Having found this old thread again I may as well add Brian McNeill's notes to it. In his songbook 'The Back o' the North Wind' he writes:

[1991:] No Scottish expatriate is better known than Andrew Carnegie, the hand-loom weaver's son born in 1835 in Dunfermline. In 1848 the Carnegie family left Fife for Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and by the time they'd been there a month, young Andrew was working as a messenger boy for the local telegraph company - but it was the arrival of rail transport in Pittsburgh that was to begin the real rise of his fortunes. He joined the railway company, and a lucky break brought to his notice the design of a revolutionary new type of railway carriage - the Pullman sleeping car. He persuaded his employers to finance its manufacture, and ended up as a majority shareholder of the resulting company. Before long, he was the superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and with his inside information about the directions of railway expansion, he began to buy stocks and shares. By the age of thirty, he was a millionaire, carefully ploughing back all his profits into reinvestment.

It was a trip back to Scotland at the end of the American Civil War that brought the first pause for breath in the process of self-betterment, and began the impulse to philanthropy. Somehow Carnegie became aware that in his pursuit of riches, he'd lost out on culture and learning - and on his return to Pittsburgh, he began the process of self-education, with the same fervour which he'd brought to the process of self-enrichment. But though he was sincere in his desire for a new dimension to his life, he never lost his commercial appetite. He expanded into iron, then bridges, then rails for the railroads, and finally, by the means of the revolutionary new Bessemer process, into the substance that will always be linked with his name in the USA - steel.

He built his steelworks in Braddock, on the Monongahela river, and with it his empire grew apace. He bought, sold, dealt and undercut, he spurred his labour force on to prodigious productivity by making them compete with each other - and soon, he was no longer just a common or garden American millionaire, he was the head of one of the most all-embracing industrial institutions of the USA, a money-making juggernaut that seemed unstoppable. By 1880 he was spending half of every year in Europe, determined to pursue a cultural life as rich as his commercial one - and it was during one of these trips to Scotland that the labour unrest began which was to blacken his reputation. Carnegie had watched one of his rivals, a neighbouring steelworks called Homestead, nearly collapse with labour troubles, and when these were at their worst, with his usual impeccable commercial timing, he put in his bid, bought it, and appointed a manager, Henry Frick, to run it. But Frick had neither Carnegie's charm nor his ability. In 1892 another strike erupted, much worse than anything that had gone before - Carnegie's men were demanding an end to shifts that were routinely twelve hours long, and sometimes as long as twenty-four. A private army of Pinkerton Detectives was hired to break the new union which had made the demands, the Amalgamated Association. What followed was inevitable; strike, lockout, the introduction of scab labour, and some of the bitterest pitched battles in the history of American industry. But in the end, Carnegie and Frick won - a victory that was to effectively end unionisation in the American steel industry for the next 45 years, and blacken Andrew Carnegie's name forever.

Did he deserve the vilification? And was it the terrible violence of the Homestead strike which turned him into the Andrew Carnegie everyone remembers, the greatest philanthropist in the world? The man who died at the age of 84, having given away over 300 million dollars? Like so many other Scottish children, I learned to love books in a library built with Carnegie money. Time and time again, my teachers pointed him out to me as a hero, as an example of what hard work could achieve; Andrew Carnegie, the self-made Scot who used his money to enrich the lives of others. It was only later, when I worked on building sites as a student, that I discovered how deeply the other side of his reputation - as a strike breaker and ruthless capitalist - had dug itself into the consciousness of working people. The folk memory is long and dogged, and it does not forgive easily; the explanation that I heard most often for Andrew Carnegie's generosity was that it was based on guilt. This song offers no answers; it's just my own personal framework for the questions. (McNeill Songbook 37)