Carnegie (21 page)

Next year the Carnegies were back in Britain with a new summer lease in mind; this time Carnegie selected Cluny Castle in the heart of the Scottish Highlands. For a while he had been promising Louise a coach trip through Britain, and this seemed a good time to do it. In the party for the 700-mile journey from London was James Blaine (absenting himself from the impending presidential election back home), his wife Harriet and their daughters, Henry Phipps and his wife, the Revd Charles Eaton, the pastor who had married them, Lord Rosebery, Walter Damrosch, the Wagnerian conductor at the New York Metropolitan Opera House and author Mary Elizabeth Dodge (who as Gail Hamilton later wrote a biography of James Blaine). Why did Carnegie choose to drag his guests to such a remote part of Scotland? The piper who had entertained them at Kilgraston was a native of Speyside, and this influenced the decision.
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Whenever Carnegie entered Britain the daily newspapers took an interest, one of them offering its readers a glimpse of Carnegie’s latest touring party:

Mr Blaine, a gentleman of some sixty years, with whitey grey hair and sallow face, wearing a white hat and blue coat, jumped up to his seat by the whip with the alertness of youth.

[Louise Carnegie] in a blue serge travelling costume, carrying a detective camera and a lovely bouquet of Marechal Neils, was assisted to her place at the back by Lord Rosebery, who, with his close-shaven face and spruce attire, his bell-shaped hat and the humorous smile which plays about his mouth, is the very ideal of a prosperous comedian.

Carnegie looked the picture of health and happiness, and as chirpy as a cricket, with a little serge suit, a white hat fixed on his head, a red rose in his buttonhole. Up he climbed to his seat by the side of his charming pretty wife, who, like all American ladies, was not in the least ashamed of showing her keen enjoyment of the lively scene.
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The journey would last six weeks. Mary Dodge remembered:

We coached with Mr Carnegie weeks through the cathedral towns of eastern England [Ely, Lincoln, York and so on] and Scotland to Cluny tracking the Roman roads, sleeping in the rooms of Tudor kings, lunching under yew trees which might have been the ones that bothered Caesar, under the oaks of Burleigh House by Stamford town, on the hills of the great White Horse, on the Lammermoors, on the battlefields of York and Lancaster, on the banks of the Tweed, and a little coldly in the damp of Delnaspidal [
sic
].
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From Blair Atholl, Carnegie’s carriage – a wedding gift from his sister-in-law Lucy Carnegie – clattered through Glen Garry across the Perthshire–Inverness border and into Glen Truim. At Dalwhinnie they left the old military road to the north and made for Laggan Bridge and thence the short distance to the white granite Cluny Castle in the birch- and fir-wooded valley of the Upper Spey. This was Louise Carnegie’s first real taste of the Jacobite Highlands. It is a wild place. To the north rise the lonely Monadhliath mountains, and not far from the 11,000-acre Cluny estate is the stone with arrow markings denoting ‘the geographical centre’ of Scotland.

They had entered the clan lands of the Cluny Macphersons, and near the castle lie buried many clan ancestors in a little churchyard beside the road. Over the centuries there were several families of Macphersons –
Mac a Phearsoin
in Gaelic, meaning ‘Son of the Parson’ – but the Cluny line evolved as the most important. From the seventeenth century when Donald Macpherson of Cluny was a faithful Royalist the Macphersons supported the House of Stuart, and during the rising of 1745 Ewan Macpherson of Cluny took 600 clansmen to join Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Although his men arrived too late to take an active part in the Battle of Culloden (1746), Macpherson actively helped Prince Charles to escape capture. Almost 150 years later Carnegie eagerly located the cave on Craig Dhu where the prince had sought shelter before his escape to exile. After the disaster at Culloden Cluny Castle was burned down and the clan chief went into hiding from the Hanoverian authorities before escaping to France in 1755. The Cluny estates were forfeit to the Crown, but were restored in 1784 to Duncan Macpherson of Cluny. The castle was rebuilt but on the death of the seventeenth chief it was sold. The castle was full of Jacobite memorabilia, with Charles Edward Stuart’s own targe (shield) proudly displayed. For the duration of their stay Carnegie became a Highland laird and Robert Louis Stevenson’s recently published (1886)
Kidnapped
– with its tales of notorious Highland Jacobites – was the talk of the dinner table.

Both Carnegie and Louise lapped up the local history, Louise recording the locality with her camera. Carnegie enjoyed the hunting and fishing with the estate gillies and wrote enthusiastically to the erstwhile president of his steelworks William L. Abbott:

60 trout caught yesterday by one rod in our own Burn – We have splendid grouse shooting also, everything there is Lochs – Burns, Moors and the Spey River all round us. Two trout streams run past the Castle one on each side. Waterfalls, Rustic Bridges over them. This is indeed a gem – I will have you all over in pairs year after year if you are good boys. . . .
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The Carnegies filled the house with American and English guests, Carnegie relations and a clutch of Liberal Party stalwarts. All dined lavishly and enjoyed musical evenings under the direction of Walter Damrosch. The conductor even taught Cluny Macpherson – the castle’s current owner – how to play ‘Yankee Doodle’ on the bagpipes.
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Independence Day, 4 July 1888, was especially celebrated with cannon fire and fireworks, and for the first time the Stars and Stripes fluttered over the castle turrets.

The British press were not alone in taking an interest in Carnegie’s Scottish activities. The American papers also followed his peregrinations, several even criticising him for having an unseemly allegiance to a ‘foreign power’. Thinking about what was being said about him, Carnegie made this public pronouncement:

The exile may be excused if his fondness for his native land knows no bounds. Scotland was to me the land of childhood, the fairyland. Here I have never known labour nor struggle, nor any of the trials – the invigorating trials – of life; nor sorrow, nor pain; and across the Atlantic, amid the early struggles – the fierce struggles of success – amid all my cares and throughout every weary hour, there shone upon my path, shedding its beams of poetry and romance, the resplendent star of Scotland. Return to Scotland was ever to me the prize of life. . . . In the exquisitely beautiful life which Mrs Carnegie and I are privileged to live among you in the Highlands, I reap my reward. The exile has returned. . . .
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He went on to pay tribute to the republic in which he had made his wealth with the comment that he would defend it if he had to. ‘I am a Celt,’ he proclaimed, but one who was loyal to the republic too.

While Carnegie strutted the paths of Cluny Castle like a proud ptarmigan, enjoying the position of tenant-laird, Louise was happy too:

We are all in love with Cluny. . . . Such walks, such drives, such romantic little nooks! Imagine the most beautiful mountain brooks on each side of the park with rustic bridges, beautiful waterfalls, plenty of shade trees and shrubs all surrounded by high rocky mountains. . . . It looks in places like the scenery in Die Walkurë. . . .
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A pattern of travel was now emerging. From the closing days of October until early May the Carnegies were based in New York, while the summer months were spent in Britain. As summer came slowly up to Cluny Castle, which they were to rent annually for ten years, the first weeks of May–June each year were spent in southern England.
¹⁷
For instance, in 1892 and 1894 they rented Coworth Park estate from Lord William Farmer at Sunningdale in Berkshire, and Buckhurst in Hampshire from Lord Canteloupe.

Wherever they went Carnegie delighted in showing off his wife; as an American female she had a certain cachet in British society. Had not Jennie Jerome from Brooklyn, New York, married Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough, in 1874? (Their eldest son was Sir Winston Churchill.) The Marlboroughs were a fine example of how many aristocrats found themselves in a parlous financial state; the 9th duke married the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt to help recoup the family fortunes. And here was Andrew Carnegie, once an impoverished urchin from Dunfermline, now sporting on his arm a beauty from ‘Colonial Connecticut’ stock.
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Just as the British landed gentry were being eroded and overwhelmed, Carnegie as a ‘Transatlantic Midas’ was on the up, enjoying all the trappings the English aristocracy were obliged to rent out.

During 1885–9 the Democrat President Grover Cleveland held office in the White House. A lawyer of limited initial formal education who rose to the highest position in American life, Cleveland was adept at making political enemies: Carnegie was one. In office Cleveland pursued a policy of civil service reforms and stood firmly against a high protection tariff – moves that were to contribute to his defeat for he made the Democrats appear an anti-business party. This was certainly what Carnegie thought and he gave his enthusiastic support to the Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison. To Carnegie’s delight, his money having influenced the election, Harrison was returned and remained President until 1893. For the first time in US politics ‘big business’ interests had played a leading role in winning an election. Carnegie was now one of those men who could influence American politics from Maine to Texas and all along the west coast. In due time he would reap his rewards from the Harrison presidency.

Carnegie was also taking on another role that he did not like; he had become one of America’s media ‘robber barons’, those industrialists who were considered to exploit working practices and land deals. The poor boy from Dunfermline, the hater of royalty and aristocrats, with a personal fortune at that date of $15 million, was now being lampooned in the press. It caused him to think seriously about his public persona and his future position in American society, and he actively set about formulating a personal philosophy of philanthropy.

So far Carnegie had funded libraries at Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and his money had gone into public baths and church organs. But he was a philanthropic pygmy compared with the British-educated John Jacob Astor, whose $350,000 legacy founded New York’s public library, or Ezra Cornell, who co-founded and heavily endowed Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, in 1868. Carnegie began an intense study of how the philosophy of philanthropy had been achieved and worked out by others. In particular on the desk in his study were papers on the activities of Peter Cooper, the American manufacturer and inventor of such things as the washing machine, who provided the working classes with educational advantages through his Cooper Union (1854–9) at New York. What Cooper had said about the use of accumulated wealth for the public good impressed Carnegie, who began to formulate his own interpretation of Cooper’s thoughts.

Carnegie was keen to parry press and academic criticisms about his own accumulated assets. He found the answer by setting out his thinking in an article, which would appear in the June 1889 number of Lloyd Stephens Bryce’s
North American Review
under the bold title ‘Wealth’. Based on a defence of wealth and its accumulation, the article developed a theme of giving, identifying three principal methods of donation: family legacies, public donations at death and active lifetime philanthropy. He dismissed the first two as self-memorialising, favouring the latter. He also set out, mirroring his list of 1868, a new set of targets:

1.   Found a university.

2.   Establish a free library.

3.   Found at least one hospital, medical school, laboratory or other institution devoted to alleviating human suffering.

4.   Establish a public park.

5.   Build halls suitable for musical concerts and meetings of all kinds.

6.   Build public swimming pools.

7.   Provide permanent structures for churches.

A core statement was to be relevant in understanding Carnegie’s thinking about wealth, the substance of which decades of Carnegie students would deem idiosyncratic and totally against what his childhood deprivations had taught him. He said: ‘Wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums [i.e. wages] to the people themselves.’ Thus he promoted the low wages that his grandfather and uncle had railed against, and with which his father and mother had struggled. He thought that any surplus wealth or profits should not be spent on enhanced wages but in benefits for the whole community – Carnegie, then, could spend the money more wisely than by simply paying out substantial wages. Another theme of the article was to help those who would help themselves and close the mind to beggars. Carnegie was not interested in giving generous wages to promote a better personal standard of living, but in offering public donations to promote the public good in such things as education and art. He ended his article with perhaps his most famous quote: ‘The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.’
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‘Wealth’ was hailed by the editor Allan Thorndike Rice as ‘the finest article I have ever published’.
²⁰
In those days the
North American Review
had a wide international circulation among those interested in American current affairs, and the article gave Carnegie a wider public presence. Gladstone was one who lauded it, asking that it be reproduced in the
Pall Mall Gazette
; it duly appeared therein as ‘The Gospel of Wealth’, a revised title of which Carnegie approved, and thereafter the work was known by this name. It was soon also available in a penny pamphlet in the United States and Britain. In November 1890 Gladstone wrote his own essay on wealth for the
Nineteenth Century
magazine in which he echoed Carnegie’s thoughts in large part.