Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  For the most part, conservatives and fellow boosters of the capitalist enterprise praised Carnegie’s sentiments, while liberal thinkers were more apt to take issue. On the heels of the book’s publication, Herbert Spencer wrote Carnegie to argue that unbridled ambition was a curse for the average American. In a country where the concept of advancement was foreign, Spencer wrote, “each has to be content with the hum-drum career in which circumstances have placed him, and . . . is led to make the best of what satisfaction in life fall to his share.”

  In its review, The Dial, a self-proclaimed “socially humanitarian” magazine once edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, questioned whether or not the statistics trotted out by Carnegie on productivity and railroad expansion were the true gauge of a country’s merit. “It wouldn’t hurt if we had less bragging and more books,” The Dial concluded.

  Despite such cavils, Triumphant Democracy went through four printings in the United States and racked up even greater sales in Europe—likely aided by its quasi-scandalous scolding of the monarchy. Indeed, a mass-market paperback edition sold more than forty thousand copies in Britain, a sizable figure even by today’s standards.

  Undeterred by the critics who found his logic specious or by his many peers who feared he was encouraging the critics of big business, Carnegie published a second, equally confounding article in the wake of the Haymarket debacle, this in the August 1886 issue of Forum. In it he downplayed the fear that the nation was on the verge of a workingman’s insurrection, and went so far as to defend workers who sometimes turned to violence: “To expect that one dependent on his daily wage for the necessities of life will stand by peaceably and see a new man employed in his stead, is to expect too much.”

  As if these sentiments did not seem dangerous enough to his fellow industrialists, he then made the declaration that opponents on both sides of the issue would use against him ever after: “There is an unwritten law among the best workmen,” Carnegie penned, in near-biblical tones. “Thou shalt not take thy neighbor’s job.”

  Historians have labored long to explain the contradictions between Carnegie’s public statements and his zealous anti-union practices. Some point to the influence of his impoverished childhood and his awareness of his forebears’ democratic leanings. Had Carnegie been challenged, he would surely have defended himself vigorously as the possessor of a special understanding of the laborer, having himself been “one of the downtrodden.” And he would always on some sentimental level identify with the less fortunate. But for all his noble sentiments, he had long ago ceased to be a workingman, and whatever the tenor of his public statements, his energies were now devoted to preserving his new status as an accumulator.

  Nevertheless, Carnegie continued to make noble statements about the workingman to the very end of his life, seemingly untroubled by those who criticized his business and labor practices. As to why he might have done so, the most cursory examination of the history of American business shows that Carnegie is scarcely the only man of prominence who wanted very much to be liked.

  WHATEVER THE SINCERITY OF Carnegie’s feelings for the workingman, he would soon encounter more trouble from that quarter. Tensions in Frick’s coke works finally reached the breaking point in late 1886, when workers there, many of them recent immigrants from Hungary and other Eastern European countries, who were indiscriminately referred to as “Huns” or “Hunkies,” organized with the help of the Knights of Labor and the Amalgamated Association of Mine Laborers, demanding wage increases of up to 20 percent.

  Carnegie suggested that Frick turn the matter over to an arbitrator, and Frick reluctantly complied. The result was the offer of a 10-percent increase. The unions refused the offer, however, and went on strike at the end of the first week of May 1887.

  Frick soon found himself in a difficult position. Steelmakers besides Carnegie whom he supplied were condemning him for his inability to deal fairly with his own workers (and thereby ensure an uninterrupted delivery of the coke that was the lifeblood of their businesses). On the other hand, his fellow coke manufacturers were warning him not to give in to the workers’ demands and grant wage concessions that would ultimately have to be matched elsewhere and thus cut into the profits of the entire industry. One, Colonel James M. Schoonmaker, wrote to Frick, warning that Frick’s association with Carnegie made him a seeming pawn of the steelmaking interests.

  “There never was and probably never will be a better opportunity than now for you either to be the President of the H. C. Frick Coke Company for all time in the future or merely a representative of other interests in the sacrifice of your own,” Schoonmaker said. A former Civil War hero, Schoonmaker continued with an appeal to Frick’s virility. “You are bound by all the ties of honor to stand by those whose interests are identical with yours,” he said. “We are bound to come out all right if you stay with us and I never have doubted your nerve or manhood in any issue past or present.”

  On the other side of such entreaty was Carnegie, who, despite being on vacation in Scotland, fired off a cable to Frick demanding that he settle with his men so that production could proceed without interruption at Edgar Thomson, Union Mills, and the newly acquired Bessemer Steel Company at Homestead. Carnegie was accustomed to obedience from his subordinates, but if he expected unquestioned subservience from Henry Frick, he had gravely miscalculated.

  The truth was that Frick had, from the beginning of his career, been a hard-liner on labor issues, incensed by the interference of labor organizers in what he considered a process properly left to the discretion of owners. The Molly Maguires, a secret society for the protection of laborers formed in Ireland, had found its way to the coalfields of Pennsylvania as early as the 1840s, and during a miners’ strike in the mid-1870s had been blamed for the murder of several local law enforcement officers, elected officials, and mining personnel. It was not lost on Frick that one of his fellow owners had stamped out the threat by importing a number of Pinkerton detectives from Philadelphia to infiltrate the group. Information provided by the undercover agents led to the hanging of at least twenty men suspected of involvement in the killings.

  Frick himself had succeeded in quashing strikes in his coke fields, and a story related by Martha Frick Sanger illustrates his penchant for summary action. During an 1877 railroad strike that disrupted the shipment of coal and coke in the Connellsville area, Frick accompanied a sheriff’s deputy to help evict a striker who lived in a shack on the property Frick had sold at a handsome profit to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Told that he would have to leave, the striker refused. Frick, who weighed all of 130 pounds, glanced at the deputy and an unspoken message passed between them. In the next moment they grabbed the obstinate striker by the hands and feet and flung him off the embankment where they’d been arguing, and into a nearby creek. As the striker struggled to his feet, he found his belongings flying after him, including his mattress, bedclothes, and razor.

  When it came time to make a decision regarding the strikers in his own backyard, then, Frick reverted to form. He might have been goaded by Colonel Schoonmaker’s jabs at his manhood, or he could just as well have been remembering Carnegie’s threats that he would one day find himself in a diminished position on his own turf. As the Illustrated Weekly, a popular New York–based publication, once put it, “Mr. Frick is of a forceful, self-reliant nature, and in previous conflicts with labor organizations has shown a determination to carry his point at all hazards.”

  Whatever the reasons, Frick responded in rather startling fashion to Carnegie’s demands that he settle with the strikers. In a letter delivered to Henry Phipps and John Walker, Frick got quickly to the point: “As you hold a majority of the stock and are entitled to control in the Frick Coke Company, and in viewing what has passed between us on the subject, I feel compelled to vacate my position as its President. I therefore enclose, herewith, my resignation.”

  He went on to argue that giving in to the present set of demands would set an unfortunate precedent for future stri
kers, and complained that he was being unfairly squeezed by Phipps and Carnegie. “I object to so manifest a prostitution of the Coke Company’s interests in order to promote your steel interests,” he wrote, as if unaware that Carnegie’s dire predictions concerning the loss of control of one’s destiny had finally come true. “Whilst a majority of the stock entitles you to control, I deny that it confers the right to manage.”

  He might have declined to recognize this truth, but such denial did not change it. A terse cable from Carnegie followed: “Please don’t mislead me second time remember suffered enough last time make no mistake no stoppage tolerated. Reply.”

  Frick’s reply came in the form of a confirmation of his resignation, which took effect in early June 1887. And in July, while Henry Phipps struggled to replace him at the reins of a business he scarcely understood, Frick went on an extended European vacation. If Phipps and Carnegie were intent on running the coke business, then have at it, his actions seemed to say.

  The local press had a field day with the story. CARNEGIE THUNDERS FROM HIS CASTLE IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS—HIS BOLT WRECKS THE SYNDICATE—FRICK OVERPOWERED RESIGNS—HUNGARIANS DANCE WITH GLEE, read one headline, enough to send anyone on vacation.

  Frick took his time touring Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and France, but on his way back to the United States, a cable from Carnegie reached him, one that he had doubtless been expecting. “Come and spend a week with us,” Carnegie wrote. “It’s superb—Come and see what one gets in Scotland these summer days.”

  The cable had originated at Kilgraston House, a rented estate where Carnegie, at age fifty-two, was honeymooning with his new wife, the former Louise Whitfield, daughter of a New York City merchant. Carnegie had met Louise in the mid-1870s and from then on had courted her steadily, if surreptitiously, owing to his mother’s skepticism that any woman could be good enough for her Andra.

  Though Margaret Carnegie was a tireless champion of her firstborn son, she was wary of female interlopers. As illustration of the hold she exerted, Carnegie biographer Joseph Frazier Wall relates a story from Carnegie’s bobbin-boy days. When he returned home from work one evening to find his mother weeping in despair, the twelve-year-old Carnegie hurried to her side and begged her not to cry. “Some day,” he swore, “I’ll be rich, and we’ll ride in a fine coach driven by four horses.” Margaret stopped crying long enough to retort, “That will do no good over here, if no one in Dunfermline can see us.” As the tale goes, Carnegie was not put off. He amended his declaration then and there: one day they would return to Dunfermline itself in their own coach and four, and the whole town would know about it.

  As it happened, the two did make that triumphant return, in 1881, when Carnegie’s mother was invited by city fathers to lay the cornerstone for one of his public libraries. It was exactly as Carnegie must have dreamed it would be, some thirty-four years previously, with one exception: another woman had entered the picture. That woman was Louise Whitfield, and Carnegie wanted her to come along. As a first step, Carnegie had managed to persuade his mother to visit Louise’s mother to assure her that all would proceed with the proper decorum.

  Though other young friends of Miss Whitfield’s were scheduled to make the trip, Margaret Carnegie was not fooled. As Wall tells it, she made her visit to the Whitfield home, all right, and even proposed that Louise be permitted to make the journey. But when Mrs. Whitfield politely responded by asking Margaret what she thought of it all, Mother Margaret saw her opening. “Well,” she said, drawing herself up, “if she were a daughter of mine, she wouldna go.”

  The trip to Dunfermline proceeded, but without Louise, as Carnegie, despite his power in the business arena, remained cowed by his mother. He also remained smitten by Louise Whitfield, who was twenty-two years his junior, and in 1883 became secretly engaged to her.

  As long as Margaret was alive, however, they would not marry. It was not until late in 1886 that the matter was resolved. On November 10, less than a month after the death of his brother, and while Carnegie himself drifted in and out of his typhoid-induced delirium, an enfeebled Margaret Carnegie finally died. So fearful was his physician that his mother’s death would send Carnegie into a tailspin, he arranged for her coffin to be lowered from her bedroom window rather than risk having Carnegie see it carried past his bedroom door.

  The deaths in close succession of his brother and mother did have a profound effect on Carnegie, who wrote in his autobiography, “My life as a happy careless young man, with every want looked after, was over. I was left alone in the world.”

  If his childhood was over at the ripe old age of fifty-one, Carnegie was not left alone for too long. With his mother gone, he and Louise were free to plan their long-postponed nuptials—and on April 22, 1887, less than six months after his mother’s burial, the two were married in a private ceremony at the Whitfield home. Less than an hour after the wedding, they embarked on a cruise to London and from there traveled to Scotland, where they settled in at Kilgraston, near the town of Perth, and where Carnegie would invite Frick for a conciliatory visit. (Some family members have questioned Carnegie’s storybook devotion to Louise, by the way. As it is told by one of his nieces, Carnegie had long been smitten by Tom’s wife, Lucy, and in fact proposed marriage to her shortly after his brother’s death. According to Nancy Carnegie, only when Lucy dismissed his advances out of hand did Carnegie turn back to Louise.)

  As Frick had toured Europe in the weeks following his resignation, Phipps had given in to workers’ demands and production had resumed at H. C. Frick Coke. This “return to normalcy” had, however, come at considerable cost. Carnegie might have been relieved to see his furnaces fired up again and steel rolling out the doors, but it troubled him greatly to realize that he was paying twelve and a half percent more than his competitors for his coke. Perhaps Frick had been right.

  As a result, Frick had received any number of entreaties from Carnegie, Phipps, Walker, and other members of the board of the H. C. Frick Coke Company, all holding out the olive branch and suggesting overtly or subtly that he reconsider his decision to resign. It had not escaped them that while profits from the firm’s sales of coke still rolled in, they might have been twelve and a half percent greater if Frick had remained at the helm.

  Finally, Frick decided that he had let Carnegie stew long enough. In September, during a stopover in London, he left his son Childs, then four, and his daughter Martha, two, with a governess while he and his wife Adelaide traveled to Kilgraston to meet with Carnegie. Though Carnegie never publicly disclosed what passed between them, and Frick wrote only that he and Carnegie had taken a long stroll during which Carnegie “brought up the coke matter which we discussed pleasantly and then dropped it without going into the future,” the message must somehow have been delivered.

  Upon his return to the United States, at the meeting of the H. C. Frick Coke Company on November 5, 1887, Henry Phipps resigned as president and Frick accepted immediate reelection to the position.

  If all seemed well and getting better, the incident had taught both partners important lessons about each other. Carnegie saw that Frick was no puppet, but rather a man willing to take considerable risks in defense of his principles. If Frick’s actions made clear that he was less pliable than others in Carnegie’s circle, they also indicated a strength of will that might be useful if applied to others.

  On the other hand, Frick’s admiration and awe of Carnegie were tempered by the realization that Carnegie’s self-interest reigned supreme. Given Frick’s diminished interest in H. C. Frick Coke, it was more important than ever to carve out an enhanced position in the steel concern. It was a matter of self-preservation.

  Carnegie was wise enough to grasp Frick’s point of view, given that he was the one who had pointed out to Frick the inevitability of this very lesson. And because he had also seen in Frick a managerial capacity second to none, he was willing to overlook Frick’s resignation as the understandable act of a proud man. If Frick had been a compet
itor, he might well have been consigned “to the cart,” but as a partner with valuable skills, he deserved a second opportunity. Carnegie determined to put Frick’s managerial talents directly to work within the steel companies, and to ensure Frick’s loyalty Carnegie offered him an increased share of the company.

  Carnegie’s decision might have taken longer to put into practice if it were not for Henry Phipps’s decision to retire. In an October 1888 letter to the Carnegie Brothers board, Phipps explained that at age forty-nine, with twenty-eight years in the iron and steel business behind him, and a comfortable estate amassed, he was ready for a respite. He would remain a partner in the firm and a trusted adviser to Carnegie, but his role in the day-to-day affairs of the company was at an end.

  The board accepted Phipps’s resignation as chairman and appointed David Stewart, a Carnegie business associate and partner from the days of his move to Homewood, as a successor. But almost immediately Stewart died. Clearly the time for Frick had arrived, and on January 14, 1889, Henry Clay Frick was named chairman of Carnegie Brothers and Company, his interest in the company having been increased from 2 to 11 percent.

  Carnegie wrote Frick a glowing letter of congratulations that ended with him “expressing my thankfulness that I have found THE MAN, I am always yours, A.C.” Frick responded in like manner, seeming to embrace his position at the feet of the throne: “Please advise me a day or two before you arrive in Pittsburgh. Don’t want to be away on your arrival as I have many things to ask you about.”

  The stage seemed set for a long and harmonious relationship between owner and manager, between the nation’s most accomplished investor and the man he deemed a genius at making one’s investments pay. Even the cautious Henry Phipps had joined the bandwagon, penning a note to Carnegie from a stop on a long-postponed European vacation: “With Mr. Frick at the head, I have no fear. . . .”