James Pethokoukis for the American Enterprise Institute: I recently interviewed media entrepreneur Bhu Srinivasan about his new book Americana: A 400 Year History Of American Capitalism and asked his opinion on the most influential American entrepreneur or businessman ever. His response:
I would have to say it’s Andrew Carnegie. I would say it’s close — John D. Rockefeller is a close second — but I think it’s Andrew Carnegie. And the only reason I don’t quite give it to John D. Rockefeller is because his rise and his fortune very dramatically changed after the automobile obviously, and he was already the world’s richest man before that. So the fact that the fortune grew so dramatically after it — he was born in 1839 and he died in 1937, and so, yeah he lived a long life.
But Carnegie was so multi-dimensional. He is an immigrant in this country, first of all. He leaves Scotland when he was 13 years old, he comes to this country, and he was this educated boy, you know he was attending school in Scotland. When he comes here, he’s sent immediately to the factories in Pittsburgh and he’s there working in a boiler room. He’s 5-foot-2, 5-foot-3 on a good day, if he’s standing on very high heel loafers. And he just goes and dominates the steel industry, and he becomes the richest man in the world, at least according to JP Morgan in 1901.
He makes it out of the boiler room where he doesn’t see daylight for months on end, and ends up in the telegraph office as a messenger boy, and slowly, literally, makes his way up. And you know, you tend to think these Horatio Alger stories are really just mythologies and feel-good tales, but Horatio Alger actually wrote a story called “The Telegraph Boy” in the late 19th century, and Andrew Carnegie in many ways was the real-life telegraph boy, just rising to just incredible heights. And for me, in many ways, it’s a confirmation of both the egalitarianism of American capitalism, in many ways — it’s not for everyone obviously — and it also was an affirmation of American democracy that someone like that could come here.
