Carnegie Read Free Page A

business man is worth his salt . . . who does not have his affairs so expertly organised that he cannot drop them at a moment’s notice and leave for parts unknown.
    Burton J. Hendrick,
The Life of Andrew Carnegie
, vol. I, p. 138
    C arnegie was getting itchy feet again. For two years he had juggled his financial interests which had now mutated into two distinct balance sheet groupings. There were the businesses like the Keystone Bridge Co., the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works, the Superior Rail Mill and the Union Iron Mills, which demanded Carnegie’s direct attention and relevant intervention, and company interests like banks, insurance concerns, Adams Express, Columbian Oil and Woodruff Sleeping Cars that were run by others.
    As Carnegie assessed his financial sheets, America jogged along after the shock assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865 at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, by actor John Wilkes Booth. His death removed the only man who could have reconciled North and South, and the country had a new president in Lincoln’s Vice-President Andrew Johnson (1808–75). As Johnson settled into his struggles with the radicals in his own party, Carnegie set out for Europe in May 1865, with share revenue flooding into his pockets.
    Inspiration for the journey came from a book by American travel writer James Bayard Taylor entitled
Views Afoot: or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff
(1846). But there was another underlying motive for Carnegie to undertake the five-month tour. He wanted to round off his ‘mind and character’ and achieve the ‘desirable expansion of his soul’ through travel. 1 His arrangements for the voyage made, Carnegie left his interests principally in the hands of a quartet of trusted colleagues: Andrew Kloman, of the iron-working firm of Kloman & Co., who had brought Carnegie into the iron manufacturing business; John Piper of the bridge builders Piper & Shiffler Co., in which Carnegie had made a key investment; his old friend Tom Miller; and his much put-upon young brother Tom. This group of individuals underlined another of Carnegie’s secrets of success: put into roles of responsibility people who are more accomplished at the job than you are yourself.
    This time Carnegie’s travelling companions were Henry Phipps and John W. ‘Vandy’ Vandervort; it would cost them some $3,000, earned from oil revenues. 2 They sailed from New York in May 1865 aboard the
Scotia
, bound for Liverpool, and thence travelled directly to Dunfermline. A sojourn with the Lauders and Morrisons was a happy time. Carnegie honed his sentimentality for Scotland and was overcome by a sense of ‘coming home’; he wrote to his mother and brother: ‘[At Dunfermline] we have a local history extending to the third generation, and many a one speaks kindly of our ancestors.’ 3
    The party now retraced their steps to Liverpool where they met up with a distant cousin of Henry Phipps, John Franks, who joined them for the rest of the tour. They crossed France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, sojourning at London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Dresden, Vienna, Naples and Pompeii, soaking up art galleries and theatres, opera and architecture, scenery and volcanoes, much as eighteenth-century aristocrats had done on the Grand Tour. Carnegie recalled how they ‘climbed every spire, slept on mountain-tops, and carried our luggage in knapsacks upon our backs’. 4
    John Franks put together a sort of journal of the continental tour in correspondence to his sister. He reported that Carnegie was ‘exuberantly joyous’ throughout the trip. 5 Other important letter extracts offer a rare glimpse of Carnegie at 30. Franks explained:
    He is full of liveliness, fun and frolic. His French is to carry us through when Vandy’s German is no longer required. I had to acknowledge my obligation to him no later than yesterday, when, wishing my portmanteau forwarded by rail and the German porter being so stupid as not to