Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  The citizens of Pittsburgh could point to their own boys of the streets who had made fabulously good, among them the Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie and his rags-to-riches Swiss-German partner, Henry Clay Frick, now steel barons and multimillionaires both. Not only had Carnegie and Frick started with nothing and worked their way to the top, they were local heroes whose accomplishments had provided a livelihood for thousands in the Monongahela Valley and its environs.

  If penniless upstarts like Flagler, Carnegie, and Frick could do it, then why couldn’t anyone? And if some of their fellow dreamers tumbled beneath the wheels in the attempt, wasn’t that just the way of the world?

  Furthermore, the unglamorous stuff produced in such vast quantities by the foundries and factories of Carnegie and Frick was itself inspiring. For if the backbone of the first American Revolution had been moral, the spine of the new revolution was forged of steel, and that was a great source of pride in the city of Pittsburgh.

  THERE HAD BEEN AN IRON INDUSTRY in the New World from the earliest days, with a blast furnace established near what is now Saugus, Michigan, in 1645. The smelting of iron and the production of iron implements such as stove castings, pots and pans, nails, ship plating, and farming tools had continued in the colonies and states ever since, but it remained a cottage industry throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with smelting furnaces fueled exclusively by charcoal and their location dictated by proximity to plentiful sources of wood.

  In the 1830s, however, things began to change. Anthracite coal, a substance so dense it is classified as rock by geologists, began to supplant charcoal as a source of fuel, and vast deposits of coal had been discovered in western Pennsylvania, leading to the establishment of a number of smelting furnaces in the area. Although England had until then been the undisputed leader in iron production, that, too, was about to change.

  Cast iron had formed the backbone of the Industrial Revolution from the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when William Darby introduced in his native England the first large-quantity processes for smelting, casting, and forging quality iron. Iron had its limitations, however: Lower-grade ores contained significant impurities, and products made of it could be brittle, limiting the size and application of finished goods.

  Steel, a far superior alloy of iron, had a precise carbon content of between 0.15 and 0.25 percent and was much stronger, more resilient and ductile. First produced in small quantities in Central Asia in the fifteenth century, steel had become more widely available in the mid-eighteenth century, when a Swedish metallurgist, Torbern Bergman, and a British manufacturer, Benjamin Huntsman, developed a process to ensure a more consistent product. “Swedish Steel,” however, remained prohibitively expensive, and even one hundred years later, in 1850, total steel production in England, far and away the world leader, was barely 60,000 tons.

  In 1855, however, Henry Bessemer received the British patent for a process that would change the world. By forcing a blast of air through a mass of molten iron held inside his “Bessemer” converter, excess carbon and other impurities could be removed and additives reintroduced later. The process allowed for the production of steel at a rate as rapid as one ton per minute, and made it as cheap to produce as iron.

  Within five years another method for mass-producing steel—the “open hearth”—was introduced, resulting in even greater efficiency. By the end of the nineteenth century, world production of steel was approaching 30 million tons, some five hundred times what it had been barely a half-century before, and almost totally supplanting the production of iron, which had slipped to 16 percent of the volume of its new cousin.

  This prized new substance took the form of rails, ships, I-beams for skyscrapers, endless miles of cable and piping, machinery, armaments, and tin plate for cans, providing the medium with which and upon which the modern world was reshaping itself. Rails already spanned the American continent, extending the possibility of significant commerce to nearly every nook and cranny of the land. True, the automobile industry had not yet been born, and no one could yet imagine the voracious appetites that would be stoked by it. Still, it was clear that steel would lead the way into the new millennium.

  If the amount of steel being produced had reached staggering levels, the shift in its locus of production was no less profound. Although the discovery of the western Pennsylvania coalfields had spurred the development of the iron industry in that area, U.S. production of iron before the Civil War remained insignificant, and U.S.-made steel was virtually nonexistent.

  However, an American steelmaker named William Kelly had received his own patent for a Bessemer-like “blast” furnace in 1857, spurring new interest in an industry previously fragmented and marginalized in the United States. In addition, the development of the coalfields in Western Pennsylvania had created a plentiful source of “coke,” or baked bituminous coal, a substance that could provide the fuel necessary for the economical production of steel in significant quantities.

  Less than a decade following the end of the Civil War, the production of iron in the United States had reached 41 percent of that of England, and by 1892 the balance was about to tip in favor of the former colonies for the first time in history. At the same time, Pittsburgh was on its way to its own position of dominance. By 1875, one-quarter of all the iron rolled in the United States came from the city. By the turn of the century Pittsburgh would account for more than half of all the iron and steel made in the United States, and twice as much as was then being made in all of England.

  Thus was a single American city on the verge of outstripping all Britannia in the production of the most important ingredient of an industrialized age as Independence Day of 1892 drew near. From a city of fewer than fifty thousand in 1850, Pittsburgh had more than quintupled in size, and served as the home of such giants of industry and banking as George Westinghouse, Alfred Hunt and Charles Hall (Alcoa), and Andrew Mellon. None was more important to the “Iron City” than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, whose operations in the city had more than quadrupled their output in the previous decade and were now producing more than a million tons of steel each year.

  The facilities of Carnegie, steel plenipotentiary, and his chief executive officer, Henry “King of Coke” Frick, constituted the single most important employer in and around Allegheny County, with nearly four thousand working at their signature mill installation in nearby Homestead, just east of Pittsburgh on the banks of the Monongahela. The Homestead Mill had been built in 1881, when the surrounding village numbered fewer than six hundred. By 1892 the plant had expanded to house four new open-hearth furnaces and was by itself the nation’s leading producer of rolled steel. The surrounding town of Homestead was now home to nearly eight thousand residents, the welfare of virtually every one of them tied to the fortunes of Carnegie Steel.

  Since the profits of the company had totaled nearly $5 million in 1890 and steel production at Carnegie was up, totaling more than 20 percent of the entire country’s output, the mood in Pittsburgh should have been jovial as the nation’s birthday approached.

  Instead, a pall had descended, for a strike loomed at Homestead, the premier facility of the Carnegie operations. It was more than a strike, in fact, for the plant’s gargantuan operations had been halted summarily by Carnegie and Frick, and a massive new fence topped by guard towers now encircled its perimeter, the entire facility transformed to such an extent that the men who had formerly worked there called it “Fort Frick.”

  Here, in this village on the banks of the Monongahela, at the very time when prospects for the nation and its most vital industry had never been better, loomed the prospect of open warfare. What would transpire there would become known as the Battle of Homestead, the deadliest clash between workers and owners in American labor history, one that would forever tarnish the image of the country’s richest man and drive a wedge of acrimony between him and his former partner and right-hand man that would endure to the grave.

  “How could we
have come to such a pass?” was the question on the lips of more than one resident of Pittsburgh in 1892. It is a question that more than one of its citizens repeats to this very day.

  3

  BY THE BOOTSTRAPS

  ANDREW CARNEGIE’S ASSOCIATION WITH Pittsburgh dated back some forty-four years, to the summer of 1848, when he arrived as a penniless Scottish immigrant of twelve, along with his father, Will, his mother, Margaret, and his younger brother, Tom (his sister, Anna, had died in 1841). Carnegie’s father had been a master weaver in the city of Dunfermline, but in the wake of Ireland’s Great Potato Famine he could no longer find work.

  As a result, the family sold everything and came, as so many of their fellow Scotsmen did, to America. In the case of Carnegie’s family, their journey would end in Allegheny City, a suburb of Pittsburgh, to which Margaret’s sister and brother-in-law had immigrated in 1840.

  The Pittsburgh that the Carnegies found was a rough-about-the edges manufacturing town of nearly fifty thousand, ideally situated for riverborne commerce. Chockablock with tanneries, cotton mills, and iron smelters, it offered unfettered opportunity for those willing to endure the harsh conditions of factory work. Further schooling, beyond the few years he had received in a rudimentary Scottish classroom, was out of the question for young Andrew, whose mission now was to help his family survive. His first employment was as a bobbin boy in a weaving mill, a six-days-a-week, twelve-hours-per-day occupation for which he was paid $1.20 a week.

  Carnegie was diligent and hardworking, however, and what scant schooling he had received in Scotland stuck with him. He found a clerk’s position in another mill, and then happened into a position as a delivery boy for a telegraph company in downtown Pittsburgh for what must have seemed the princely sum of $2.50 a week. Before long, Carnegie had picked up telegrapher’s skills, including the ability to translate the clicks and clacks of Morse code directly into text or speech. His skill and self-confidence attracted the notice of a number of influential customers, including Thomas Scott, who was then an assistant superintendent for the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  Scott had recently made the decision to string his own telegraph lines for the railroad, and had it in the back of his mind to hire an assistant who would serve as his personal telegraph operator. In February 1853, Andrew Carnegie, not yet eighteen, accepted Scott’s offer of the job for thirty-five dollars a month, the first step along his path to greatness.

  Working as an assistant for a railroad executive was a vastly less taxing and far more remunerative occupation than that of factory worker or telegraph clerk, of course, but the real benefit to Carnegie was the practical business education that he received from his association with Scott, who also introduced him to the concept of investment. When, in 1856, Scott took him aside to deliver an insider’s tip on Adams Express, a delivery company about to sign a favorable contract with the railroad, Carnegie made a fateful decision.

  While he lacked the five hundred dollars he needed to invest—“Five hundred cents was nearer my capital,” Carnegie wrote in his autobiography—the young telegrapher persuaded Scott to advance him the money, then scurried about to various friends for help in repaying the loan. (Until the day he died, Carnegie perpetuated the myth that his mother mortgaged the family home so that the investment could be made, but biographer Joseph Frazier Wall points to a promissory note in Carnegie’s papers that suggests otherwise.)

  Whatever the source of funds, the risk paid off. One day not long after he bought the stock, he arrived at work to find an envelope on his desk. Inside was a check for ten dollars from the cashier of the Adams Express Company. These dividends provided the first income “I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow,” as Carnegie later wrote in his autobiography. “ ‘Eureka,’ I cried. ‘Here’s the goose that lays the golden eggs.’ ”

  Not long afterward, more inside information led to Carnegie’s investment in the Central Transportation Company, a firm that would soon begin the production of sleeping cars for the railroad, based on patents for seats and convertible couches secured by inventor T. T. Woodruff. By 1863, Carnegie’s one-eighth interest in the new company, for which he had originally borrowed about $200, was producing annual dividends of more than $5,000. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,” Carnegie would write.

  Meanwhile, by 1859, Scott had become vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and promoted Carnegie to the post of superintendent of the Western Division, at the offices based in Pittsburgh. Carnegie, then just twenty-four, had officially become an executive, with an annual salary of $1,500.

  With his newfound wealth, Carnegie was able to move his family to the suburb of Homewood, only ten miles east of the smoky central city where he had grown up, but light-years away in terms of culture and sophistication. For the first time he mingled on a regular basis with individuals whose educational and social stores were vastly beyond his own. Now the neighbor and regular houseguest of former secretary of war and foreign diplomat William Wilkins, Carnegie resolved to better himself in a fashion that Horatio Alger might have charted for one of his protagonists. He took French lessons, read the classics, refined his table manners, and studied the likes and dislikes of the American leisure class until he felt at ease among his new neighbors.

  Meanwhile, with the outbreak of the Civil War, Carnegie’s old boss Thomas Scott was summoned to Washington, where he was appointed assistant secretary of war. To help with the charge of moving men and matériel expeditiously across the North’s network of rail lines, Scott summoned Carnegie, whose brief but vivid experiences in a panicked Washington convinced him that private enterprise was far more capably organized and directed than government. His disdain for government may have insulated him from guilt regarding later charges that the Pennsylvania Railroad, among others, had gouged the United States for transportation costs of matériel and was thereby profiting from the war.

  Although those charges, which ultimately led to a congressional investigation, were indisputably true, the results of the inquiry proved fruitless. In any case the scandal derived from policies put into effect by men much higher in the railroad’s hierarchy than Carnegie. For his part, Carnegie had already pledged his allegiance to the railroad and charted his course: He simply turned a blind eye to the matter.

  Besides, other matters distracted him from what he considered a stain solely upon his employer’s record. In the fall of 1861, shortly after his return from Washington, Carnegie was approached by a group of businessmen (including one of his new Homewood neighbors, iron manufacturer William Coleman) who persuaded him to visit a region north of Pittsburgh where a new substance known as oil had been discovered in quantities so plentiful it was bubbling to the surface of the earth and running freely down the surface of the area’s streams. Until then, oil had been of little practical use except as a nostrum believed to cure a wide array of vague ailments, from the vapors to ague. When its by-product, kerosene, proved useful as a substitute for whale’s oil in lamps, however, the rush to tie up the rights to oil lands was on.

  Carnegie took one look at the mad scene in Pennsylvania’s new oil country and made his decision. Parlaying his interest in the sleeping-car company, he was able to raise the necessary cash and join a group of investors to found the Columbia Oil Company. It was another in a series of timely decisions: by 1863 he was receiving nearly $18,000 in yearly dividends from “black gold.” In addition, the new company also recapitalized, and shares for which Carnegie had originally paid ten dollars were suddenly worth fifty dollars.

  It was a lesson that Carnegie would not forget. When another such venture presented itself in 1862, he did not hesitate. The incidence of sabotage on the North’s rail lines had greatly increased with the advent of the Civil War, with wooden trestles and bridges being particularly vulnerable to arson, and Carnegie’s old mentor Scott approached him with the notion that he might take advantage of his contacts in and around the Pittsburgh iron mills and railyards to assemble
a group that could make bridges of a substance far more difficult to burn.

  The new company, Scott explained, would enjoy a virtual lock on new bridge-building operations for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a privilege that might require the submission of judiciously calculated bids, but one certain to yield generous profits. Carnegie was eager to act on yet another gilt-edged tip. The Piper and Shiffler Company (which would later become the Keystone Bridge Company) was formed early in 1862, and to Carnegie it was the investment that turned out to be “the parent of all other works.”

  By 1863 Carnegie was earning more than $45,000 a year from this and all his other investments, compared with a mere $2,400 from his railroad salary. Yet he understood that it was the contacts he made and the information he derived from his association with the railroad that made everything else possible. While Carnegie had by this time developed a desire to break clean of working for anyone else, he was uncertain about severing his ties with a community of interests that had served him so well. It may have been the one time in his life when indecision was a boon.

  In 1864, after dabbling in one Allegheny City ironmaking concern with his younger brother, Tom, Carnegie joined with his bridge-building partners, Piper and Shiffler, and other associates, to form the Cyclops Iron Company, which would allow them to secure the raw materials for their projects without recourse to a middleman. The foundation for his success had now been laid.