Was Andrew Carnegie a Murderer?

Andrew Carnegie is known world wide as a great Scottish American and Philanthropist giving away billions in today’s money values to help the working class in particular their education and promoting world peace.

Alongside this good work there is a lot of forgotten evidence to suggest that this philanthropist knowingly hired gunmen to end strikes by attacking strike leaders.

Born and brought up in Dunfermline Scotland Andrew Carnegie‘s father and uncle were being constantly attacked for their radical political attitudes and actions. As leaders in the Chartist movement they were fighting for the right of the working class to vote and stand for election in the belief that this would bring about a fairer future for the world. At this time only the richer people were allowed to do these things. Only property owners were able to have their name on the electoral register to vote so only they would be able to represent the people and of course were able to maintain power and influence.

The actions of Andrew Carnegies father and uncle led to the family losing their jobs and the rich factory owners seeing as potential troublemakers ensured they never worked again.

When Andrew Carnegie was only 13 years old the family decided to sell up everything they had left basically their furniture and borrowed money from other Chartist supporters and emigrated to the USA ending up in Pittsburgh.

Andrew took a job as a bobbin boy in a weaving factory but later moved to become a telegraph boy where he caught the eye of his employer who promoted him to personal secretary. In this position he was able to acquire an inside knowledge of how business worked and with hard work and very shrewd investments was able to start his own steel works. This grew to become one of the countries largest and when he later sold it he was able to pocket over 350 million dollars.

By making his workers increase their hours whilst cutting wages and investing in new ways of steel production he was able to generate sufficient profits to buy up a large number of other steel companies.

Andrew Carnegie appointed Frick as business manager of his steel works was also known as a hard nosed business man when it came to fighting unions and they often brought in Pinkerton’s Detective Agency to defend their position. Pinkerton’s over the years had become the people to turn to when you wanted gunmen to fight strikes and had acquired a reputation for being violent in the way they handled themselves. The agency had even bombed a union HQ in Chicago and had been involved in a number of killings of strike leaders.

Although Carnegie was back in Scotland at the time of the Homestead steel works strikes we have published a number of cables from Andrew Carnegie to Frick as his General Manager supporting and encouraging him to do whatever was necessary to win the fight. On this occasion 10 men died in a day long gun battle and when the union finally caved in Carnegie cut wages even lower, increased the number of hours and blacklisted 500 union men who would never work again.

Remember how his own family was blacklisted from employment as a punishment for political activity against rich factory owners well you can read the full story of Andrew Carnegie and his part in these killings on our website http://ScottishJerk.com/09/andrew-carnegie-murderer/ and vote on our poll at the same time.