1920 Read Online Free

intellectual gifts, had insisted on these measures, directed primarily at the Germans, perhaps seeking revenge for having been drawn into a conflict of which he swore his nation would never be a part. The Germans had made a liar out of the Chief Executive who, among all who held that office in the twentieth century, sought peace fervidly.
    THE RAILROADS, AUTOMOBILE AND AIRPLANE manufacturers, and military forces needed steel, never-ending shipments of it, millions of tons. Only one nation could have met a demand so immense. Met it, in fact, with barely an increase in normal production quotas. In 1901, the Carnegie Steel Company, the largest venture of its kind in the country, had merged with the National Steel Company to form United States Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. Capitalized at slightly more than that, $1.4 billion, which is forty billion in today’s dollars, the new entity was, in the main, the doing of J. P. Morgan. His chief partner in joining thetwo firms, attorney Elbert Gary, was also an eminent fellow, giving his name to an Indiana city that would become an official entity in 1906 and would produce smoky, sooty, filthy wealth for the fortunate few until the American steel industry started dying its slow death more than half a century ago.
    As for Carnegie, in selling himself out of America’s bedrock industry, he made $6,098,351,361, give or take, in present currency, but he did not believe he had been overpaid. Neither did Morgan nor Gary—and neither had, for United States Steel now
was
United States steel, and its output had become staggering, its profits even more so. The railroads were satisfied. The automobile industry was satisfied. The military was satisfied. As for investors, some of the larger ones were beginning to believe in streets of gold after all.
    Carnegie was satisfied too, even more than just that. The enormous sum he had been paid for his steel company, in addition to the hundreds of millions he had previously made in the business, was more than enough to fund his second career as a philanthropist, and until the Gates Foundation came along, he was the greatest dispenser of cash for good causes that America has ever known. For one thing, he provided money for the astonishing total of 1,696 public libraries, most of them in the Midwest, 164 in Indiana alone, and another 142 in California.
    The philanthropist was one side of the man, and his nobility in this role cannot be overstated. But there was also another side to Carnegie, a side that made his philanthropy seem less an act of charity than an attempt at penance. Before Carnegie could give his money away, he had had to make it—and his methods of achieving the latter were the gruel of existence for virtually all who spent their days and lives in his smoldering mills.
    NINETEEN FOURTEEN WAS THE YEAR in which the Great War began. It was also the year when construction of the Panama Canal ended. More than three decades after the French had started to build the waterway, the United States, still manifesting its destiny, completed the job. The $365 million, 51-mile-long feat of engineering was the most important sea laneever created for shipping, and the first oceanic path of any sort to link America’s two shores, important not only for shipping but for defense in the event of attack from abroad. “For millions of people after 1914,” writes canal chronicler David McCullough,
    the crossing at Panama would be one of life’s memorable experiences. The complete transit required about twelve hours, and except for the locks and an occasional community along the shore, the entire route was bordered by the same kind of wilderness that had confronted the first surveyors for the railroad. … This was a military rather than an aesthetic decision … the jungle … was the surest possible defense against ground attack.
    MEANWHILE, BACK IN LOWER MANHATTAN on that mid-September day in 1920,