— Andrew Carnegie
If ever there was someone who demonstrated the notion of “conscience money,” it was Andrew Carnegie. At one point the country's richest man, Carnegie eventually donated most of his massive fortune to the charitable foundation that still bears his name today.
And why did he do this?
Guilty conscience.
Andrew Carnegie was born poor in Dunfermline, Scotland. His family immigrated to the United States, settled in Ohio when he was thirteen, and he spent his youth even poorer than he had been back in Scotland. Determined to better his prospects, the young Carnegie worked hard, invested shrewdly, and made the most of his opportunities. His investments in a railroad sleeping car company were especially lucrative. By the time he was thirty at the close of the Civil War, he was a millionaire.
During the Civil War, Carnegie had contracted for the War Department and was able to see the writing on the wall for his future investments. He positioned himself to profit immensely from the post-war commodities boom, especially in oil, coal, and eventually (to the exclusion of nearly all other investments) in steel production. Put most succinctly, Carnegie did not make most of his money from shrewd investment, or by making his companies competitive. He and his fellow bastard robber barons Henry Clay Frick, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller stifled competition to the point of forming monopolies in growing industries. Thus they gained enough power to set the price at will of the commodities they controlled Carnegie's good of choice: steel.
He succeeded in part by keeping operating costs low. That meant that he needed to keep labor costs low. So Carnegie certainly had no love for labor unions — the groups of workers intent on reversing or at least slowing the growing distance between the incomes of the rich and poor. Carnegie proved a clever bastard on this point. He did not take on the unions or associated social reformers directly and even expressed shock and dismay when associates like Frick did so viciously during the 1892 Homestead Plant strike.
Instead, Carnegie publicly pledged to work with the masses and then secretly used his wealth and influence to sabotage those negotiations. He managed to keep the government out of the business of taxing and regulating businesses; he was a particularly strong opponent of wage and price controls.
Carnegie also worked to keep his operating costs low by using a revolutionary public relations campaign that foreshadowed those of such later corporate philanthropists as Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The rich, Carnegie said, were intended to be stewards of wealth, and as such had a moral (but not a legal) obligation to help serve and elevate the poor. “A man who dies thus rich,” Carnegie wrote in his 1889 book The Gospel of Wealth, “dies disgraced.”
By 1901 Carnegie's conscience had begun to get the better of him. He allowed financier Morgan to put together a buy-out deal wherein Carnegie received $435 million (worth around $4 billion today) for selling his company. He instantly became the wealthiest man in the country. By the time he died eighteen years later, Carnegie had given away close to $300 million of his conscience money. He even paid for the creation of hundreds of libraries from bricks to books.
Still a bastard.
“Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.”
— Andrew Carnegie
45
HENRY CLAY FRICK
Everything but Plagues of Locusts (1849–1919)
“We bought the son of a bitch and then he didn't stay bought!”
— Henry Clay Frick on Theodore Roosevelt
Imagine a robber baron so ruthless that he was able to shock a bastard like Andrew Carnegie. That's Henry Clay Frick.
Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Frick got into the steel business early, founding his own coke-producing company (coke is an element that helps get blast furnaces hot enough to make iron into steel) before he was twenty-one. By the time he turned thirty he had bought his partners out.
Frick formed a decades-long business partnership with millionaire steel-magnate Carnegie after a chance meeting while Frick was honeymooning in New York City. He eventually merged his interests with Carnegie's to form U.S. Steel Corporation.
Frick was directly responsible for the devastation associated with the Johnstown Flood of 1889. He and several wealthy cronies had banded together as the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and had ordered an earthen dam built on a tributary creek of the Conemaugh River, just a few miles upstream from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
In May of 1889 the dam failed due to shoddy maintenance (and heavy rains), and the city of Johnstown was wiped off the map. The flood killed over two thousand people and caused millions of dollars worth of damage. Frick's lawyers succeeded in keeping Frick and the rest of the “club” from paying a dime in restitution.
Frick is probably most notorious for his response to the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892 (which in turn appalled Carnegie so much). When strikers took over the Homestead Plant during an impasse in talks between Frick's company and the steelworkers' union, Frick bypassed local law enforcement and hired three hundred Pinkerton detectives to take back the plant by force. Several people were killed in the ensuing bloodbath. After regaining control of the plant Frick fired two thousand employees (regardless of whether or not they had played any role in the strike) and halved salaries for the few who managed to keep their jobs. For Frick it was an unqualified success: he'd broken the union and actually made money doing so.
BASTARD BY APPOINTMENT
Frick had so much pull with the various Republican presidential administrations during the late nineteenth century that he would use them to help him attempt to get rid of troublesome business rivals in a unique manner. He'd get the rival appointed U.S. ambassador to a foreign country! And not in the third world, either: in 1897 Frick got President William McKinley to offer the post of ambassador to Switzerland to John George Alexander Leishman in order to get him to resign as president of United States Steel. The next time Frick tried this stratagem it didn't work so well. He got James Hazen Hyde appointed U.S. ambassador to France in order to try to get Hyde off the board of his father's insurance company. When Hyde refused the post, Frick had to settle for smearing him in the press as a spendthrift who misappropriated funds from the company.
Toward the end of the strike an anarchist named Alexander Berkman broke into Frick's office intending to kill him. He shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him four times before being overpowered and arrested. Frick was back at work within a week, and Berkman went to jail for twenty years.
Due to be deported in 1919 as a result of his ongoing anarchist activities, Berkman at least had the satisfaction that the bastard who he blamed for so much misery had died before he could be forced from the country. Frick was dead of a heart attack at age sixty-nine.
“[Frick was] deported by God. I'm glad he left the country before me.”
— Alexander Berkman on hearing of the death of Henry Clay Frick
46
J. P. MORGAN
International Banker and Millionaire War Profiteer (1837–1913)
“Capital must protect itself in every way …. Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”
— J. P. Morgan
John Pierpont Morgan's wealthy banking family raised him to appreciate the value of a dollar. Where people were always disposable to Morgan, capital was quite another matter. And like Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Morgan was a war profiteer. And it wasn't as if
he needed the money he stole. Morgan was born rich!
Morgan grew up sickly, receiving the majority of his education in Europe. He joined his father's organization by going to work in the bank's London office in 1857.
During the American Civil War, Morgan and a partner saw an opportunity to make a real (literal in this case!) killing. They bought a batch of cast-off, defective rifles as surplus scrap metal from the U.S. Army, had the guns retooled, and then turned around and sold the rifles back to the Army. The price per gun when Morgan and his partner bought them: $3.50. The price at which the two men sold these defective guns back to the Army: $33.00! When the guns exploded upon firing — doing greatest harm to most of the soldiers who used them — federal officials realized that they had been re-sold their own defective firearms. They refused to pay, and Morgan went to court (TWICE!) to try to get his blood money.
HOLIDAY BASTARD
Morgan's uncle, James Lord Pierpont, was a famous composer of his day. His biggest moneymaker was the time-honored classic Jingle Bells, which he originally entitled One-Horse Open Sleigh. Northern-born, Pierpont lived in Savannah for most of his adult life, served in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and by all reports rarely ever saw snow after his childhood. It's hard to connect the hard-nosed founder of The House of Morgan with something as light-hearted as a classic Christmas carol!
Of course it goes without saying that Morgan, like so many rich men during the period, couldn't be bothered to do his patriotic duty to his country during its hour of need. Morgan paid a substitute to serve in the Army in his place, as did fellow bastards John D. Rockefeller and Grover Cleveland. Makes you wonder whether that substitute ever came to any harm because of his rifle exploding, doesn't it?
PHILANTHROPIC BASTARD
If you've ever enjoyed the exquisite art displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you likely have Morgan to thank for that pleasure. He donated much of his private collection near the end of his life to help seed the current world-class collection at the Met. Apparently the tax incentives were too good to pass up.
Morgan went on to broker numerous important deals, including the one that made Andrew Carnegie the wealthiest man in America. He died in 1913 with a personal fortune estimated at over a billion dollars in today's money. The beneficiaries of his philanthropy included Harvard Medical School and the American Museum of Natural History.
That doesn't make him any less of a bastard, or of a war profiteer, for that matter.
“How did Mr. Morgan get this mortgage on his native land?”
— Watson's Magazine
47
RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
The Stolen Election of 1876 (1822–1893)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes is] a third rate nonentity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.”
— Henry Adams
Imagine that, as a citizen, you've just endured eight years of the most corrupt, venal, and self-seeking government in recorded history; for those who are not fans of George W. Bush, it won't be too much of a stretch to get in touch with that feeling. Now further imagine that after those forgettable eight years in our country's history, the election intended to sweep the previous pack of liars, incompetents, and thieves right out of office is stolen, keeping the offending political party firmly in power.
At least the Bushies had the “decency” to swipe a contested victory at the beginning of their boss's eight years in office. President Ulysses S. Grant's administration just kept on sullying elections and politics right through both of his terms. It ought to come as no surprise that his party (the Republicans) just couldn't leave well enough alone when it came to the election of 1876.
For what it's worth, the Democrats were no better. The party then out of power worked desperately to swing the election in favor of their candidate, former New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden. One Democratic governor, Lafayette Grover of Oregon, even refused to certify an elector who was going to vote for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. The state of affairs began to unravel from there.
Four states — Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon — had “irregularities” with their electoral votes thanks to charges of fraud and corruption. What's more, Colorado had so recently become a state that there was little time to organize actual polling there; the state's legislature awarded all three of their electoral votes to Hayes.
In the end, Tilden won the popular vote; he beat Hayes with just over 250,000 votes. But he lost the electoral count by a single vote: Hayes garnered 185 to Tilden's 184.
For the first time in American history the clear winner of the electoral vote had failed to win the popular vote. At least in 1824 when Andrew Jackson had won the popular vote, the five candidates split the electoral vote and Jackson won a plurality.
Congress finally fixed the situation with a classic back-room deal. The Democrats agreed to accept Hayes if he would in turn recall the Union troops who had been propping up Reconstruction Republican state governments in the South since the end of the Civil War. Hayes agreed and sold Tilden down the river. The civil rights advances of Southern ex-slaves under Reconstruction went right along with him.
The ordeal of the election of 1876 and its aftermath broke Tilden's health. He accepted his loss with admirable restraint and retired from public life.
Hayes was such a pious man that he made the nation wait an extra day for him to take office as president, because the original inauguration date was set for a Sunday. Yet this “Godly” man, so upright and honest, made a political deal that ensured that the disenfranchisement of African Americans would continue in parts of this country for nearly a century after the end of the Civil War.
Pious bastard.
“My task was to wipe out the color line, to abolish sectionalism; to end the war and bring peace … I am reluctantly forced to admit that the experiment was a failure.”
— Rutherford B. Hayes
48
GROVER CLEVELAND
Producing His Own Bastard (1837–1908)
“Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa? Gone to Washington, Ha-Ha-Ha!”
— Political chant used by Grover Cleveland's electoral opponents
Successful former judge, lawyer, businessman, and mayor of Buffalo, Stephen Grover Cleveland was a picture of Gilded Age virtues and stability; he was also the only man elected to two nonconsecutive terms as president of the United States. And yet this paragon dodged the draft, had a child out of wedlock, and eventually married a much younger woman for whom he was serving as legal guardian.
Extramarital sex has been a part of the human experience since the invention of the institution of marriage. In the nineteenth century, America was smack-dab in the middle of the so-called “Victorian Age,” with its supposedly more stringent approach to morals. But really it was no more moral than at any other point in history. The difference was that personal immorality and vice were less likely to be acknowledged or even discussed then than they are now.
Could a character like Cleveland actually have won the most recent election? Take a good look at the recent implosion of John Edwards's political career after the revelations regarding the kid he had with a member of his campaign staff. Now answer the question for yourself. How can anyone explain the fact of Cleveland's successful election not once, but twice? Especially when he didn't win as a favored incumbent the second time?
First: all voters in presidential elections before 1920 were male. Men tended to wink and nod at each other over situations such as the one in which Cleveland found himself.
Second: there was no such thing as a paternity test in those days, and it's likely the little boy that Cleveland acknowledged as his son wasn't even his. The woman who bore the child “dated” several different men at the same time, Cleveland among them.
Where Cleveland differed from the rest of this young woman's “boyfriends” was that he was the only one of them who was still unmarried. So it seems that Cleveland “took one for the team
.” He paid for the child's upbringing and apparently received help in that endeavor from the rest of the “circle of male friends” the child's mother had cultivated. Never mind that the boy also happened to be named after Cleveland's married law partner and was apparently the spitting image of him.
WHAT'S IN A BASTARD NAME?
What kind of guy changes his name from “Stephen” and opts instead to use his middle name of “Grover” instead? “Steve Cleveland” became “Grover Cleveland” for no recorded reason. One name sounds like the sort of guy you can have a beer with. The other sounds like that of the pompous-ass president of a bank somewhere.
As for dodging the draft, Cleveland was the sole supporter of his widowed mother and sisters when the American Civil War broke out. At the time it was legal for someone drafted for military service to hire a “substitute” who could serve in his place. Cleveland opted for that, and his political opponents made him pay for it for the rest of his life.
And speaking of Cleveland's law partners and orphaned daughters, Cleveland's law partner Oscar Folsom named the future president as his daughter Frances's guardian in his will. The child was eleven years old when her father died. Cleveland had known the girl since her birth and bought her first baby carriage as a present. After Folsom's death, Cleveland took an active role in supervising Frances's upbringing, including seeing to it that she went to college. At some point his feelings for her changed, and he proposed marriage even though he was executor of her father's estate. She accepted. They were married right after her twenty-first birthday, and had five children together.
The Book of Bastards Page 11
