Carnegie's Maid

While Clara Kelley is a fictional character, Andrew Carnegie is not. The novel depicts him as a contradictory personality, combining the traits of avarice and altruism. In real life, Carnegie could be both benevolent and tyrannical. The contradictions in his temperament are portrayed accurately in Carnegie’s Maid and reflect the known facts of his life. Carnegie devoted the first half of his life to building a business empire by ruthlessly crushing anyone who got in his way. A few examples of this disturbing behavior are the Johnstown Flood of 1889, for which he was partially responsible, and the Homestead Strike of 1892. In contrast, Carnegie’s later years were devoted to founding charities and building libraries. He was also a pacifist during an age when American foreign policy favored imperialism.

Over the course of his life, Carnegie donated $350 million to various charitable causes. As the novel indicates in the Prologue, the tycoon drafted a statement of his future plans in 1868, outlining his intention to retire at the age of 35 and spend the rest of his life engaged in philanthropy. The novel emphasizes the role that private libraries played in helping Carnegie rise from poverty as a youth. In real life, he also understood the value of public libraries for the empowerment of the masses. Carnegie founded his first library in 1881 and gifted it to his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. Thousands more such structures would follow. In total, Carnegie donated $40 million for the construction of 1,679 libraries across the United States. He would go on to found more than 2,000 libraries worldwide. Other notable examples of his philanthropy include The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Carnegie Foundation to promote education.

In addition to being a philanthropist, Carnegie was also a pacifist. As was so often the case in his life, he found his ideals in conflict with his business practices. During the 1880s and 1890s, his companies fulfilled large orders for armor plating to equip naval vessels at a time when Carnegie publicly opposed American overseas expansion. He used his influence with former President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate an end to the Japanese-Russian War and also to intervene in the growing friction between the royal houses of Britain and Germany. Roosevelt was quick to note the contradiction between Carnegie’s philosophical views and his behavior. In a letter to Whitelaw Reed in 1905, Roosevelt said:

All the suffering from the Spanish war comes far short of the suffering [...] among the operators of the Carnegie steel works [...] during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune […] It is as noxious folly to denounce war per se as it is to denounce business per se. Unrighteous war is a hideous evil; but I am not at all sure that it is worse evil than business unrighteousness (Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. Penguin Group, 2006).

Given Roosevelt’s interest in American imperialism, his views of Carnegie may well have been skewed to justify his personal advocacy of colonial expansion. However, Carnegie seemed sensible of the contradiction between his own words and actions and did his best to reverse the damage he had wrought during the first half of his life. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, he gave $10 million to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This charity would later be the springboard for the League of Nations, the world’s first intergovernmental organization to promote world peace. In turn, this body would ultimately evolve into the United Nations of today.