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 he is common.” 26
In any event, Carnegie’s reckoning with the carnage and disfavor of the Homestead event proved an uneasy one. He was pilloried on both sides of the Atlantic by erstwhile allies. His home-country Edinburgh Dispatch sneered that “neither our capitalists nor our labourers have any inclination to imitate the methods which prevail in the land of “Triumphant Democracy,’ ” while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch judged that “America can well spare Mr. Carnegie. Ten thousand Carnegie Public Libraries would not compensate the country for the direct evils resulting from the Homestead lockout.” 27 Depressed and secluded in the immediate aftermath of the violence, Carnegie returned to Homestead in January 1893, where he attempted publicly to bury the lockout and its aftermath as a kind of “horrid dream.” While rhetorically still supporting Frick’s moves, he loudly whispered at least a retrospective dissent from the decision to send in the strikebreakers, an event he glossed in a private message to Morley as “that Homestead Blunder.” 28 Growing tensions dating from the strike between Frick and Carnegie would lead the former to resign his chairmanship in 1899, with Charles Schwab stepping into the breach. 29 Echoing Carnegie’s own post-strike whisperings, Schwab, forty years later, would similarly regret his role in the Pinkerton affair, while offering a hypothetical tactical alternative:
At Homestead, had I been running affairs, I would have called the men in and told it was impossible to meet their terms. I would have told them we would simply close down until the justice of our position had been demonstrated—even if we had to close down for ever. But I would have told them that nobody else would be given their jobs… . There is nothing a worker resents more than to see some man taking his job. A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble. 30
Though there was never a direct mea culpa from Carnegie, we nevertheless witness some post-Homestead alterations in his thought and behavior. On the labor front, while taking advantage of lowered wage scales consequent to the decimation of the Amalgamated, he effectively cut workers’ living costs, with lowered rents at company housing and new low-interest mortgage loans as well as cut rates on coal and gas supplies. 31 In addition, Carnegie made much of what he considered a personal reconciliation with Homestead Strike martyr John McLuckie. When family friend and art historian, John C. Van Dyke, accidentally stumbled on an indigent McLuckie in Mexico’s Baja California in 1900, Carnegie, acting anonymously through Van Dyke, offered whatever money he needed “to put him on his feet again.” McLuckie declined the offer, insisting that he would make it on his own, and within months, Van Dyke found him again, now securely employed at the Sonora Railway and happily remarried to a Mexican woman. When Van Dyke then told McLuckie that the previous monetary offer had come from Carnegie, McLuckie reportedly replied, “Well, that was damned white of Andy, wasn’t it?” The compliment so moved Carnegie that in a memoir penned in 1906, he gushed that he “knew McLuckie well as a good fellow” and that he “would rather risk that verdict of McLuckie’s as a passport to Paradise than all the theological dogmas invented by man.” 32
Aside from guilt offerings, however, perhaps the nearest hint of a change of heart towards trade unionism lay in Carnegie’s post-millennium connection to the AFL-friendly National Civic Federation (NCF): in 1908, Carnegie was not only its biggest financial backer but also contributed specifically to the defense of AFL president Samuel Gompers from contempt of court charges in the pivotal Buck’s Stove and Range case. 33
Meanwhile, Carnegie increasingly turned his public advocacy to international affairs. Whereas he had happily supported a U.S. naval buildup (which also happened to rely on armored plate from his mills) and also joined the rush to “free Cuba” in 1898, Carnegie soon after refurbished his liberal, anti-imperialist principles in adamant opposition to the Philippines campaign. Opposing “distant possessions” (except where a colony could be expected to “produce Americans” as in Hawaii), Carnegie asked defiantly, “Are we to exchange Triumphant Democracy for Triumphant Despotism?” 34 (Secretary of State Hay countered by pointing out the contradiction of Carnegie’s anti-interventionist stance regarding Filipinos and his treatment of striking workers at Homestead.) For a time Carnegie’s anti-imperialism extended even to possible political collaboration with the Republican’s archenemy William Jennings Bryan. Though never consummated as a political alliance, Carnegie later supported Secretary of State Bryan’s earnest efforts (in the Wilson Administration) at arranging international arbitration treaties. His last commitment, what he called his greatest, was the establishment of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910. As in his early simple faith in American democracy and free enterprise, Carnegie convinced himself that a series of international treaties and peace conferences were truly delivering world peace under international law by 1914. True to form, he died in 1919 still possessed of great hopes for the League of Nations. 35
Never a deep thinker but rather an impressive doer, Carnegie was a man caught between different worlds of time and place. Living effectively as a bi-national, he regularly projected the idealism and worldly success that he attached to his American experience back onto the forms of mid-nineteenth-century British radical democracy. For decades he could thus remain a radical-liberal
