The Carnegie Boys

Book excerpt: In the 1890s, the Carnegie Veterans Association began as a group of boyhood friends and older Andrew Carnegie steel partners united to share business ideas, but it evolved into a powerful secretive network in American business circles. By 1925, these Carnegie lieutenants controlled more than 60 percent of the country's industrial assets. Haunted by their past with Carnegie Steel, they demanded a new ethical relationship with labor and adopted a philanthropic philosophy of paternal capitalism, building libraries, churches, schools, and hospitals. Ultimately, their experiments in industrial democracy and "progressive industrialism" failed, but their efforts formed the root of future cooperative management and employee participation. This chronicle of the evolution and legacy of this influential association offers a new, more complex perspective on Carnegie and demonstrates how he and his lieutenants helped to shape America's view of capitalism.