Carnegie's Maid

by Marie Benedict

a storm hit the Envoy, tumbling those of us in steerage out of our beds into a hold with two feet of water. As the crew and my fellow passengers began working the pump in the pitch-dark of the moonless night, the ship began rolling from side to side like the heavy log it was,

we’d receive tallies on our bata scóir for speaking Irish instead of English and then receive the corresponding punishment, as teachers at the hedge schools for the Irish were instructed to do.

The steward yelled at us. His pinched, sallow face had terrorized steerage for forty-two days, withholding food, water, and deck time if he deemed us not compliant enough. If he didn’t hold the power to deny us admission to our new land, I would have shared with him my thoughts on his cruelty.

If the inspector found one contagion in one steerage passenger, it was in his discretion to hold all of us at Lazaretto until every last person in steerage recovered. One by one, we moved up in line toward the health inspectors. I winced as the officials inspected my cabinmates like they were Dad’s farm animals, lifting up their gums and eyelids for signs of disease, sifting through their hair for evidence of lice or other vermin, examining their skin and fingernails for yellow fever or cholera, and pawing through their belongings.

Of courseyou werelimely to pick up illnesss i forced to stay at the quarantine statio

Unwashed for weeks in turbulent seas, even the sea air couldn’t freshen them. Even the beggars recoiled from the stink of my fellow passengers.

I’d assumed I would have to cobble together the cheapest route I could find, some combination of rail and canal rides and wagon, since the train route didn’t extend all the way from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.

the Anglo-Irish Martyns retaliated. Bit by bit, the Martyns took away land from the twenty-acre tenant farm Dad had amassed, a size permitting the crop diversity that allowed our family to survive the famine, unlike so many with the standard one-acre tenancies that could grow one crop only, the decimated potato. Our family needed another source of income to bank against the reduction in the family’s earnings, and I was to be that other source.

I saw filth the likes of which I’d never imagined. Black clouds billowing in plumes from tall stacks. Buildings turned ashen from sooty air, outlines of posters in white, like ghosts on their walls. Why didn’t anyone tell me that industrialization would look like biblical hell?

I’ve already invested in you and need to recoup my money. The ride from Philadelphia cost nearly two months of your wages.”

Three servants brouggt in a private coach. Will have tp be repaod put of her ages.

an area that Mrs. Seeley called Homewood,

Mansions in countryside at this time

“I’m fine with her being Irish, but I must be certain she’s not Catholic. These Catholic Irish running from the havoc wreaked by their famine and pouring onto American shores are not like the hard-working Protestant Irish who immigrated in earlier years. This new Catholic crop is rough and uneducated, and they’ll destroy the fabric of this country’s shaky democracy if we let them, especially in these days of Civil War unrest, just like they did back home in Scotland when they stole factory jobs away from Scottish men and women. An Irish Catholic servant might suffice as a scullery maid but not as my personal maid.”

in American homes, neither the housekeeper nor the butler oversees the lady’s maid. That is the province of the mistress alone. The lady’s maid role is singular and separate from the rest of the staff in that respect.”

From the moment a rap on my window woke me at five o’clock in the morning—the Carnegies employed a “knocker upper” armed with a long cane and a lantern to tap us servants awake—I

the housekeeper’s room, the often empty room where I took my breakfast, tea, and supper separate from the rest of the staff. The protocol referenced by Mr. Holyrod, in which the lady’s maid fell under the control of neither the butler nor the housekeeper,

began the long walk down the cobblestones of Reynolds Street to the streetcar stop that would take me to Allegheny City, the town abutting Pittsburgh to the west.

The horse-drawn streetcar from Homewood Station to Allegheny City passed by Pittsburgh, quite close to its three rivers lined with mills and factories.

the snow lost the battle with the soot, and black smuts sailed down like a new species of snow, settling on everything with an inky, sticky layer.

this is Slab Town, miss—it’s no Ridge Avenue neighborhood. It’s like a rabbit’s warren in there. I can give you general directions, but you’ll be at the mercy of the locals once you get there to find the exact house.” “Perhaps I should hire a cab to take me there.” “No cab will go into Slab Town, miss.”

my cousin’s house slanted into the house next door, almost like a lean-to. No paint adorned the ragged wood exterior, and the two upstairs windows were covered in paper instead of glass.

No matter the soot permeating every pore on their skin and every surface of their home in Slab Town, no matter the precariousness of Patrick’s work, their life was inestimably better than what they would have faced in Galway, where the famine ravaged entire families

“When I was a boy, I worked as a messenger for the telegraph company. The sky was even darker from the mills then than it is today, and on bad days, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. To deliver my messages in the allotted time, I had to memorize the streets because I couldn’t always see where I was going.

As Mrs. Barrett Browning says, ‘The world of books is still the world.’”

At first, I found their manner brusque and off-putting, without any of the softness, nuance, and humor of our fellow Irish folk. Once I grew accustomed to it, however, I embraced its rough honesty, its lack of mystery about one’s standing. I have also come to appreciate the directness of the American people’s ambition. We Irish assume our status is immoveable and therefore bristle at any effort to climb above one’s natural-born station. There is no such assumption in America, and in fact, ambition is not only encouraged but rewarded. For men, I mean.

Rough honezty

“When we left Dunfermline in 1848, I was twelve and Tom was four, a white-haired child with beautiful, black eyes. We were destitute. My father had been a weaver—he made damask,

we made the journey to the dankest parts of Pittsburgh, where our relatives lived off work in the foundries.

I got work right away as a bobbin boy in a textile factory, and then I became a clerk for a factory tending steam engines.”

“I quickly worked my way up from messenger boy to telegraph operator at O’Reilly Telegraph. Once in that spot, I made certain I was the quickest and ablest telegraph operator. Not just for your usual raise or promotion, but so that the most important businessmen in Pittsburgh would ask for me when they had a message to deliver or receive.”

Mr. Carnegie had scaled the hierarchy of the Pennsylvania Railroad to reach his current position of division superintendent, which made him the man in charge of safely moving all rail traffic in western Pennsylvania. A heady height indeed for a small lad from Scotland, as he liked to tell me. But his true success came not from advancing rung by rung up that corporate ladder—a rare enough feat—but by investing in companies, a notion that had been novel to him. And to me.

The most important factor in his decision-making, however, was the requirement that he had insider knowledge about the company and its dealings.

extolled the virtues of the free access that he—along with other working boys of Pittsburgh—had every Saturday evening to the private library of four hundred volumes owned by Colonel James Anderson, who had made money in the iron business. It was here, he claimed, that a poor Scottish boy was educated about the ways of the American business world. This library, he maintained, made him into a successful man.

distillery outside of Dublin. He will be working as one of the men heating the liquids in the mash machines, a dangerous position.

St. Patrick was far more elaborate than the Catholic churches at home. Because of the governmental prohibitions on practicing Catholicism in Galway, worship had taken place in makeshift, single-room, thatched structures or the open air, as safety would allow. Only in recent years were more permanent and substantial Catholic churches built in Ireland, but even then, they had the dual purpose of serving as the local schools.

this church, one of only a handful of Catholic churches in the entire Western Pennsylvania region.

“Because Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph is paying us, the owners of the shares of Keystone Telegraph, a huge premium. Each of your Keystone Telegraph shares is now a Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph share worth $25, for a total of $1,250.” I didn’t feel my jaw drop at the news that I now had $1,250—an amount I never expected to earn in my entire lifetime—but it must have.

using insider information to invest in companies with whom they were about to enter into contracts was common for Thomson and Scott? Indeed, for executives of all sorts of companies, not only the railroads, including her son?

six days it had taken us to get from Pittsburgh to the nation’s largest city with over eight hundred thousand people,

What would he think of the fact that my people were living nine people to a room in the Five Points slums and paying four dollars—nearly one week’s pay—for the pleasure of a single room with no windows or indoor plumbing but plenty of rats? Would he downplay the fact that my own family was living four to a room in my aunt’s damp, candlelit attic with the closest outhouse a quarter mile away?

We understood that the highest realms of New York society were guarded by the women. Not just any women, mind, but the wives and daughters of a small set of families referred to as the Knickerbockers. These families were the descendants of early Dutch settlers who’d amassed modest fortunes in trade, and their women were eager to keep at bay those made newly wealthy by oil, the railroads, and the stock market—like the Carnegies—particularly if they were immigrants as well. Not that Andrew or his equally ambitious mother would give up before trying.

memories of my sisters and I practicing classical compositions at home in Galway. While our neighbors fiddled out Irish ballads, violating the law prohibiting all Gaelic culture,

These New York City society folk don’t have titles like the aristocracy in Europe, so they have to invent ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the citizenry. Minute, private ways, almost like a secret society of which only its members know the rules.”

“Andrew, they will likely do business with you but never admit you to their ranks. Commodore Vanderbilt has been trying for years, and he has received constant snubbing for his efforts. And he is the president of the New York and Harlem Railroad, among other things, and he is not a recent immigrant, a fact which can make entrée into society even more challenging. Perhaps you should focus your efforts on Mr. Vanderbilt and his society. An invitation into their ranks might be more achievable.”

“I had no idea that women served in the army.” “I am not surprised. We were volunteers, and as such, our positions were unofficial. To my knowledge, no newspapers reported on our work.”

As nuses

I knew that Andrew had hired women to serve as telegraph operators, one of the rare other opportunities.

a gloved finger, his second pair of the day. The first pair blackened with the soot of downtown Pittsburgh by lunchtime and had to be discarded.

Andrew interrupted me. “That’s where we first lived when we came to Pittsburgh.” I could not allow the unfathomable idea of Andrew and his family living in the slums of Rebecca Street to deter me.

Slab town though mybe twenty years ago i wasnt as bad

his continued ruthlessness—as evidenced by the hard line he’d taken against steelworkers in the Homestead Strike—which he undoubtedly justified to himself as helping to raise money for his causes.

I dont think tbe Book relly addreses this imblnce well. This is the only brief mentiom of homestead strikes. No mention of johnstowm. Book does.address poor conditions of steel workers though

The idea began with my own family over a hundred years ago, when my Irish immigrant ancestors, deprived of schooling and opportunities, used the first Carnegie library in Pittsburgh to educate themselves and their families. Utilizing the resources of the Carnegie libraries—the vast array of books and the programming—they transformed their families from impoverished mill and steel workers to highly educated lawyers, doctors, and professors, some of whom attended Ivy League universities.

I always wondered why the tycoon, long-rumored to be heartless, became the world’s first true philanthropist.

After I learned that the impetus for Carnegie’s vast philanthropy began not later in life when he was established as the world’s richest man but in December 1868 when, at the age of thirty-three, he wrote a letter to himself pledging to focus on the education and “improvement of the poorer classes,” I became intrigued by his metamorphosis

Yet he continues to treat workers badly. Homestead strikshappen in 1892 i think

historians had long debated the origin of Carnegie’s change and this mysterious letter he kept for the rest of his life,