The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink

the American industrial order, they seem sometimes to be grappling as much with the ghosts of British or European pasts as concrete American realities.

      Carnegie, of course, was the protagonist of the Homestead Strike of 1892, a fateful standoff between one of the biggest corporations and the most powerful union of the Gilded Age. When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) together with an aroused local citizenry proved unable to withstand a combination of lockout, importation of Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers, and ultimate application of state militia, unionism took a toll beyond the immediate casualties of nine dead and eleven wounded. In the steel industry, declining wages and yellow-dog contracts requiring a binding non-union pledge subsequently became the norm. Overvaluing its remaining resources, the Amalgamated made a final, fateful decision to confront the newly formed U.S. Steel monolith in 1901, a decision ending in crushing defeat. ¹³ Once the last steel lodge in the country dissolved in 1903, Big Steel inoculated itself from trade unionism for the next thirty-four years. ¹⁴

      Moreover, despite Carnegie’s calculated self-removal to his Scottish castle and delegation of authority to his business lieutenant Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead events, a clear chain of authority set the fateful events in motion. Like the Boston Associates who a half century before had created the spindle city of Lowell out of Merrimack River farmland, Carnegie had within a decade turned a village of a few hundred residents into an industrial center of 8,000 people mainly occupied making steel plate (much of it for the U.S. navy) with the nation’s largest rolling mill. It was Carnegie who first negotiated a “sliding scale” (geared to the market price of a key component in the manufacturing process) with the Amalgamated in 1889, then, deciding to go entirely non-union, provoked a strike by stockpiling plates, fencing in the plant, insisting on a reduction in tonnage rates, contracting with the Pinkertons to recruit a substitute labor force, then calling for military intervention and ultimately encouraging the most draconian legal penalties against the strikers. ¹⁵ Indeed, John McLuckie, the twice-elected burgess (mayor) of Homestead, fled the state rather than face charges of murder, conspiracy, and treason for opposing the Pinkertons; a once-proud skilled worker, his pro-union stand cost him his job, his home, and his marriage. ¹⁶ There is thus ample evidence to finger Carnegie as the “intellectual” author of the Homestead tragedy, while leaving Frick—who would survive an assassination attempt by anarchist Alexander Berkman at the end of the strike—to serve as the fall guy.

      Yet, we are also left to reconcile Carnegie’s onerous role as industrial autocrat with his philanthropical acts both before and after the strike. Of course, his philanthropy, as perhaps most famously associated with his endowment of public libraries, could be chalked up to liberal guilt or worse. From the beginning there is a touch of defensiveness in “The Gospel of Wealth” (Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay). “While the law [of competition] may be hard for the individual,” Carnegie insisted, “it is best for the race.” Yet, he allowed that the concentration of wealth in a few hands (like his own) would likely be accepted in a free society only so long as the rich treat it as a “sacred trust.” ¹⁷ In addition, gift-giving could prove quite strategic: Carnegie himself was finalizing plans for the Carnegie Library of Homestead—arriving in town with “a Pullman-car-full of guests”—just two months before he locked out his employees. The Homestead historian thus does not have to reach far to contextualize such acts within the framework of behavioral “social deception” as explained by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, that “the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest” in furtherance of social hierarchy. ¹⁸

      Still, there were aspects of the man that seem to point to less predictable behavioral patterns. Outwardly confident and even boisterously sure of himself, Carnegie likely could not easily dissociate the grievances of Homestead workers from his own past as the son of a failed Scottish handloom weaver and grandson of a proud Chartist activist in the working-class movement for radical democratic reform that swept British industrial districts for a decade after 1838. Escape from the class system is thus a central theme behind the soaring rhetoric of his Triumphant Democracy (1886). Notably, it is not entrepreneurship, technology, or even hard work which, for Carnegie, account for the American Republic’s triumphal “rush” past the “old nations of the world [that] creep on at a snail’s pace.” Rather, with universal suffrage and free public education, “the people are not emasculated by being made to feel that their own country decrees their inferiority, and holds them unworthy of privileges accorded to others.” Freed from a “social system which ranks them beneath an arrogant class of drones,” Carnegie anticipates Israel Zangwell’s melting-pot, where “children of Russian and German serfs, of Irish evicted tenants, Scottish crofters, and other victims of feudal tyranny are transmuted into republican Americans.” ¹⁹ Carnegie’s career was self-consciously steeped in the ideals of both social and political independence. It is thus no accident that when, at eighteen, having just graduated from four years of service as a telegraph messenger to become private secretary to Pennsylvania Railroad owner Tom Scott, Carnegie would look around at his adopted country and exclaim (in correspondence to a British uncle), “We have the Charter.” ²⁰

      Even as a profit-seeking American industrialist, therefore, Carnegie was in some significant respects still tethered to the democratic concerns of the British liberal tradition. Regularly spending half of each year in the UK (historian A. S. Eisenstadt labels him the quintessential “Pan-Anglian”), Carnegie cultivated close ties with the “radical-liberal” wing of the Liberal Party, including an early friendship with writer-editor John Morley that led him into the inner circle of reform-oriented statesmen in the age of William Gladstone, Liberal leader and four-time prime minister from the late 1860s through the mid-1890s. ²¹ By the mid-1880s, Carnegie was helping to finance a syndicate of Liberal newspapers: pushing vociferously for Irish Home Rule and land reform, abolition of the House of Lords, and manhood suffrage. “Carnegie’s Radicalism” (according to biographer Joseph Wall) proved a frequent source of embarrassment to party leader Gladstone, with whom he maintained a generally cordial relationship. ²²

      Yet, on specifically labor-related issues, Carnegie’s British commitments across the 1880s and early 1890s are unclear. Among his close associates, Morley in 1891 bitterly opposed an eight hour bill for miners, while other friends like Charles Dilke and John Burns were strong labor advocates. On the very eve of his September 1891 departure to America to deal with the expiring Homestead contract, Carnegie hedged on the question of hours legislation: internationally competitive industries like steel, he suggested, could not practically conform to restrictive regulation, yet he allowed that “we shall have more and more occasion for the State to legislate on behalf of the workers.” ²³ Perhaps most surprising was Carnegie’s £100 contribution to the campaign of Scottish socialist Keir Hardie, elected the first independent Labour MP (with de facto Liberal support) at West Ham South in 1892: was he expressing sympathies for Hardie’s social-democratic principles or merely patronizing a fellow Scot? ²⁴ Whatever the competing, sometimes contradictory pulls on his political sympathies, Carnegie surely bore witness to the contemporary tensions between an older, individualist liberal-radicalism and a New Liberalism that tied citizenship in an industrial society to state-aided worker welfare and trade union protections.

      In retrospect, one aspect of Carnegie’s thought, evident in his own discourse, seems to have facilitated a confrontational stance with his American workforce. If he was a spread-eagled American patriot, Carnegie was also an Anglo American cultural chauvinist. Thus, even as he idealistically allowed for immigrants from other stock to remake themselves in the American setting, he betrayed no doubt as to which bloodline made up the “noble strain” (how odd a phrase for a radical anti-monarchist) of cultural inheritance. His sufferance of an obstreperous unionized workforce—particularly one heavy with unreconstructed ethnic outsiders—was noticeably limited. At his Edgar Thomson works in 1891, he readily assented to both Frick and Schwab’s denigration of workers’ recalcitrance as “nothing more than a drunken Hungarian spree” and anticipation of “another attack by the Huns tonight.” ²⁵ As lesser citizens, expressions from the vast ranks of unskilled, immigrant labor might be more easily dismissed. As Carnegie asserted on his way to Homestead in 1891, they “lack the necessary qualities: educational, physical, and moral. The common laborer is a common labourer because