Old Masters, New World
Page 18
“King of Coke”: Henry Clay Frick
Frick attempted to order his life with the regularity of ledgers and graph paper, but it was, in fact, the stuff of melodrama. Although he had not lived Carnegie’s rags-to-riches American fable, he engineered his rise to the top of American industry by means of ruthless drive and he outmaneuvered any competition by exceeding it with brains, talent, and incessant work.
Named for the admired statesman Henry Clay, Frick had been born in 1849 into a prosperous family in Western Pennsylvania on the Allegheny plateau, where rich seams of coal would later provide the raw material for his fortune. Frick grew up on the farm of his grandfather Abraham Overholt, whose brick distillery across from his house produced Old Overholt rye whiskey and made him among the wealthiest men in the county. In contrast, Frick’s father struggled as a farmer and his shortcomings as a provider were clear to his son (not unlike Carnegie’s view of his own father). Thus Frick took his cues from Abraham Overholt, who hung black-and-white prints of American statesmen in his parlor and ran the distillery with coal that he mined from his own land. Finishing his formal education by the time he was seventeen, Frick went to work first as a clerk in an uncle’s store and then kept the books at the distillery.
Early on, Frick demonstrated his appetite for calculated risk. At twenty, he borrowed $75,000 to invest in a “coke” firm started by two cousins and a friend. They had bought land and mined coal, firing it in bee-hive ovens to produce coke, which they hauled to the iron and steel mills in and around Pittsburgh. The sooty, industrial city, located where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers converged into the Ohio River, was already a center of iron milling and iron rail production. By the mid-1870s, the city’s iron makers, including Carnegie, began to produce steel.
To expand his business, Frick approached Thomas Mellon, a childhood friend of his mother’s, who with his sons, Andrew and Richard, had recently started a Pittsburgh bank. Mellon obliged Frick with the loan. Six months later, Frick requested a second. When Mellon dispatched a colleague to inspect the coke operation, he reported that Frick “knows his business down to the ground,” and he advised the bank to extend the loan. “Lands good, ovens well built, manager on job all day, keeps books evening.” He also observed even then that Frick “maybe a little too enthusiastic about pictures,” adding “but not enough to hurt.”
Soon after, in 1873, when the collapse of Jay Cooke’s Philadelphia bank set off a depression, Frick snapped up his struggling competitors. Two years later, he bought out his partners. By 1882, the H. C. Frick Coke Company had over 1,000 coke ovens, produced over 75 percent of the region’s coke, and was valued at $1 million. Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie and his brother, Thomas, were seeking a steady supply of high-grade coke for their steel mills, and Tom approached Frick. Looking for capital to further expand, Frick agreed to sell Carnegie 11 percent of his coke company.
By 1881 Frick had moved to Pittsburgh, and that spring he and Andrew Mellon, with two other friends, took a “grand tour” to Europe, stopping in England, Scotland, Italy, and France. In a photograph of the four young men, Frick stands out from the others by casting a skeptical look and striking a sophisticated pose with a walking stick and a hand on his hip. The following year, he elevated himself to a social class commensurate with his wealth when he married Adelaide Howard Childs, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a Pittsburgh boot manufacturer. Adelaide had understated beauty with an innocent open face. She would remain an obscure, reclusive figure, her life centered at home, in the shadow of her husband.
Adelaide Childs Frick, age forty-one, taken at the Falk Studio at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in 1901. She had married Henry Clay Frick in Pittsburgh in 1882, and remained in his shadow.
On their honeymoon, Frick took Adelaide to New York, where for the first time he met Carnegie, who had moved to the city in 1870 and now invited the Fricks to celebrate the new steel and coke alliance by joining him and his indomitable mother for dinner at the Windsor Hotel. By 1883, Frick, always bent on expansion, had sold Carnegie more than 50 percent of the coke firm, along the way effectively ceding control of his company to the steel magnate. Three years later, Carnegie warned Frick against selling out his firm. It will be “the mistake of your life,” he bluntly predicted. “Your career must be identified with the Frick Coke Co. You never could become the Creator of CB and Co. Twenty years from now you might be a large owner in it, perhaps the principal, still the concern would not be your work and you could not be proud of it.” Within two years, Frick had reduced his share of coke company stock to only 21 percent, while Carnegie held more than three times that much.
In January 1887, Frick had accepted Carnegie’s invitation to join Carnegie Brothers’ board and take $100,000 (or 2 percent) of its stock, for which he could pay with the company’s future profits. But within months, when Frick’s coke workers went on strike, Carnegie forced the reluctant Frick (not for the first time) to settle. Frick fired off a protest to Henry Phipps, chairman of Carnegie Brothers, against “so manifest a prostitution of the Coke Company’s interests in order to promote your steel interests,” and resigned as the coke company’s president. That summer, after persuading Frick to visit him in Scotland, Carnegie wooed him back to the coke firm, and in a year and a half named him chairman of Carnegie Brothers steel.
Frick was pleased with his new appointment. “As I become familiar with the Steel business, it becomes more interesting; always something that can be done to reduce cost,” he wrote Carnegie in Scotland on July 25, 1889. “I am nothing of a ‘literary cuss’ any way, which is probably as well, as we have no lacking of it in our concerns. Glad you are enjoying yourself. When I get to be 50 I want to retire and do the same.” Carnegie replied: “I am so glad the steel business is fascinating you. It is the greatest of investments in the U.S. in my opinion managed as it can be.” Frick shot back that he more than understood. “I could not and would not remain the official head of any concern that was not well managed. I cannot stand fault-finding and I must feel that I have the entire confidence of the power that put me where I am, in a place I did not seek. With all that, I know that I can manage both Carnegie Brothers and Co. and Frick Coke Co. successfully.” By September, Carnegie told Frick to “take supreme care of that head of yours. It is wanted. Again expressing my thankfulness that I have found the man.” Frick helped Carnegie by buying steel mills, building a railroad, and constantly driving down costs. Frick viewed labor as nothing more complicated than a “factor of production,” writes the historian Kenneth Warren, “wages being regarded as a cost consideration on a par with charges for raw materials, energy, or transportation.”
Carnegie had already begun to meet the challenge he threw out to himself and other tycoons to redistribute their fortunes. In his 1890 Gospel of Wealth, he wrote that “the duty of the man of wealth” was “to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds,” and to administer them for society “in the manner’best calculated to produce the most beneficial results.” In 1879, he gave his first library to Dunfermline, the Scottish village where he was born; eventually, he would spend some $50 million to fund over 2,800 other libraries and would give away his entire fortune.
With Frick’s grip on the steel empire, Carnegie could supervise from afar, and move about on an international stage, distanced and detached from the city that continued to generate his fortune but that he had long ago escaped. Famously described as “Hell with the lid taken off,” Pittsburgh now produced more steel than any other city in the nation—a gargantuan industrial landscape with mills, foundries, and factories, darkening sky and water. Commentators cringed at the inhuman scale, the ugliness, and the contrast between the ever richer capitalists and the workers, increasingly unskilled immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom made less than two dollars a day.
By 1890 Clay and Adelaide Frick had three children, Childs (b. 1883), who was seven, Martha (b. 1885), five, a
nd Helen Clay (b. 1888), who was only two. Although they were raised in extraordinary luxury, the Frick children were not spared the dangers of a nineteenth-century childhood. Several years before, Martha had contracted an illness that continued to grow worse. On June 30, 1891, Frick cabled Carnegie who was in London: “We have had a very sick little girl for two weeks past.” On July 14, he telegraphed again. “I have decided positively not to go to Europe this year. The future of business is too uncertain, and matters here need close attention.” Sadly, Martha’s condition worsened, and on July 29 she died. Both parents were devastated. “Knowing just what the blow means to you, I can find no words to write’I have no consolation to offer you,” Carnegie confessed in a thoughtful letter addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. Frick” on August 3. “All I have found serviceable is to resolve to forget & busy myself with the duties that surround me.” To memorialize Martha, Frick not only commissioned a posthumous portrait, but also, in a strange tribute, the tycoon had the image of her young face printed on his checks. But grief did not paralyze the pragmatic industrialist; within six months he began a $131,000 renovation of his large gray stone house, which he had named “Clayton,” after himself.
The following year, the ongoing conflicts between Frick and Carnegie reached a climax when the strike by the Amalgamated Steel Workers union at the mill in Homestead, a bleak industrial town on the Monongahela River, brought to light the brutal underpinnings of their moneymaking empire. In April 1892, when steel prices were falling and the union contract at Homestead was about to expire, Carnegie sailed for Europe. He left Frick to execute their agreed-upon strategy to slash wages, lengthen shifts, and break the union—he would refuse to negotiate, shut down the steel works, send guards to occupy it, and start up again with workers who would accept the Carnegie terms. In preparation, Frick encircled the mill with an eleven-foot fence and ordered it to close. Then he dispatched a force of Pinkerton guards to take over the plant, sending them by barge up the river into Homestead in the early hours of June 6. But idled workers, stationed as lookouts, spotted the approaching Pinkertons. Gunshots (from one side or the other) started a fight, which raged throughout the day, until the guards surrendered. Within days, Pennsylvania’s governor dispatched eight thousand National Guardsmen to Homestead, and the Carnegie management regained control of the plant.
Meanwhile, on July 8, Adelaide Frick gave birth to a premature baby. The parents named him after his father, who at that moment had little time to spend with his new son.
Three days later a committee from the House of Representatives arrived in Pittsburgh to investigate the Homestead fight. Their report faulted the officers of Carnegie Steel for not having “exercised that degree of patience, indulgence and solicitude which they should have done,” and argued that Mr. Frick, who is “a businessman of great energy and intelligence, seems to have been too stern, brusque and somewhat autocratic.”
To Carnegie, Frick assessed the situation with a fanatically detached optimism and took no account of human cost. “Looking back over the transaction of this month so far, or previous to that, I cannot see where we have made any serious blunders,” he wrote on July 18. “It will all blow over before long, and when we do get started at our several works they will be all non-union, and if we treat the men as we always have done, or desired to do, it certainly will be a long while before we will have any more labor trouble.”
But Carnegie attempted to distance himself from Homestead. “I have given up all active control of the business, and I do not care to interfere in any way with the present management’s conduct of this affair,” he told a reporter who tracked him down in Scotland. To another partner, he wrote on July 17, “matters at home bad, such a fiasco trying to send guards by Boat and then leaving space between River and fences for the men to get opposite landing and fire—still we must keep quiet and do all we can to support Frick and those at seat of war.” No doubt Frick was aware that behind his back, Carnegie blamed him for the crisis and its toxic public relations fallout. “For as long as he [Carnegie] lived, and longer,” writes Nasaw, “Homestead would remain a symbol of all that was wrong with industrial America.”
Then suddenly violence of the sort that Frick had set in motion in the troubled steel town arrived at his own door. On July 23, a twenty-five-year-old self-proclaimed anarchist (who had no ties to the union) named Alexander Berkman barged his way into Frick’s Pittsburgh office, pulled a gun on the coke tycoon, who was standing at a table, and shot him twice. John Leishman, Carnegie’s vice-chairman, who was meeting with Frick, jumped on Berkman, who had meanwhile pulled out a knife and stabbed Frick in the right hip and left leg. Although wounded, Frick helped Leishman subdue the gunman. Later a doctor removed the bullets from Frick, and he was transported to the hospital. Before he left the office, the self-possessed industrialist courageously cabled Carnegie: “Was shot twice but not dangerously. There is no necessity for you to come home. I am still in shape to fight the battle out.”
For several weeks, Frick rested at home, although he continued to work. A visitor recalled seeing him in bed with his head bandaged, arguing, “I will fight this thing to the bitter end. I will never recognize the union, never, never!” Eventually, Frick recovered. Meanwhile, he could do little to help his struggling son. On Wednesday, August 3, the baby, only weeks old, died. Two days later, Frick took the trolley back to work. At one point, he wrote Carnegie about the heartbreaking situation of witnessing a child die for the second year in a row. Carnegie replied: “I don’t see how you can stand [your home agonies]. If you are like me you will stand until all is quiet and you are out of it and then give way.”
Carnegie’s vocal concern only provoked Frick’s anxiety. Frick encouraged Carnegie to stay where he was but defensively told Carnegie that if he found a better manager, “the position is open for him.” Even when sympathetic, Carnegie’s messages seemed double-edged. “This fight’is very bad indeed for you—very, and also bad for the interests of the firm.’You don’t deserve a bad name, but then one is sometimes wrongly got.”
Although the strike cut profits in 1892, in the long run Carnegie enjoyed the reduced costs of a weakened labor force. By early August one thousand workers restarted the Homestead mill and by mid-November the union called off the strike. “Events were to show that his [Frick’s] firmness had indeed set in train a wholesale and irreversible decline in the union,” argues Kenneth Warren. Frick only grew more arrogant, volatile, and certain of himself and his decisions. By 1897, Carnegie Steel manufactured almost 50 percent of America’s structural steel, and its profits, climbing steadily since 1894, reached $7 million.
Fall 1899
After the Fricks docked in Le Havre in June 1899, Adelaide and the children settled into a Paris hotel, and Frick and Henry Phipps crossed the channel and headed to Scotland for their fateful meeting with Carnegie. By now, Carnegie was furious; he had learned Moore’s identity, and that Frick, whom he entrusted to negotiate on his behalf, had structured the deal to shower himself, Phipps, and Moore with a $5 million bonus if it went through. Although Carnegie played the host to Frick and Phipps, taking them on walks and carriage rides, he made it clear he would not extend the option: “Not one hour.” For the moment, Frick’s dream of wresting control of Carnegie Steel had collapsed. Carnegie’s doubts about Moore had proved true and Frick, who rarely, if ever, admitted to error, had been humiliated.
Frick remained with his family in Europe for the rest of the summer. They went south to Aix-les-Bains and later returned to Paris. There at the French branch of Arthur Tooth’s gallery, Frick agreed to buy portraits by the eighteenth-century French artists Greuze and Nattier; soon after, in London, also from Tooth at Five and Six Haymarket Street, he bought a second Nattier—an emphatically aristocratic image of an English countess, with a long neck, creamy skin, and a fancy dress, whose arms are resting on a balustrade as she gazes at the viewer. Then only days before
setting sail from Liverpool, he told Arthur Tooth he had made the decision to buy the Rembrandt—Portrait of a Young Artist—for $ 38,000 and asked the dealer to ship the painting (already in New York) to Pittsburgh.
For Frick, art collecting, like all other aspects of his life, involved careful calculation. In accumulating pictures, he could translate the vast capital he had amassed into something magnificent, concrete and fixed, which gave him pleasure, gained him recognition, and over which he could exert complete control.
Anticipating the discomfiture of returning to Pittsburgh without any prospect of escaping Carnegie’s shadow, he would now enter triumphantly with a magnificent work of art, a picture of unassailable value, which even as a private possession would enhance the cultural assets of the city. At the very least, the Rembrandt underscored Frick’s financial clout and his appreciation of genius. It spoke with the authority of ages, an artifact of Dutch art’s Golden Age, when the practice of painting thrived and the bourgeois society measured itself in its abundance of pictures. Despite ups and downs, its value as a work of art and as a commodity had held for over 250 years. In his lifetime, Rembrandt had enjoyed international fame and success, and in the eighteenth century, such illustrious figures as Catherine the Great numbered among the collectors of his pictures. Yet, in the course of the nineteenth century, his reputation had soared and was reaching its zenith. As the American artist and critic Kenyon Cox put it: “Of all the great masters of painting none is more popular today than Rembrandt.” Extraordinarily prolific and versatile, he wore the label of genius with ease. He had produced over 350 canvases, some 1,000 drawings, and close to 300 prints. While he concentrated on portraits, which brought a steady income, he also painted (and drew) landscapes, in addition to subjects from history, mythology, and the Bible. Ironically, historical evidence of the artist’s worldly success—that he had operated a large workshop and earned enough to become a collector himself—was ignored by the pioneering French critics who had in the mid-nineteenth century rediscovered him as the most up-to-date of Old Masters, the one who spoke most eloquently to the modern age—his dark, mysterious, psychologically penetrating canvases aiming not to idealize but to capture nature and “truth.”