Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 4 | A Footnote to History

Andrew Carnegie had a long-standing interest in world peace. “I am drawn more to this cause than to any,” he wrote in 1907. Like other leading internationalists of his time, Carnegie believed that war could be eliminated by stronger international laws and organizations. Between 1900 and 1914, he gave generously in support of this belief, funding projects such as the Peace Palace at The Hague, the Pan American Union building (now the Organization of American States building) in Washington, D.C., the Central American Court of Justice in Costa Rica and giving $10 million to establish the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The outbreak of World War I, however, shattered the high expectations of turn-of-the-century internationalists like Andrew Carnegie. When he heard the news that the war had begun, he felt as if his life had ended. He had been writing his autobiography, but was so overwhelmed with the thought of “men slaying each other like wild beasts” that he could write no more. His autobiography, therefore, ends abruptly. His wife, Louise Carnegie, wrote about his deep sadness in a preface to his autobiography:

For a few weeks each summer we retired to our little bungalow on the moors at Aultnagar to enjoy the simple life, and it was there that Mr. Carnegie did most of his writing. He delighted in going back to those early times, and as he wrote, he lived them all over again. He was thus engaged in July 1914, when the war clouds began to gather, and when the fateful news of the 4th of August reached us, we immediately left our retreat in the hills and returned to Skibo to be more in touch with the situation.

These memoirs ended at that time. Henceforth he was never able to interest himself in private affairs. Many times he made the attempt to continue writing, but found it useless. Until then he had lived a life of a man in middle life—and a young one at that—golfing, fishing, swimming each day, sometimes doing all three in one day. Optimist as he always was and tried to be, even in the face of the failure of his hopes, the world disaster was too much. His heart was broken.