Chapter Forty-Two

America at Peace

Why had Carnegie been summoned to the White House just now? Clemens reports that President Roosevelt “had desired his advice regarding the calamitous conditions existing today, commercially, in America and Mr. Carnegie furnished that advice.” In October a run on New York’s Knickerbocker Trust had intensified the Panic of 1907, alleviated only when J. P. Morgan intervened and, in those days before the Federal Reserve, came up with funds enough to steady the market by the end of November. Calling at Ninety-First Street on December 1, Clemens learned that Carnegie had been conferring at the White House about the fiscal crisis. “He knew,” his visitor tells us, “and I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was thoroughly competent to advise the President and that the advice furnished would be of the highest value and importance; yet he had no glorification to waste upon that.” It was enough that Mark Twain hear of President Roosevelt’s sending for the philanthropist for guidance.

For as Clemens aspired to be more than a mere humorist, Carnegie aimed at being more than a mere moneymaker. The Scotsman had fashioned himself into a writer, a thinker, a sage. And a public awed by his achievements was eager to read the man’s views and opinions: on the uses of wealth (“Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving.”), on capital and labor, on imperialism. When Carnegie introduced a volume of his essays with an account of his apprenticeship in industry—how he had found a pathway leading from humble beginnings to astounding success—people read that avidly. And when he published an essay on the labor question, as he did in the spring of 1886, shortly before Chicago’s bloody Haymarket Riot, this titan of industry could be sure of an audience, all the more so because his opinions on the subject were different from what might have been expected. “The right of the working-men to combine and to form trades-unions,” he wrote, “is no less sacred than the right of the manufacturer to enter into associations and conferences with his fellows, and it must sooner or later be conceded.” Other capitalists and much of the American public weren’t so sure about labor’s right to unionize, all the less sure a short while later when somebody threw a bomb into a crowd of policemen charging striking workers as they rallied peacefully at Haymarket Square. Strikes themselves are ridiculous, Carnegie declares in this same essay, in that their outcome determines not where justice lies but simply which side has more strength and endurance. In his “An Employer’s View of the Labor Question,” this employer of thousands proposed to make strikes unnecessary by basing wages on a sliding scale, keyed month by month to what owners must charge as prices vary through boom times and bust. Adjusted thus, if iron sells high one month, wages go up; if next month the price of iron drops, so do wages. That way management and labor work shoulder to shoulder, sharing prosperity and adversity, with any lingering differences left to binding arbitration to settle.

That had been Carnegie’s suggestion in 1886, just before the Haymarket Riot erupted in Chicago, and his liberal views earned him the thanks of American workers. But six years later, their regard for him perished with the other victims that fell during eighteen hours of riot and bloodshed at Carnegie’s own steel mills in Homestead, near Pittsburgh. As usual, the industrialist had gone off to Scotland over the fateful summer of 1892; later he insisted that if he had been on hand, things would have worked out differently. Back in Pennsylvania, Henry Clay Frick was left in charge, and Frick had no use for unions. Frick (who eventually would build his own great mansion on Fifth Avenue) wasn’t much for coddling workers in any case, the less so because their skills were becoming redundant at the Carnegie mills. For it was a characteristic of a Carnegie enterprise to be up-to-date—to have installed in it the very latest technology, in this instance for producing steel more efficiently than any competitor could. Rockefeller, who hated competition as wasteful, sought to force rivals in the oil business to join his company. But the steel magnate Carnegie relished competition as a mechanism by means of which evolution leads on to progress, in the same way that he relished the latest technology as fruits of that evolution, to be installed at the earliest moment in his homes and his factories. And in those factories, technological advances (which Carnegie traveling overseas was always on the lookout for) had proved able to do what only skilled workmen did earlier. Increasingly, laborers without skills were operating the new machines; and those mostly immigrants would work for less and could be replaced with ease. Nor was the Carnegie organization averse to working its laborers, skilled and unskilled, as hard as competition warranted, and to working them longer hours, often eighty-four hours a week, and to paying them less in order to trim costs and make the product (steel rails, structural steel, steel armor plate) more competitive.

At Carnegie’s Homestead plant in the summer of 1892, Henry C. Frick in charge defied the workingmen’s union by increasing hours and cutting wages. Millworkers walked off the job and massed around the plant to keep scabs from taking their places. Frick had called in the Pinkerton Agency, 300 agents brought upriver overnight to be on hand next morning to guard the factory and protect any nonunion laborers willing to work the longer hours for the lower pay. But the boats bringing up Pinkerton’s agents arrived late, in early daylight with an armed mob gathered on shore to meet them. A battle ensued between the threatened union strikers along with their supporters and the hired guards still crowded on their couple of barges offshore. The all-day violence ended with a dozen men dead—both guards and strikers—up to sixty wounded, and at least a hundred Pinkertons mauled and beaten as they stepped on firm ground to surrender. The nation’s press was filled with the fracas through days ahead.

It looked like a victory for the workingman, but in the end capital won out, on the grounds widely shared that owners could do what they liked with their property—in this case, the steel mill—and could hire whoever was willing to work on their terms. Even so, it took Andrew Carnegie years of building libraries across America before he restored even a part of his good name with labor.

More than his concerns about labor, however, and more than all his benefactions in brick, glass, and stone, the philanthropy nearest Carnegie’s heart in these late years centered on world peace. Nicholas II, Czar of all the Russias, appeared to share the Scotsman’s longing, to the extent of issuing a summons in 1898 (year of the Spanish-American War) for nations to send delegates to The Hague, in the Netherlands, to a conference seeking “the most effective means of ensuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace, and, above all, of limiting the progressive development of existing armaments.” Twenty-six countries responded to the Czar’s appeal, their representatives meeting from mid-May 1899 until the end of July. They didn’t get as much done as they had hoped for—nothing to speak of on disarmament—but they did set up a Hague Tribunal, a court of arbitration to mediate future disputes among nations; and they agreed to meet in The Hague at a later date to continue their efforts.

For Carnegie, world peace was of overriding importance. In the months immediately before this 1899 Hague Conference convened, he had published in the North American Review, in the issues of January and March, an essay on “Americanism and Imperialism,” which alluded to expansionist America’s new colony, the Philippines. According to the anti-imperialist Carnegie, our acquisition of that Pacific archipelago put us squarely in the midst of “dangers of war and the almost constant rumors and threats of war to which all nations interested in the far East are subject. There is seldom a week which does not bring alarming reports of threatened hostilities, or of new alliances, or of changes of alliances, between the powers arming for the coming struggle. It is chiefly this far Eastern question which keeps every ship-yard, gun-yard, and armor-yard in the world busy night and day, Sunday and Saturday, forging engines of destruction.”

Carnegie, owner of steel shares, profited hugely from the day-and-night forging of those same guns and armor-plated battleships, so his quest for peace was hardly self-serving. Nor was the rising use of weaponry that he deplored restricted to the Far East. War fever had spread more widely than that, armed conflict in the two decades from 1890 through 1910 erupting in Cuba, in South Africa between Boers and English, in China with the Boxers fighting foreign devils, and in far Siberia between Russians and Japanese—while it threatened to break out in South America as German, Italian, and English creditors menaced Venezuelan debtors and in Europe between the colonial powers of Germany and France over Morocco. In Carnegie’s opinion, what the world needed to settle all that strife was far fewer arms in everybody’s hands and a means of arbitrating differences instead of fighting over them. The Hague Peace Conference had provided a start toward the latter reform by establishing a court of arbitration; and before long Carnegie would give $1.5 million—some $40 million now—to build the new court a permanent home, the Peace Palace. That structure towers in grandeur at The Hague to this day, where it houses not only the Court of Arbitration but the Academy of International Law and the International Court of Justice—agencies deriving from meetings after the second Hague conference, when delegates from the various nations assembled once more to strive for arms limitations (and to lay the cornerstone of the palace) in 1907.

Disarmament and arbitration: Carnegie’s recipe for world peace. Yet disarmament proved even harder for the delegates of 1907 to deal with effectively than arbitration was back in 1899. In truth, European powers—and assuredly the United States during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt—didn’t believe in discarding their arms in hopes that peace would follow. At the very start of these two decades, in 1890, Alfred T. Mahan, a captain in the U.S. Navy and instructor at the Naval War College in Newport, had published a book with a dry title that belied its enormous significance: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. Reviewing Captain Mahan’s volume in the Atlantic, young Roosevelt, then civil service commissioner and himself a naval historian of the War of 1812, called it “distinctively the best and most important, also by far the most interesting, book on naval history” in a very long time. Many of Mahan’s recommendations Roosevelt sought to put into practice as soon as he came by the means of doing so, as assistant secretary of the navy and president of the United States. Captain Mahan had stressed the importance of a navy in establishing the primacy of Britain—that small island—among the world’s empires, Great Britain’s the vastest empire of all, and all because of her warships at sea. Thus the lesson for other nations was not to disarm but, rather, to build up their navies, equip them with firepower, man them with crews highly trained, and send them forth to protect commercial routes in peace and destroy the enemy in time of war. To support such a fleet, a nation must actively acquire coaling stations. When, for instance, in this same decade America had a chance to gain possession of Hawaii, in 1898, it was right to seize that opportunity. And any country aspiring to be a world power must be able to move its fleet of battleships, cruisers, and torpedo boats about with speed, by means, for example, of canals strategically placed, as at the Isthmus of Panama.

The British admiralty read Mahan. So did the Japanese: considered Captain Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power along with two more volumes in which the strategist developed his thinking further, and ended by studying all three volumes closely, with profit. Meanwhile, the apostle of peace who had initiated the Hague conference in 1899—Czar Nicholas II—was aggressively expanding Russian territory across Siberia, absorbing and “Russifying” ethnic groups as his own transcontinental railroad crept ever farther eastward along the 5,800 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok. But that seaport on the Pacific lay far enough north to be icebound in winter; so the Czar, with Germany’s help, persuaded China to lease to imperial Russia the ice-free harbor of Port Arthur, on the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria, across the bay from Korea. The Russians took possession in 1897 and proceeded to fortify their ice-free port while the railroad edged closer. Those developments alarmed the Japanese, with their own designs on the feeble Korean empire—this Slavic incursion into what they regarded as their particular sphere of influence; so that the ultimate result of Nicholas’s Russification eastward, as one civilization nudged up against another, was the Russo-Japanese War. After months of fruitless negotiations, that conflict erupted with a surprise attack that the Japanese navy launched against the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on the night of February 8, 1904.

A European power and an Asiatic power were at war, and the outcome seemed foreordained. Certainly the complacent Nicholas thought it was; but to the astonishment of Western observers the Japanese, after great loss of life on both sides, emerged triumphant at sea and on land. For almost a year Port Arthur lay under siege before surrendering to the investing Japanese in January 1905. The colored race—as they were regarded in the West—went on to win the Battle of Mukden on shore after three weeks of bloody fighting, in February 1905; and in May they dealt a crushing blow at sea to a second Russian fleet, which had sailed 18,000 nautical miles around the Cape of Good Hope only to be destroyed in the Tshushima Straits that lie between Japan and Korea: eight Russian battleships sunk and over 5,000 Russian lives lost, while Japanese losses were limited to 116 crewmen and three torpedo boats.

The war stretched through a year and a half, its battles including the largest military engagements the world had yet seen. By the spring of 1905 both sides appeared spent and ready for peace. Nicholas was beset with revolutionary outbreaks at home, while the war’s cost threatened to wreck Japan’s economy. At that juncture, the Japanese asked the President of the United States to mediate. He agreed to; so the combatants sent delegates to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to work out terms, Roosevelt entertaining them en route aboard the presidential yacht at Oyster Bay. The two sides signed the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905; and for his efforts in bringing that resolution about—his substantial efforts, his crucial efforts that required great patience and tact and diplomatic finesse—the often combative Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American so honored.

Soon the President was intervening to settle another quarrel, at Russia’s request, between France and Germany over conflicting colonial claims in Morocco, in northwest Africa. The disputants agreed to meet with various European powers at the Spanish port of Algeciras in January 1906. The story grows complicated because of the intricate, wary maneuverings of those same powers late in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, each mistrusting the others and all seeking alliances for strength in their competitive race toward colonies and markets. France wanted a protectorate over Morocco. Germany objected. France and England, enemies for centuries, came to an understanding: France could have Morocco and England would take Egypt. Such cavalier disposals sound high-handed, greed-soaked, and sordid, but at the time much of national prestige appeared at stake. Apparently Russia, formerly an ally of Germany, was now allied by secret treaty with France. Germany, a nation created as late as 1871 through the unification of various duchies and principalities (Prussia, Saxony, Hanover, and others), had for its allies only bloated Austria-Hungary and fragmented Italy, hardly a match for the triple alliance that threatened to encircle that weaker trio of nations.

Having read Mahan himself, Kaiser Wilhelm II was bent on building up the German fleet until it rivaled Britain’s. In the 1890s and on into the new century German shipyards launched battleship after battleship, and English shipyards responded with battleships and dreadnoughts of their own, in an arms race that the rest of the world watched with apprehension. “The Kaiser sincerely believes,” President Roosevelt wrote privately in April 1905, “that the English are planning to attack him and smash his fleet, and perhaps join with France in a war to the death against him. As a matter of fact the English harbor no such intentions, but are themselves in a condition of panic terror lest the Kaiser secretly intend to form an alliance against them with France or Russia, or both, to destroy their fleet and blot out the British Empire from the map!” The American president was in touch with both Edward VII and the Kaiser, so his words bore weight. “It is as funny a case as I have ever seen,” Roosevelt added, “of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of war.”

The Algeciras Conference in the winter of 1906 appeared to settle the Moroccan question for the time being, giving the sultan certain powers over customs and tax collection and limiting France’s involvement in that small nation’s internal affairs. Roosevelt off in Washington played his part in resolving the dispute, as he had played a key role in defusing that other German crisis four years earlier, when the presence of Admiral Dewey’s squadron building up steam in the Caribbean persuaded the Kaiser to take his quarrel over Venezuela’s debts to the Hague Tribunal—an early case brought (at Roosevelt’s urging) to the new international court of arbitration for settlement.

In truth, as president the Colonel was behaving more temperately than might have been expected, given his saber-rattling words and acts in earlier years. The responsibilities of high office appeared to have modified Roosevelt’s views, so that he could write to a friend at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, midway through his presidency: “I have grown to feel an increasing horror for pointless, and of course still more for unjust, war”; specifically, for the exhaustion and waste, for the slaughter of “gallant men to no purpose,” that a continuation of the present conflict in the Far East would have entailed. On the other hand, just wars, righteous wars, were different. For peace-at-any-price types the President still felt nothing but scorn: for those who, “whether from folly, from selfishness, from short-sightedness, or from sheer cowardice, rail at the manly virtues and fail to understand that righteousness is to be put before peace even when, as sometimes happens, righteousness means war.”

To which Andrew Carnegie, pacifist manufacturer of armor-plate, furnished a response that in most instances would appear unanswerable. Think of our Revolution, or of our Civil War—or of World War I, even then brewing in 1906, as armed rivals met grimly at Algeciras. “Disputants are both seeking righteousness,” Carnegie reminded President Roosevelt; “both feel themselves struggling for what is just. Who is to decide? No one. According to you they must then go to war to decide not what is right but who is strong.”