ABSTRACT
Andrew Carnegie and Louise Whitfield became engaged, but it was a troubled courtship, one that is well documented in a collection of letters between Louise and Carnegie, and one that Louise terminated when she finally realized that Carnegie would never marry as long as his mother lived. The mirror-image thesis poses some interesting insights into both the characters and to the relationship with each other: radicalism converted into conservatism versus conservatism converted into liberalism; geographic, social, and economic mobility versus remarkable stability in these same three areas; the mother as heroine versus the father as hero. Carnegie would later utter pious sentiments about the “advantages of poverty,” but the only true value of poverty he saw was that it served as a spur to those sensitive enough and fast enough to run all the harder for the prize awaiting the winner.
