Carnegie's Model Republic: Triumphant Democracy and the British-American Relationship

5. The British Critique

5 The British Critique TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY appeared on Saturday, April 17, 1886. The press on both sides of the Atlantic greeted it with scores of reviews. What they said constituted a transatlantic colloquy, all the more so as Andrew Carnegie was quite literally a transatlantic figure, an inhabitant if not quite a citizen of two worlds. At least two questions about the British response immediately arise. First: Who were the responders, meaning what was the party affiliation of the respective newspapers that reviewed Triumphant Democracy? Surely, political orientation could enter into, if not necessarily determine, what the reviewer would say in a dialogue about the virtues of republicanism and aristocracy. Second: How far were current British affairs shaping their comments on Carnegie’s assay of the kindred polities? The dominant issue in British politics during the spring months of 1886 was Irish Home Rule. On April 8, nine days before Triumphant Democracy appeared, Gladstone introduced his bill for granting Ireland home rule. Nothing else mattered so much in British politics as that bill. Though he had certainly touched on the issue of home rule, it did not figure prominently in Carnegie’s book. He subsumed it under the larger American principles of federalism and localism. What his British respondents said, accordingly, touched relatively little on the theme that almost totally dominated their politics. 73 And yet, somewhere alongside that theme ran another one, which was sounding most audibly and inescapably in British affairs, which Carnegie had surely made central to his argument, and which figured largely in the British reviews. Irish Home Rule lay deeply embedded within the larger question of who should rule at home, not merely in Ireland but throughout the United Kingdom. That larger question had surely commanded the public mind throughout Gladstone’s second ministry and surely Carnegie’s mind as he was writing his masterpiece. The franchise act of 1884 extended the vote to the counties, virtually doubling the United Kingdom electorate. The redistribution act of 1885, with which the franchise measure had been coupled, divided the whole country into single-member constituencies , making numerical equality the guiding principle in the election of the House of Commons. In effect, as Carnegie was laying down his pen in late 1885, his homeland was becoming, pretty much like the United States, a democratic polity. He had understood even when he started to write back in 1882 that the kingdom was democratizing; what troubled him was that it remained insistently aristocratic and deferential. From precisely a reverse perspective , this is what troubled many of his reviewers. The acts of 1884 and 1885 amounted to nothing less than a constitutional reconstruction— indeed, a revolution—in the governing rules of British political life. And because politics and political economy were one and the same, British ruling circles had reason to be fearful. Answering the question Carnegie had raised about the respective principles and stability of the kindred polities was therefore one in which the men who ran the British press and wrote the British reviews had a truly vested interest. The terrain of Carnegie’s reviewers was rumbling seismically. Their laws and therefore their wealth could be altered at the stroke of a mere majority in the Commons. What portents could one read in the fundamentally reconstituted Britain of the new laws of 1884 and 1885? Where else was the ever-unfolding Gladstonian Liberalism moving? That it would be evangelical was incontrovertible. But was the great political question of the day about Liberalism or really about Gladstone? When the Grand Old Man withdrew to his residence at Hawarden at the time of Lord Salisbury’s first cabinet—during the latter half of 1885—what would the Liberal leader carry in his new emergence? The Hawarden kite—inadvertently sent up by Gladstone’s son Herbert—carried the message that 74 CARNEGIE’S MODEL REPUBLIC Gladstone had been converted to Irish Home Rule. If we see the events of the mid-1880s as one unfolding British political drama, then Irish Home Rule surely belongs to the larger theme of that larger unfolding. Carnegie’s evangel about the redeeming principle of the American polity is then to be understood as part of that drama. A native Briton, he could claim a role in British politics. As member of the Celtic fringe, he carried some authenticity in a discussion over home rule. Indeed, the distinction afforded by his prominence as an industrialist...