Mural of a Tycoon

...We also see a man who owed much of his wealth and business success to the early favors of Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad and then refused to assist his hard-pressed former patron during the depression of 1873-1878...

...Most obviously, twenty years devoted to studying the life of Carnegie has given Wall a vested interest in his subject...

...In the face of such facts, Wall excerpts from a letter by "Captain Billy" Jones, Carnegie's general superintendent, to prove that Carnegie Steel paid high wages, preferred independent "American" type workers, and offered the best conditions in the trade and the greatest opportunities for advancement...

...It was a trade-union journal that said in 1900 after Carnegie had spoken publicly on the blessings of poverty and proclaimed that it would be a sad day when poverty was abolished: "We imagine he would not see the blessings of poverty if he had to go back to a dollar's worth of oatmeal a week, that in the old days used to keep his microscopic soul in his worthless body...

...Joseph F. Wall, professor of history and dean of Grinnell College, tells Carnegie's story probably as well as it will ever be told...

...Wall has created an unsurpassed literary mural of the world of Andrew Carnegie and his business associates, one that fills in every wart and sore...

...His book is ojd fashioned biography which minimizes Carnegie's private and subconscious world (Wall consciously declines to indulge in Freudian or other forms of psychological speculation) but which lovingly details every available fact or incident, including delightful anecdotes, of the subject's public career...

...Cap'n Billy" deserves full attribution for his remarks, not excerption...

...Best of all, this biography is no simple apology for the history of America in the late Nineteenth Century or for Carnegie and the business practices he personified...

...Wall's assimilation of Carnegie's values intrudes more heavily during the actual battle of Homestead in July, 1892, when the reader is in effect asked to sympathize with those poor miserable wretches, those abused Pink-ertons, who were terrorized by Homestead's workers, their wives and children, whom Wall describes as a "howling mob . . . screaming, cursing lunatics...

...Such a life story is well worth telling and also studying...

...When other iron and steel companies bargained with trade unions, Carnegie refused...

...Nowhere is Wall's devotion to Carnegie's interests clearer than in the field of labor relations...

...One also wonders about Wall's constant assertions that most American workers shared Carnegie's value system, that they too believed wholeheartedly in the gospel of free agency, individualism, self-reliance, and "rags to riches...

...Along the way the reader encounters all the major tycoons of late Nineteenth Century America, one American President after another, leaders of the Anglo-American intellectual community from Herbert Spencer to John Morley, and European aristocracy and royalty...

...He was a man who devoted the four most productive decades of his life to making a fortune and destroying business competitors, and then dedicated his final two decades to giving away what he had once amassed and helping those his business practices had previously exploited...

...Yet this biography fails the reader in some vital aspects...

...But whatever the faults of this book, they are the inevitable result, I think, of any biographer's absorption with his subject and Wall's effort to write simultaneously for two audiences: one academic, the other the general public...

...Nevertheless, this is a book whose abundant virtues, including a vivid literary style, clearly outweigh its faults...

...Despite public endorsements of trade unionism and strident defenses of the rights of the workingman, Carnegie wrote a record of industrial relations as sorry as that of any Nineteenth Century entrepreneur...

...And without realizing it, the biographer has assimilated the values of his subject...

...for the general reader the length and detail of the volume make it heavy going indeed...

...He was a man whose active life was lived in the arena of economic warfare with no holds barred and who devoted his last years to a vain effort to end war between sovereign nations...

...Personally, I can think of no better or more stimulating introduction to the historical world of American business or the career of a great entrepreneur...

...indeed, Wall presents an object lesson in the triumph of capitalist "ethics" over the older values of personal loyalty and gratitude...

...In more than 1,000 pages of narrative, Wall engagingly and wittily carries tjie reader from the young Andrew's Scottish world of poor but radical handloom weavers to the vigorous, cutthroat economy of Western Pennsylvania from the 1850s through the 1880s to the boardrooms of the great American and European financiers...

...Here is what he in fact wrote about company labor policy: "We must steer clear as far as we can of Englishmen [a Welshman speaks] who are great sticklers for high wages, small production, and strikes...

...Are those the remarks of an advocate of high wages and kindness...

...He was a great businessman who from the first realized that mere money-making did not provide purpose enough in life...

...When his acquisition of the Homestead Works brought him an unwanted union, Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick proceeded in the famous Homestead strike-lockout of 1892 to smash it...

...He was a child of Old World radicalism, the direct descendant of Scottish Chartism and anti-royalism, who, without consciously changing his values or inheritance, became an ardent defender of the established order in the United States...

...He was, in fact not fiction, the individual who rose from "rags to riches," from immigrant bobbin-boy to the world's greatest steel magnate and one of its wealthiest men...

...My experience has shown that Germans and Irish, Swedes and what I denominate 'Buckwheats' —young American country boys judiciously mixed make the most effective and tractable force you can find . . ." (my italics...

...Instead Wall portrays a Marxian capitalist ideal-type, an entrepreneur who thinks only of accumulation, who hungrily adopts each new technological innovation, who then accumulates more capital, and who seizes upon every recession or depression to gobble up smaller or less successful competitors...

...For the professional historian much of the book's detail is common knowledge...

...We observe a business universe in which all values, principles, and ideologies are bent or twisted to serve the imperatives of growth and profit...