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Joseph Frazier Wall (1920–1995)

Autor von Andrew Carnegie

8 Werke 205 Mitglieder 5 Rezensionen

Werke von Joseph Frazier Wall

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Geburtstag
1920-07-11
Todestag
1995-10-09
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male

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1777 Andrew Carnegie, by Joseph Frazier Wall (read 23 Apr 1983) I found this biography, published in 1970, very interesting, and I believe it is the first biography of a businessman I've read since I read
Gustavus Myers' polemic, in three volumes, on great American fortunes, back in 1946. Carnegie's story is awfully interesting. He was born in Dunfermshire, Scotland (between Edinburgh and Glasgow) on 25 Nov 1835. His father was a weaver and he could get no work in Scotland, so in 1848 his parents and Andrew and his brother came to the U.S. Andrew's success in business was phenomenal and he became richer and richer, selling out this business interests in 1901--the U.S. Steel Corp being organized to take over the Carnegie interests. After that he spent his time on various causes--prominently international peace. The War in 1914 was a terrible blow to him, and he died 11 Aug 1919. I found I had tears in my eyes as I read of his last years! Some of the account of the business dealings seems kind of naive, like if the author didn't know the technical aspects too well, but maybe things were simply simpler in those days. Some of the accounts were long (this book is over 1000 pages) and not too interesting, but all in all I found this book excellent. Carnegie is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at North Tarrytown, N.Y. I would like to see the stone. Many things about Carnegie weren't too bad, though his attitude to religion was bad. After he left his business he was against high tariffs. He was for a paternalistic attitude to labor, and claimed the massacre at Homestead wouldn't have happened if he'd been there. I thought this book very well done. The author is a history professor at Grinnell College… (mehr)
 
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Schmerguls | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Aug 18, 2022 |
Few people exemplify the “rags-to-riches” ideal of the American success story as well as Andrew Carnegie. Born to poverty in Scotland, after emigrating to the United States he built a fortune that made him one of the wealthiest Americans in history. That his name lives on today is because of what he did with his wealth, as he spent his retirement giving away his millions through gifts, endowments, and bequests to a variety of causes in which he fervently believed.

Carnegie lived a long life that was filled with controversy, conflict, and achievement. Telling it in full is a formidable task, yet it is one which Joseph Frazier Wall accomplishes admirably with this book. Over the space of a thousand pages he details the span of Carnegie’s life, from his impoverished childhood in Dunfermline through his final years as a transatlantic philanthropist and peacemaker. It’s a task that requires him to explain not just Carnegie’s activities, but the context in which they took place, providing a history of the times in which he lived – and affected profoundly.

None of this seemed possible, let alone likely, during Carnegie’s early years in Scotland. His father, Will, a handloom weaver, fell on hard times as automated looms increasingly made his skills unnecessary. Though the family emigrated to the United States in 1848, William proved as unable to make a success of his trade in the New World as he was in the old one. Forced to find work at a cotton mill in Pittsburgh, he was soon joined by his son who worked as a bobbin boy before gaining a promotion as a clerk to the mill’s owner – the start of his meteoric rise in business.

Much like Horatio Alger’s central characters, Carnegie benefited throughout his early years from catching the attention of important people. Yet Wall demonstrates that Carnegie’s work ethic was the key to his rise. Abandoning mill work for a job as a telegraph boy, his commitment to his duties led to swift promotion, followed by a position as a telegrapher and personal secretary to Thomas Scott, a rising executive in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. By the age of 24 “Andy” was superintendent of the railroad’s entire Western Division, and when Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War in 1861 Carnegie joined him in the War Department, where he was placed in charge of military transportation.

George McClellan’s centralization of Union Army operations in his own staff led Carnegie to return to Pittsburgh, where he engaged in a range of business activities. Wall recounts these in detail, yet in a way that makes the operations never less than interesting. His ability to draw the personal relationships and personality conflicts from the dry minutes of board meetings is a real asset, one that highlights the conflicting approaches of Carnegie and his partners to their business operations. This allows him to show Carnegie’s gifts, particularly his ability to manage people, his sense for opportunity, and his aptitude for dealmaking. For all of the success of his subject’s activities during this period, though, Wall notes as well Carnegie’s growing dissatisfaction with his success and a desire to do more.

By the early 1870s this dissatisfaction led Carnegie to focus his attention on steel manufacturing, then a rapidly growing manufacturing sector thanks to the introduction of the Bessemer process and other innovations. Over the next quarter century Carnegie built a company that dominated the market. Carnegie’s success soon made him one of the nation’s leading industrialists, giving him a social prominence that made it possible for him to associate with authors and educators on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process, Carnegie became one of the foremost apostles of Herbert Spencer’s theories of Social Darwinism, of which he regarded himself as a prime example. To this he tied his belief that his burgeoning fortune should be used for public uplift, and he increasingly engaged in a variety of charitable activities.

Carnegie straddled the twin worlds of business and philanthropy until he sold his company to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With a fortune that now numbered in the hundreds of millions (at a time when the average yearly wage for men was less than $600), Carnegie dedicated the remainder of his life to giving it all away. Wall chronicles the breadth of Carnegie’s activism during these years, from his funding of library construction to the equipping of churches with organs and the providing of pensions for worthy individuals. Yet the cause most dear to Carnegie proved that of world peace, and he used his millions and his range of personal connections to achieve it. His hopes of its enduring attainment were dashed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, however, and while Carnegie survived to see its end and the promise of a League of Nations, it remains the ongoing work of the institutions he financed in the hope of realizing it in his lifetime.

Wall’s achievement with this book is impressive. In it he relates the full scope of Carnegie’s life in a way that entertains as well as informs. The many details never overwhelm the text, and though laudatory his narrative fully addresses his subject’s failures and flaws as well, from his harsh usage of his younger brother Tom to his role in the bloody Homestead Strike that forever marred his public image as a benevolent businessman. Moreover, in the process of recounting Carnegie’s activities Wall supplies his readers with an insightful account as well of the times in which he lived and some of the key figures of the era, many of whose activities intersected with those of Carnegie. Taken together it makes for a magnificent biography, one that should be read by everyone interested in Carnegie, the Gilded Age, or the history of big business in America.
… (mehr)
 
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MacDad | 3 weitere Rezensionen | May 25, 2021 |
Mr. Wall's writing style, coupled with the facts of Mr. Carnegie's life, held me enthralled as I read. One of the two books I have ever had the pleasure of being forced to read in a history class.
 
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RoAnnon | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 15, 2011 |
Strongly readable biography, with fascinating insights into social history. Wall is a wonderful writer, and the book entertains throughout.
 
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Judy58 | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 9, 2007 |

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8
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