A Review of "An American Citizen"

Published October 18, 2019

Updated June 20, 2021

"Ignorance, arrogance and tyranny rise to the top in organized labor whenever such organization is opposed by tyranny and arrogance, and in my experience, I have seen as much of these qualities of human nature in the employer as in the employee."

William H. Baldwin Jr., An American Citizen

 A Review of "An American Citizen" by John Graham Brooks

 "An American Citizen: The Life of William Henry Baldwin, Jr."

The newspapers would report on the day memorializing William H. Baldwin that every vacant seat in the church was filled, the galleries were standing room only, and that seldom had there been such a “gathering of prominent citizens of the city [New York City] at such a service.”

The attendees included prominent businessmen of the late 1890s. Several of their names are still recognizable more than a century later such as Andrew Carnegie, William Vanderbilt, and Jacob Schiff. Many social, political and economic organizations were in attendance: East Side Civic Club, Colored Young Men’s Christian Association, Colored Republican Club of New York, several Southern educational societies, and local corporations such as the Corn Exchange Bank and Metropolitan Surety Company.

​The employees of his Long Island Railroad were well represented with over 200 in attendance.

​At 4 p.m. every head in the service bowed as well as every head on every train of the Long Island Railroad as the corporation’s vehicles came to a stop and remained so for a full two minutes in tribute to a man many would miss.

Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute (of which Mr. Baldwin was a trustee), wrote in his book Up from Slavery about his “personal friend.” Mr. Washington cancelled his speaking engagement in Pittsburgh to attend the funeral. He eulogized the industrialist for what he accomplished for the “education of both Whites and Negroes in the south” but that this was “as nothing when compared to the moral and religious influence which his presence and faith inspired among [the Tuskegee Institute’s] teachers and students.”

All of this I did not know when I started reading An American Citizen: The Life of William Henry Baldwin written by John Graham Brooks in 1910. As I read the book, I thought that the author was a bit over the top almost turning a biography into a lengthy eulogy of a man who had been recently deceased. I stopped reading the book, not wanting to waste my time but the quick research I performed revealed what I have written in the first three paragraphs above.

After reading the book and the times surrounding William Baldwin’s death, I questioned my human nature and a certain cynicism rooted in that nature. Why are we so willing to accept the bad in individuals (such as when Ida Tarbell wrote of the failings of John D. Rockefeller Sr.) but will not accept that there are individuals who – although never spotless in nature – may be so close to exemplary leaders in business (such as Ida Tarbell’s biographies on Elbert H. Gary and Owen D. Young) that they can serve as role models.

Are we too attuned to the bad and too far removed from the good? I am now struggling with how an author writes a biography that sidesteps this defensive armor of human mistrust, as I will probably face the same problem with my coming work on Thomas J. Watson Sr.

William Baldwin was a man who fought corruption by chairing the “Committee of Fifteen” that took on Tammany Hall and their support of organized prostitution in New York City. He was perceived as an honest arbitrator between capital and labor: those that funded the railroads and those that, at the time, were trying to extract every penny from these corporations—perceiving the industry as a whole as almost evil incarnate.

​William H. Baldwin would comment on this conflict that:­

Ignorance, arrogance and tyranny rise to the top in organized labor whenever such organization is opposed by tyranny and arrogance, and in my experience, I have seen as much of these qualities of human nature in the employer as in the employee.

The author wrote that Baldwin “held it first among the duties of the more powerful party to set the example of candor and fairness.”

The one criticism of the book is that it would have been much stronger if the author had given the sources of the multitude of quotes about Mr. Baldwin. Some are attributed to men like President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, but too many are just tagged with a description such as a well-known industrialist.

It was this deficiency that spurred my additional brief research into William H. Baldwin.

I am glad I did the research as the book describes an American industrialist that built his business on trust, cooperation, openness and good will. I highly recommend the book. Although, if there had been one chapter showing more of the internal struggle of the man, it would have gone a long way to making him more approachable to me—a mere mortal. Evidently, though, from reading a few of the reviews of the times, this was not a problem for those that knew or worked with William Baldwin. He was a good man in the opinion of all who dealt with him.

I don’t know if this is the book’s one failing or a fault of my humanity, but it was an inspiring read—once a little research overcame my initial objection.

Cheers,

​- Pete

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