Carnegie (30 page)

A curious tale about the royal visit to Skibo is recounted by author Anthony Allfrey. Carnegie read to the King a poem that had been written to mark his birthday. The poem commenced with certain addresses to various monarchs and to President Theodore Roosevelt. The invocations included the words ‘Hail fat Edward’ – ‘that’s you, Sir’ was Carnegie’s thoughtful aside.
³¹
Happily this comment did not have any lasting repercussions on Carnegie’s reputation in royal circles. Years later the King, in conversation with John Morley, suggested that Carnegie might be honoured with a British title – but as there was no doubt in the monarch’s mind that Carnegie was not British, could Morley broach the subject with him?

Carnegie’s reply was succinct: ‘I could take no title; but tell His Majesty if he wrote me an autograph note expressing his appreciation of what I had done for my native land I should appreciate it highly, and so should those who came after me.’ The reply was pure Carnegie, the independent man who liked to write his own praise. Carnegie said he prized the monarch’s subsequent letter ‘more than a dukedom’.
³²
He savoured every word and punctuation mark:

Windsor Castle, November 1908

DEAR MR CARNEGIE
:

I have for some time past been anxious to express to you my sense of your generosity for the great public objects which you have presented to this country, the land of your birth.

Scarcely less admirable than the gifts themselves is the great care and thought you have taken in guarding against their misuse.

I am anxious to tell you how warmly I recognize your most generous benefactions and the great services they are likely to confer upon the country.

As a mark of recognition, I hope you will accept the portrait of myself which I am sending you.

Believe me, dear Mr Carnegie,

Sincerely yours
EDWARD R & I
³³

And so pride of place was given to the autographed photograph of a man the child Carnegie would gladly have assassinated.

Andrew Carnegie was a keen collector of modern gadgets and in her journals daughter Margaret listed some of the family favourites. These included the long-distance telegraph, the new electric car (which went ‘fast up the hills in Central Park’), and the ‘Victor Talking Machine’, an early phonograph which played,
inter alia
, Carnegie’s favourite ditties by Scots comical singer Harry Lauder, including his famous ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’. In his own autobiography Lauder recalled an incident concerning Carnegie. During one of Lauder’s successful American music hall tours Carnegie had visited him in his dressing room in New York. The conversation got round to their respective heights. Both were of small stature – was Carnegie taller? Carnegie wagered that if he
was
the taller he would give Lauder ‘a good tip’ for the stock exchange. Lauder accepted the wager and Carnegie was duly found to be a tenth of an inch taller. The tip was for United Steel Co. shares, on which Lauder did make a profit. He added: ‘[Carnegie] was astonished and delighted to meet a man smaller than himself . . .’
³⁴

During 1902–7 Carnegie set in place a series of important endowments. In 1902 came a first payment of $10 million to found the Carnegie Institute in Washington. He had originally hoped to found an American National University at Washington, but as this was subsequently proved to be impractical he set up a fund to nurture pioneer research in extant universities with a special emphasis on ‘physical and biological sciences’. The year 1903 saw the founding of the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust and 1905 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, bent on supporting the status of teachers in higher education by sponsoring a retirement pension fund.

As his philanthropic endeavours expanded Carnegie became more and more taken up with a new mission. When the Carnegies retreated to their stone cottage, Achinduich, on the huge moorland by the River Shin from 22 July to 10 August – so that Louise had some respite from the hectic social life at Skibo – Carnegie had time to relax and develop his plans. He was disturbed by international events; from Finland to Romania, and from the Philippines to Spain, there was rioting, unrest and disaffection. The hint of war already in the air was brought to fruition when without warning Japanese torpedo boats made a night attack on Russian ships near the naval base at Port Arthur, Manchuria. On 8 February 1904 the Russo–Japanese War began. Carnegie backed Russia to win, but he was wrong; the Russian Fleet of Admiral Rozhdestvensky was soundly defeated by the Imperial Japanese Fleet (of British-built battleships and cruisers) under Admiral Heihachiro Togo at the naval battle of Tsushima on 27 May 1905. The West was alerted to the military strength of Japan, already victorious over the crumbling empire of China in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–5, and the world was now a less stable place. Carnegie would attempt to use his millions to seek world peace.

Pity the poor millionaire, for the way of the philanthropist is hard.

Carnegie remark, 1913

O
n 8 April 1904 Great Britain and France established their
entente cordiale
, and as these traditional enemies moved closer together (and away from Germany) Carnegie began in earnest his grand mission to combine his philanthropy with an endeavour to secure peace between nations. For him nothing was impossible; from China to Canada his endowments had made him the most famous man in the world. His studies were full of the various nations’ highest honours; his mother would have wept with pride to see his decoration of Knight Commander of the Legion of Honour of France, the Grand Cross Order of Orange-Nassau from the Netherlands and his Grand Cross Order of Danebrog from Denmark. Now he threw himself into his new mission with an energy described as ‘preter-human’. His new road, though, was to be the rockiest he had ever tackled. For, alas, the Second Peace Conference, due to take place in October 1904 at the Hague, at the instigation of Theodore Roosevelt, had to be cancelled because of the outbreak of the Russo–Japanese War. But Carnegie was not deflected from his goal; he considered that everything and everyone had a price and he believed that peace could be bought. He set about its purchase in his own inimitable way, setting himself up as an unofficial ‘US Secretary for Peace’. His pursuit of peace would become a mania.

Between 1904 and 1914 Carnegie established five major international funds under the umbrella of the ‘Carnegie Peace Foundations and Buildings’. His first foundation was the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission of 1904 with an endowment of $5 million and a remit ‘To honour civilians who risk their lives saving or attempting to save the lives of other persons, and to provide financial assistance to disabled heroes and to the dependants of heroes who lose their lives in the performance of the rescue acts’.
¹
In 1908 this was extended to Britain as the Carnegie Hero Fund Trust with an initial endowment of £250,000. The new intent was ‘To place those following peaceful vocations, who have been injured in heroic effort to save human life, in somewhat better positions pecuniarily than before, until again able to work; in case of death, the widow and children to be provided for’.
²
In all there would be eleven such funds set up internationally during the period 1904–11 with a total endowment of $10.54 million.

The most curious peace fund came in 1906 within the Simplified Spelling Board. Scholar Brander Matthews of Columbia University interested Carnegie in simplifying English language spelling. He personally contributed $170,000 and the Carnegie Corporation $110,000.
³
This was Carnegie’s move towards a ‘common language’ based on English for the world’s major powers to use and thereby pursue peace. The spelling idea (lov–love, violens–violence, for instance) was much ridiculed. Newspaper columnists had great pleasure laughing at Carnegie’s ‘Karnaghefide’ literary pretensions; one writer, Wallace Irwin, lampooned him:

Grate Scot! I kannot spel the wordz
That sizzle ’neath my brow
Sins A. Karnaygy spoyled the rulz
We ust to hav in gramer skule.

But Carnegie continued to fund the project until 1917, and incorporated the simplified spelling (when he remembered) in his own correspondence and business documents.
⁴

By 1910 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was established with a funding of $10 million. It resolved ‘To hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilisation . . . and when war is discarded . . . the Trustees will pleas [
sic
] then consider what is the next most degrading evil or evils whose banishment . . . would most advance the progress, elevation and happiness of man.’
⁵

Carnegie gave time too, to setting up ‘peace palaces’ which would try to encourage a dialogue for international peace and justice. These took the form of the International Court of Justice at the Hague (1903; dedicated 1913, endowment $1.5 million; the Pan American Union Building 1907, dedicated 1910, gifts $850,000); and the Central American Court of Justice (1908 and reconstructed 1910, gifts $200,000). Then in 1914 came what some thought the strangest of all: the Church Peace Union (by 1961 this had become the Council on Religion and International Affairs). Here was the agnostic Carnegie trying to drum up the religious, ‘to promote peace, through the rallying of men of all religions to supplant war by justice and international brotherhood’.
⁶
This sentiment had more to do with inspiration from Carnegie’s hero Robert Burns than with a genuine belief in the usefulness of clergymen; after all, in 1795 Burns had sounded the psalmody of radicalism, which became a favourite Carnegie quotation:

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a’ that),
That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree [
have priority
] an a’ that.
For a’that, and a’that
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

In setting up these funds and institutions Carnegie met, interviewed, charmed, annoyed, encouraged, flattered, bored and inspired a whole range of international politicians, clergymen, editors and academics to join his cause. Leaders were bombarded with his letters and telegrams and he targeted people like British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and US Secretary Elihu Root, yet all the while he also pursued his educational and library endowments. He was continually worried about the international situation. Violence was escalating in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II; Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supported Moroccan independence against France for military advantage; in Japan the young Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen was forming a union of secret societies to try to bring down the creaking Manchu regime in China; and in Crete those dedicated to the island’s union with Greece were defying the pro-Ottoman Great Powers who supported the status quo. All this happened within the first months of 1905 and as Carnegie saw it the world was moving inexorably towards international war. He thus strove to make himself a leader of the peace movement and he chose to do it at St Andrews.

On 17 October 1905 he delivered to the students of St Andrews University a Rectorial Address under the title ‘A League of Peace’. Although some historians have suggested that Carnegie was the first to make a call for an international League of Peace, such men as the Liberal statesman Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, soon to be British Prime Minister, had used the term in recent years. Carnegie faced the students in sermonial mood.

‘My young constituents,’ he began, ‘you are busily preparing to play your parts in the drama of life, resolved, I trust, to oppose and attack what is evil, to defend and strengthen what is good, to leave part of the world a little better than you found it.’
⁷
He thereafter defined war as the greatest threat to their lives, quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s phrase: ‘War is the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of Hell.’
⁸
Warming to his theme, his quotes from Euripides to Thucydides tumbled thick and fast. He reviewed the need for more arbitration in international disputes and proposed a ‘League of Peace’ to ensure that ‘no nation should go to war’.
⁹
And finally he urged the students of St Andrews ‘to adopt [President George] Washington’s words as your own, “My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth”’.
¹⁰
And he encouraged ‘the women students of St Andrews’ to voice their opposition to war too, so that all should ‘hit accursed war hard’.
¹¹

It was an impassioned speech that would reverberate around the world. In the United States the International Union sold thousands of copies at $5 per hundred and the speech was translated into thirteen languages. Carnegie followed it with a multitude of articles on the anti-war theme. There were dissenting voices at Carnegie’s latest ‘interference’. One was his old friend Theodore Roosevelt; he believed that businessmen like Carnegie should stick to commercial affairs and not push their noses into ‘matters of war and peace’.
¹²
Undeterred, Carnegie never failed to offer Roosevelt his opinions, and in 1907 became president of the New York Peace Society, using its members such as Hamilton Holt, editor of the
Independent
, as intermediaries for his views.

One reader of Carnegie’s Rectorial Address was Queen Victoria’s mentally unstable grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. He wished to meet Carnegie, who refused several invitations to do so. Despite his resentment at Carnegie’s meddling on the international scene, Roosevelt’s administration was disturbed by current European sabre-rattling, and along with Secretary of State Elihu Root encouraged Carnegie to meet the autocratic Kaiser. Delayed by the Russo–Japanese War, a Peace Conference was due to meet at the Hague during 15 June–18 October 1907 to try to win a general agreement to stop the arms race. Roosevelt was anxious to find out the Kaiser’s future intentions and such a person as Carnegie might be able to discern some clues. Carnegie was more than ready to comply if there was any suggestion that he might be acting ‘for America’, and the US ambassador to the Imperial German Court, Charlemagne Tower, arranged for a meeting at the German port of Kiel where the Kaiser had opened a canal in 1895. The Kaiser would be there for the June 1907 regatta, where he strutted annually as a senior imperial officer.