CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
PRELUDE: EYE OF THE NEEDLE
PART ONE
GRAND DESIGN
1
GAUNTLET
2
THE STAGE IS SET
3
BY THE BOOTSTRAPS
4
CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN
5
THE KING OF COKE
6
GOOD FOR THE GOOSE . . .
7
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
8
FIRM HAND AT THE WHEEL
9
TWO STRIKES . . .
PART TWO
BLOOD ON THE RIVER
10
STRIKE THREE
11
THE WAGONS CIRCLE
12
A FINISH FIGHT
13
EARLY WARNING
14
ROCKETS’ RED GLARE
15
OVER THE EDGE
16
THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
17
WHILE ROME BURNED
PART THREE
UNRAVELING
18
THE OCCUPATION OF HOMESTEAD
19
ANARCHY IN PITTSBURGH
20
NOT AN INCH
21
BURY THE PAST
22
DEATH DO US PART
23
GREAT DIVIDE
24
GATHERING STORM
25
PUT ASUNDER
26
DEVIL IN THE DETAILS
27
MONEY, HAPPINESS
28
IN THE WINGS
29
EARTHLY GOODS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY LES STANDIFORD
COPYRIGHT
To the extended Patterson and Standiford clans of southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, so many of them miners, millworkers, and farmers—decent, hardworking men and women every one.
And to Jeremy, Hannah, and Alexander, who join the line.
If I have not been able to avoid the reputation of being rich during my life, death will at last free me from this stain.
—JOHN CALVIN
Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.
—SENECA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE A GREAT DEBT TO A NUMBER of people who have helped me on my way with this book, not least among them Scott Waxman and Emily Loose, who encouraged me to undertake this project to begin with. Very special thanks are due to Michael J. Dabrishus, archivist for the University of Pittsburgh Library, and to Julie Ludwig, assistant archivist for the Frick Art Reference Library in New York, as well as to Donald Swanson, chief of preservation for that same institution.
I would also like to thank Dan Fales, former director of the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh; Ron Baraff, director of Museum Collections & Archives for the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area; John Blades, director of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum; Gerald Costanzo, director of the Carnegie Mellon University Press; Gil Pietrzak, photo archivist at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Faye Haun, rights and reproductions associate, Museum of the City of New York; and Millicent S. Monks, David Demarest, Kristin Kovacic, Kimberly Witherspoon, Mitchell Kaplan, Joseph Kaplan, James W. Hall, Rhoda Kurzweil, and William Beesting for their guidance and their invaluable help along the way. I would also like to extend a special note of thanks to Rachel Klayman at Crown for her careful eye, for her innumerable helpful suggestions, and for her unfailing support.
And finally, my deepest appreciation to my wife, Kimberly, who reminds me every day that books are written one word at a time.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
GIVEN THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE of the United States’ steel industry and the storied exploits of its leaders, there exists a vast archival record concerning the events and individuals taken up in this book. In addition, the past century has seen the publication of several biographies of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick as well as any number of treatises on iron and steel, many of them exhaustive. I am not sure there is a single salient fact concerning any of these subjects that has escaped the attention of some previous writer, somewhere. And yet, my purpose is not—to paraphrase the noted Texas historian J. Frank Dobie—to unearth and rebury the same old bones of history. Instead, I have turned my focus upon the thread of a relationship and have restricted my attention for the most part to matters pertaining thereto. Readers who desire a more extensive examination of any single aspect of this story will find a selected bibliography at the end of the text. The books cited there have been invaluable sources. In the instances where I refer to information unique to any single publication, I have endeavored to provide a citation in the text.
A word is also in order regarding the worth of Carnegie’s holdings in today’s dollars. If the present value of Carnegie’s haul from the sale of his companies in 1901 were computed based on changes in the Consumer Price Index it would be about $8 billion, making him a relative piker compared to modern-day tycoons. However, according to a formula devised by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther in their 1996 book The Wealthy 100, the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion). Carnegie was to remain the world’s wealthiest individual for more than a decade, and he is number two on the all-time list, behind only John D. Rockefeller, whose forced liquidation of Standard Oil in 1913 netted him $212 billion in today’s dollars. Readers wishing to convert the dollar figures in this volume may wish to use the 200x factor as a rough indicator of modern equivalencies.
PRELUDE
EYE OF THE NEEDLE
WHEN I UNDERTOOK THIS RETRACING of the intertwined and singular lives of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, two of the most influential men to emerge from a remarkable historical period that spawned so many earth-roaming titans, I was well aware of the conflicted feelings I held toward my subjects.
After all, I grew up in the 1950s in the hills of southeastern Ohio, the child of working-class parents in a mining and manufacturing center. For many years I had watched as my mother and father and my many aunts and uncles rose early (or late, depending on the shifts they worked), packed their lunches into bags or tins, and made their way to the mines or the factories where they fought the machines and tended the lines for eight largely uninterrupted hours, earning the wages that kept us going from paycheck to paycheck.
Though Carnegie and Frick were long gone, their legacies were largely intact and robust. School field trips often took me and my classmates to the nearby metropolis of Pittsburgh, where the smoke from the mighty blast furnaces of U.S. Steel and Jones and Laughlin and so many others turned every Monongahela Valley day into dusk. The United States was the undisputed leader of the industrialized world, and the proof, in Pittsburgh, was everywhere we looked.
And if my parents and my aunts and uncles were awe-inspiring in their ability to rise each day and repeat the same tasks over and over and over again, without complaint, then those men we saw in Pittsburgh tending the giant furnaces, dodging railcars, stirring cauldrons of molten steel, breathing air that stunted oak trees into bonsai and dusted faces black, exuded a strength and endurance that seemed superhuman.
How could anyone do such work? I wondered. I knew that I could not.
I had seen that famous televisio
n episode from I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel are ordered to the assembly line in a candy factory, charged with boxing up the endless flow of bonbons to their stations. In short order, the belt speeds up and the rate of arriving chocolates outstrips the ability of our heroines to pack them up. Those who see this episode often find themselves weeping with laughter as Lucy jams chocolates into her apron, stuffs them in her cheeks, tosses the damned things anywhere and everywhere in a doomed attempt to keep up. When I see the episode repeated, I laugh, too, but always with a note of dismay, for I can never forget how the scene struck me the first time I saw it. To my ten-year-old sensibilities, it was as tragic as it was comic.
If you couldn’t meet the demands of the assembly line, I knew, you were no more useful than any other piece of dysfunctional machinery. You’d be replaced. And where would the groceries come from then?
Sure, I was smart enough to get the joke, but I also knew that Lucy’s bug-eyed panic was a way of making a hard truth a little more bearable.
At the same time, my parents and my aunts and uncles were quick to tell me how fortunate they were to have the opportunity to work. Furthermore, they pointed out, I was doing well in school, so well in fact that I might even entertain the notion of going to college, something that no one in our extended clan had ever done. With this education, I could transform myself and my prospects, and indeed I have often described my life as one long, unbroken effort to stay off the assembly line.
The upside of my family’s story was reflected in the books of Horatio Alger Jr., copies of which I pulled from my grandmother’s shelves and devoured, along with other rags-to-riches tales, many of them slender, orange, cloth-bound biographies of famous Americans who had risen from nothing.
“We have neither kings nor princes here,” one of my teachers often said. “You young men and women can become anything you want. That is the blessing of living in America.”
He was right, of course. I have in fact managed to stay off the assembly line. William Jefferson Clinton rose from a broken, abusive home to become president. Andrew Carnegie rose from a penniless wretch to become the richest man in the world, just as every week someone, somewhere, wins the lottery. And if the cynics among us might liken it all to a giant pyramid scheme, at least it can be argued that the few top spots are open to all.
This contradiction at the heart of capitalist enterprise has not escaped the attention of theologians, philosophers, and politicians, of course. On the one hand, we have the famous adjuration from the Gospels that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” while the reformer John Calvin argues that the acquisition of wealth is a sign of God’s preordained favor. In his groundbreaking work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the sociologist Max Weber suggests that Calvin’s ideas led to such a sea change among churchmen and their followers that by the beginning of the twentieth century, “doing the Lord’s work” and “turning a profit” had become indistinguishable virtues.
In his often-anthologized short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” William H. Gass speaks of the vast numbers of Midwestern farmers and working people who have for decades voted “squarely against their interests,” presumably due to some emotionally laden issue dear to the conservative heart—but it is just as likely that these are quite logical individuals eager to support a system in which a son or a daughter might someday, somehow, manage to climb a rung or two or twenty up the economic ladder.
One thing is clear: Carnegie and Frick represent the American ethos of limitless possibility more forcefully than any fictional overachieving shoeshine boy or chimney sweep. Both men were born to poverty, and both became wealthy and powerful beyond imagining. Yet the circumstances that led to their extraordinarily successful partnership seem, in retrospect, as inevitable as the plot turns in a Dickens novel.
The impact of their steelmaking enterprise on the economy at the end of the nineteenth century was as profound as the impact of the American Revolution had been on this country’s politics and philosophy a century before. The business practices of Carnegie and Frick and the principles they embodied not only made them the industrial potentates of their time, but continue to influence boardroom and labor relations practices to this day. And the rupture of their once “perfect partnership” illuminates the contradictions embodied in those two hallowed pillars of our thinking: capitalism and the Protestant ethic.
Carnegie and Frick were not the first to wrestle with those contradictions and they were most assuredly not the last. But the making and unraveling of their relationship became, for me, an often-troubling exploration of America’s promise to us all—a reminder that monumental achievement comes at monumental cost. Their story offers a vivid illustration of a young nation’s steadfast belief in progress and in man’s ability to affect his own destiny. As the ancients observed, such thinking may be fine for gods; but when mortals attempt to operate on the same plane—even mortals of heroic proportions—tragedy ensues.
PART ONE
GRAND DESIGN
Workers look on as molten steel is transformed into plate by one of the huge rolling mills operating at the Homestead works in 1892. (Rivers of Steel Archives)
1
GAUNTLET
ON A LATE SPRING DAY IN 1919, so the story goes, only weeks before the Treaty of Versailles put an end to a war that had threatened the very fabric of civilization, one of America’s wealthiest men—his holdings valued at more than $100 billion in today’s dollars—sat up in his sickbed in his Manhattan home and called to one of his caregivers for a pen and paper.
Andrew Carnegie, eighty-three, once the mightiest industrialist in all the world, now a wizened and influenza-ravaged man who for nearly two years had been under doctors’ care in his block-long, six-level mansion on Gotham’s Millionaires’ Row, took up the instruments brought to him and began to write as if possessed. When he was finished, he summoned to his chambers his longtime personal secretary James Bridge, the man who had helped him write Triumphant Democracy, one of the most persuasive tracts ever written in the cause of fair treatment of labor, all the more compelling for its author’s position as a titan of industry.
“Take this to Frick,” Carnegie said as he handed the letter to his old confidant.
It would have been enough to snap Bridge upright. Surprise enough to hear Carnegie mention that name, much less hand over a letter to that person. True, Henry Clay Frick was a fellow giant of industry—recently dubbed one of America’s leading financiers by the New York Times—and he and Andrew Carnegie had been partners once. Frick had been the man Carnegie trusted above all others to manage the affairs of Carnegie Steel, a manufacturing combine so vast that its output surpassed that of the entire British Empire.
But, so far as anyone knew, the two men had not exchanged a word in nearly twenty years—not since Carnegie drove Frick out of the business and Frick successfully pressed a monumental lawsuit against his former partner, the first in a long string of vengeful acts.
Had Carnegie divulged the contents of the letter, the secretary’s expression would have likely turned to outright astonishment. As it was, Bridge left Carnegie and made his way down Fifth Avenue from the awe-inspiring, sixty-four-room mansion across from Central Park at 91st Street to an even more imposing structure some twenty blocks south.
It was Bridge’s good fortune that Carnegie had selected him to be the bearer of this missive, proof positive that he had managed his way back into Carnegie’s good graces. For it was true that Bridge had authored his own acts of treason against Carnegie. In the early 1900s, while he was working on a revision of Triumphant Democracy that would have brought him a renewed flood of royalties, Bridge got word that Carnegie, still stinging from a series of rebukes from labor, would not permit a reissue of the book.
As a result, Bridge did the unthinkable: with information fed to him by Frick and others on the outs with Carnegie, he went to work on a book
titled The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company, an account that reassessed any number of myths concerning Carnegie, including his role in one of the most violent labor strikes in United States history, 1892’s infamous Battle of Homestead, where many were killed and injured on both sides. It was an event that had long dogged the thin-skinned Carnegie.
Bridge was fortunate, however; time and circumstance had changed Carnegie’s perspective, not only upon the actions of others, but upon a number of his own as well. By most accounts, the last years of Andrew Carnegie were marked by great swings in the mood of “the world’s richest man.” Carnegie, who acquired that sobriquet in 1901, when he sold his Pennsylvania steel empire to rival J. P. Morgan for the then-unimaginable sum of $480 million, had spent many of the intervening years giving away his fortune.
In addition to the funding of some 2,800 public libraries across the United States and as far away as Fiji and New Zealand, he had endowed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Research Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Educational Foundation in New York City, as well as the Endowment for International Peace. This last endowment was, in the final decade of his life, the cornerstone of his attempts to sway the nations of the world from their fixation upon war as a solution to political problems.
Carnegie’s efforts to secure world peace would cost nearly $25 million ($5.5 billion today), but that was a pittance compared to all his giving. According to Carnegie biographer Peter Krass, Carnegie was fond of turning to an assistant during his later years to ask, “How much did you say I had given away, Poynton?” To which the answer was an inevitable “$324,657,399.” To this day he is often credited with having established the precedent of corporate philanthropy; as one commentator observed, when Bill Gates makes a gift of some of his hard-earned millions, it is probably the ghost of Andrew Carnegie that guides his outstretched hand.
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