Andrew Carnegie

Wall's biography, based on the Carnegie papers at the Library of Congress and on company records, is the standard scholarly life. It covers the Dunfermline childhood, the family's emigration and poverty, Carnegie's rise through the Pennsylvania Railroad under Thomas Scott, his bond selling in Europe, the entry into iron and then steel, the building of Carnegie Steel, the Homestead strike, the sale to Morgan in 1901, and the philanthropy.

The business material is what investors will use. Wall documents Carnegie's cost accounting system, adopted from railroad practice, which let him know the cost of every process at every mill and price accordingly. He shows Carnegie's counter-cyclical investment policy: expand and rebuild during depressions when construction is cheap and competitors are retrenching, which is how Carnegie Steel took share through three downturns. He documents the partnership structure with the ironclad agreement that let Carnegie buy out partners at book value, the deliberate avoidance of public equity and debt, and the practice of scrapping functioning plant when a better process appeared.

Wall does not resolve the contradiction between Carnegie's stated views on labour and his conduct at Homestead, where Frick broke the union while Carnegie was in Scotland, and he documents Carnegie's evasions on the subject without excusing them. The book is long, from 1970, and written in a discursive academic style. Later work has added detail on the technology and on the labour history, but Wall remains the reference biography.