stock. He was definitely NOT a monopolist (U.S. Steel was formed as a result of his sale of Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan and investors). He was simply a supreme capitalist and the first of his type and scale.

He is condemned by others for taking advantage of political and business connections not available to others. Again, that was common practice in the era. Many things that he did, while legislated against now, were perfectly legal and accepted business practices of the times.

All that having been said, I get the impression, especially in the later parts of the book, that Carnegie could be an insufferable prig. I imagine it becomes easy to view ones self as omnipotent and all wise, when everything one touches turns to gold and one is constantly praised for his good works. However, it is telling that he constantly bragged of being successful while only working 2-3 hours/day, lecturing his many employees to enjoy leisure time, while at the same time instituting a 12 hour/7 day a week work schedule. It seems almost unbelievable that he was unaware of the hypocrisy of some of actions, but after reading the book, I actually believe that he was. By letting his managers do the dirty work of making his money, he was able to "keep his hands clean" and disavow any unpleasantness that might result.

Though hopelessly naive, it is difficult to condemn a man who literally pioneered the concept of philanthropy and spent his last decade in a never flagging crusade for world peace. He tirelessly advocated the formation of a League of Nations/United Nations style world arbitration body, with military enforcement powers, well before any of his contemporaries. While he would doubtless be overjoyed to learn of the existence of the current United Nations, he would nonetheless be less than pleased with its corruption and lack of effective authority.

All in all, a rather good treatment, not just of Carnegie, but of the period itself and many of the historical figures of the era. At times, the book dragged and became tiresome, but not exceedingly so. I would highly recommend the book for anyone interested not just in Andrew Carnegie but in late 19th century American and British history.