Andrew Carnegie: The Weaver's Son Who Became the Richest Man in the World (American Titans)

He landed in steerage with nothing—and left behind the richest fortune on earth, then spent his life giving it away. He was born in a weaver's cottage in Dunfermline, the son of a craftsman the machines had ruined, and raised on the fierce radical faith that no man is born above another. At twelve he crossed the Atlantic in steerage with a family that owned almost nothing, and went to work in a dark cotton mill for a dollar and twenty cents a week. Fifty-three years later a banker shook his hand and told him he was the richest man in the world. Andrew Carnegie forged that fortune out of steel and nerve and a genius for cost that let him undersell the earth. And then, at Homestead in 1892, the friend of the workingman broke his own workers' union behind a barbed fence and a line of Pinkerton rifles, and left a stain no charity could ever quite wash out. Inside this vivid, fast-paced biography you'll discover: How a penniless immigrant boy rose from bobbin boy and telegraph messenger to the summit of American industry The railroad years under Thomas Scott—and the first dividend check that taught him capital, not wages, was the road up The Bessemer bet: how he saw the future in a fountain of white fire and staked everything on steel The Carnegie system—watch the costs, run full through every panic, undersell everyone—that built the mightiest works on earth The bitter partnership with Henry Clay Frick, and the Homestead Strike that stained his name forever The Gospel of Wealth and the famous law that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced" The record-shattering 1901 sale to J. P. Morgan that created U.S. Steel and made him the richest man alive The 2,500 libraries, the university, the pensions, and the doomed crusade to end war—$350 million given away before the guns of 1914 Grounded in the documentary record and told with the pace of a novel, this is the full life of Andrew Carnegie—the Dunfermline radical and the Pittsburgh plutocrat warring inside one small, restless Scot; the immigrant boy who built modern America in steel and then tried to buy back its soul, and his own. It sets the libraries against the broken union and asks the question he could never answer about himself. The essential life of an American titan. The fourteenth volume in the American Titans series: Lives That Shaped a Nation.