And yet Carnegie, for all his largesse, remained a troubled man. In 1914, speaking at the anniversary celebration of one of the libraries he had founded in western Pennsylvania, the white-bearded, slightly built benefactor, bearing an odd resemblance to Edmund Gwenn’s Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, said, “I’m willing to put this library and institution against any other form of benevolence. . . . And all’s well since it is growing better and when I go for a trial for the things done on earth, I think I’ll get a verdict of ‘not guilty’ through my efforts to make the earth a little better than I found it.”
Beneath his self-confidence and optimism, the defensive undertone was clear: speaking scant miles from the site of that bloody Battle of Homestead, where steelworkers still lived in bleak houses and lacked the power to organize in any meaningful way, Carnegie knew full well that many a man in Homestead would dispute his claim that all was well and growing better.
And in the five years since 1914, little had changed in the mill towns of Pittsburgh. A massive, nationwide strike to protest wages and working conditions in the steel industry loomed in late 1919, and Homestead still stood as the symbol of labor’s difficult struggle. How much guilt Carnegie truly harbored is a secret he would carry to his grave, but the fact that he had sent an eleventh-hour communiqué to the man to whom he’d entrusted the defense of the Homestead plant on the fateful night of July 5, 1892, spoke volumes.
By the time Bridge arrived at the Frick mansion, a modern-day palace that its owner had vowed would make Carnegie’s place look like a hovel, Bridge would have been beside himself, not only wondering as to the contents of the message he carried, but fearing the response of the man to whom it was addressed.
Though Frick, like Carnegie, stood at only five feet three inches (at a time when the average man was five feet seven), and was white-bearded by now as well, he would never be mistaken for Santa Claus. Photographs of the era reveal his features as handsome, but Frick’s countenance was intimidating, and that had been no hindrance in his dealings with business rivals and union organizers. “You see that his head is there, placed on that body, for his triumph and your defeat,” one of his contemporaries observed. Thus, while Carnegie had gone to great pains to portray himself as a benevolent friend to his workers, he had delegated the job of holding the line on wages and other demands to Frick—a Patton to Carnegie’s FDR, as it were.
Bridge knew Frick’s legendary toughness well—this was one executive as willing to use his fists as his voice to deal with an enemy or a rival—and he could have been forgiven his apprehension as Frick tore open the envelope and scanned its contents.
Frick glanced up at Bridge accusingly, as if the messenger knew full well what was in the letter. “So Carnegie wants to meet me, does he?”
Bridge could only stare back, dumbfounded.
But a meeting was precisely what Carnegie had called for. In his careful script, Carnegie had reasoned that both he and Frick were growing old, and that past grievances were beneath their dignity. In truth, they were first among equals. Surely it was time to meet and patch up the wounds they had inflicted upon each other. Time to make amends and prepare to meet their Maker.
The words might have touched a chord in almost any other man, but Henry Clay Frick, still the ranking board member of U.S. Steel, showed no sign of gratitude or relief.
By this time Bridge might have been edging for the door. Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s “Highlands” up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.
“Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,” Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. “Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.”
2
THE STAGE IS SET
HENRY FRICK’S REACTION ON THAT New York spring day in 1919 can be traced back to the events of a fateful summer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, some thirty years before, when a tragedy unfolded whose reverberations can still be felt. Of course, as is always the case when tracing history, there is no stopping anywhere, truly, for seeking out first causes is something like following the warp and weft of an enormous knitted sweater. Pulling on one string always bunches up another, and smoothing that only leads to the knot in the next, and so it is with the story of Carnegie and Frick.
Still, Independence Day of 1892 will do as a starting point. As that anniversary of the nation’s founding approached, most citizens of the United States were aware that their world was changing at a rapid pace—technologically and otherwise—though they could not have understood just how pivotal the era in which they lived would be judged by future historians.
By anyone’s lights, material progress was mind-boggling. Though not in widespread use, the device known as the telephone had come into being in 1876, and the electric lightbulb had followed three years later. People everywhere could now dream, at least, of someday having such magical devices at their beck and call.
On the other hand, men were still buttoning up their trousers in 1892, and women needed help with the backs of their full-skirted dresses, for it would be another year before the zipper made its debut. It would be three more years before the movie projector made its first appearance, while the player piano (1894), refrigerated air-conditioning (1902), and the radio station (1920) were still the stuff of dreams and whimsy.
The country, just over a century old, comprised only forty-four states, with Wyoming having joined the fold on July 10, 1890. Still to come were Utah (1896), Oklahoma (1907), and New Mexico and Arizona (1912). As for Alaska and Hawaii, no mention need be made. Battles with Indians were still the stuff of major news: Custer had been dead only sixteen years, and the Battle of Wounded Knee had taken place just before the dawn of the New Year of 1891.
The population of the republic stood at barely 61 million when the results of the official census were announced on June 1, 1890. Some five and a quarter million of them lived in Pennsylvania, second in numbers only to New York’s six million. Though Philadelphia was the largest city in the Keystone State, in the far western section lay the important industrial city of Pittsburgh. Its 250,000 residents, living in and about the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers (with ready access to the nearby Ohio), made it—at a time when most substantial commerce still relied on water for the transport of heavy goods—the thirteenth-largest city in the nation.
One day Pittsburgh would be the home of the first radio station (KDKA), and in 1958 Dr. Jonas Salk would, at the University of Pittsburgh, develop the vaccine that would virtually wipe out the disease commonly referred to as “infantile paralysis.”
In 1892, however, few Pittsburgh residents would have dreamed of radio stations or miraculous cures, or known, even, of the work of the Duryea brothers, who were about to unveil the first gasoline-powered vehicle. Nor would there have been many streets in the hilly city on which their puny, one-cylinder contraption would have been drivable.
Many more would have been familiar with the phenomenon of the rise of the popular music industry, though no one would have referred to it that way. They might simply have hummed a few bars of “After the Ball,” the 1892 creation of a promoter named Charles K. Harris, who wrote and published the song in an unabashed attempt to prove that a popular tune could be marketed as a “million seller.”
Harris did not let the absence of a radio network or payola-ready disc jockeys or jukeboxes, which had yet to be invented, deter him. He finagled the inclusion of the song into a highly popular traveling variety show, and would eventually persuade John Philip Sousa to play it daily for visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Harris’s creation was soon selling as many as five thousand copies of sheet music a d
ay, and would ultimately sell not one million but five million copies. This was a “sky’s the limit” country.
The more leisured or literate of the Pittsburgh population might have been familiar with a book titled Looking Backward: 2000–1887, a clumsily written but engaging piece of utopian fiction that had become the most popular American novel since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edward Bellamy’s novel imagined a future America with no class distinctions, a wholly nationalized industrial establishment, and an equal distribution of wealth. Bellamy’s book sparked the formation of many clubs and discussion groups, and was a favorite of socialist-leaning organizations such as Eugene Debs’s Populist Party, an organization not unknown in what was rapidly becoming the steel capital of the world.
There was much talk in 1892 Pittsburgh about the upcoming presidential election, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland was waging a spirited campaign against the incumbent Republican, Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland had actually received nearly 100,000 more popular votes when the two had opposed each other in the previous election of 1888 (5,540,000 to 5,447,000), but the tally from the Electoral College had delivered the victory to Harrison, 233 to 168.
In Pittsburgh, a workingman’s town, the opinion of the citizenry was divided: many favored the Democrat Cleveland out of general principle; others were prepared to vote for the Republican Harrison, who championed stiff tariffs that protected American-made industrial goods against foreign competition. The tariffs were the brainchildren and the darlings of the steel industry’s owners, but laborers, who feared losing jobs because of cheaper foreign imports, supported them, too.
The contest between Cleveland and Harrison was a matter of partisan politics for many, then, but it also symbolized deeper currents in a country still raw and ingenuous. A fierce national pride still united a rebellious populace, among whom a few were old enough to have personal memories of British invaders actually sacking the nation’s capital and burning the White House in the early part of the century; and only a quarter of a century previously, a huge civil war had riven the nation over issues of self-governance, territorial integrity, and questions of liberty and justice for all. It was a country that had been forged upon not only the concept of equality, but the practice of it.
And while the finer points of liberty—including universal suffrage and equal rights—remained nettlesome, the expanding Western frontier had for at least a century provided Americans with the illusion of—if not the literal opportunity for—material advancement open to all. This was the land of the gold rush and the land rush and the homestead allotment, and all it might take to advance one’s life significantly was the willingness to overcome fear, hitch up the team, and venture toward the unknown.
This grand optimism and expansionist spirit was fueled not only by the advancements in technology that had marked the years since the Civil War, but also by the tremendous growth in industry that supported and grew out of scientific development. The discovery of oil in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1859 touched off one such momentous development, though that industry’s initial contribution to American society came in the form of kerosene, an inexpensive fuel for lamps. Suddenly, nighttime illumination was no longer the indulgence of the very few who could afford the cost of whale oil, of which there was a dwindling supply. With John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler at the forefront of the Standard Oil combine, production of oil in the United States would grow from two thousand barrels in 1859 to more than 64 million barrels at the end of the century.
Another major development was the vast expansion of the nation’s rail system. As the Civil War began, there were fewer than 30,000 miles of track in all the United States, and much of that was in varying gauges and states of repair. Owing to the enterprise of such men as Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had earlier developed the nation’s steamship freight and travel network, J. Edgar Thomson, longtime head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and J. P. Morgan, who threw much of the weight of his family’s banking enterprise into rail investment, the 1890s saw the width of railroad tracks standardized and nearly 163,000 miles of roadway put into use.
To build this vast network of track and bridges, no supporting industry was more important than iron and steel. Most of those early 30,000 miles of railway had been made of iron, an industry initially banned in the British colonies but accounting for 835,000 tons of product by 1860. The technological advancements that allowed for the mass production of steel and the vast expansion of the rail system proceeded hand in hand to the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States was turning out 10 million tons of steel, more than Great Britain, France, and Germany combined.
In less than half a century the United States had been transformed—from a largely agrarian and underdeveloped federation of competing interests, to a relatively cohesive economic juggernaut promoting a jackpot mentality in anyone willing to work hard and take the occasional chance.
Perhaps no single individual was more influential in spreading the gospel of upward mobility than Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899), whose series of novels featuring the exploits of penniless but morally upright urchins (Tattered Tom, Ragged Dick, et al.) reaping fortune’s rewards through decency, hard work, and courage would sell more than twenty million copies. At the other end of the fictional spectrum lay the work of Mark Twain, whose 1873 novel The Gilded Age satirized the unbridled greed and political shenanigans indulged in by the politicians and get-rich-quick schemers of the day.
While Twain saw nothing to approve of in the actions of his characters or the real-life manipulators, such as the Tweed Gang, who served as his inspiration, the novel’s title would in time come to evoke almost the opposite of what he had intended. The phrase “Gilded Age” is now understood as the largely grand and stirring period in American history stretching from the post–Civil War years through the turn of the century, a time during which the United States would undergo a revolution as significant as the grand political experiment that had forged it in the first place.
During this period, with its political foundations firmly established, the United States would set the stage to become not only moral exemplar to the world, but also its leading economic power. The age of the Founding Fathers was over. The Age of the Titans had begun.
IT WAS A TRANSFORMATION that was not without pain or detractors. Writers such as Bellamy and Twain and Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane (who would initially publish his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893 at his own expense) powerfully portrayed those cast aside or ground beneath the wheels of Manifest Destiny. Eugene Debs tossed aside practical considerations and, as the champion of a rising American labor movement, campaigned fervently if unsuccessfully for the presidency in five elections, espousing what would become the slogan of the Social Democratic Party: “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
At the same time, the German sociologist Max Weber was developing the concepts that would form the foundation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), in which he sought to explain the profound changes that had taken place in traditional Western culture as a result of the rise of “institutionalized” capitalism.
Weber, a jurist by trade, was no ideologue, and no call for revolution accompanied his analysis. He was quick to point out that capitalist enterprise had been practiced virtually from the beginning of civilization, by emperors, warlords, rug merchants, and buccaneers alike. According to Weber, however, never before had capitalism become so inextricably woven into the ethos of a nation, and the consequences were not all good.
Weber argued that the elevation of capitalism to the status of Protestantism had come as a result of the teachings of a number of post-Reformation followers of Calvin, whose doctrines profoundly altered traditional precepts of their faith. With its emphasis on the concept of predestination, Calvinism placed a premium on the ability of man to judge his place in the hereafter, and material accumulation was put forward as one infallible measure of God’s favor.
In time, Weber argued, the concept
of working in order to live was reversed. In an industrialized society, man now lived in order to work. And the surest indication of “good” work was the amassing of wealth. Certain elements of traditional iconography—Christ driving the money changers from the temple, the selfless vow of poverty, and the Golden Rule—were turned on their ear. In the new “rational” Protestantism, the single-minded pursuit of profit was not only justified, but became a virtual commandment.
Inevitably, bigger became better, and there were moral arguments to prove it. One of the inescapable corollaries of such thinking, Weber argued, was what he called the “rational capitalistic organization of labor.” Workers were no longer individuals but “hands,” and the manipulation of the “work force” to provide the maximum profit for an enterprise was not only defensible, but likely to ensure a factory owner a future place among the heavenly host.
While Weber’s work remains for many the most influential and provocative in Western social thought, it held little sway among those on the front lines of getting and spending as the nineteenth century neared its close. Balanced against such notions were those of men who had enjoyed the fruits of capitalism, or yearned to do so, no matter what the odds.
If Irish and German immigrants had served their time in the mills and mines of a developing industrial nation and were now threatening business as usual by demanding a say in their working conditions and pay scales, there were also tens of thousands arriving from Eastern Europe to whom even the worst circumstances in the American workplace seemed a godsend. Call a desperate Hungarian just off the boat a scab or a strikebreaker as some might, but it is easy to understand why, with a starving family to feed, he would not listen or even comprehend.
And beyond the promise of mere subsistence in America shone the myth of streets paved in gold that had persisted since the arrival of the first conquistadors. If it had only required of an early settler that he go west, preferably at a young age, to remake himself, then clearly a citizen of the 1890s, with an Alger-like glint in his eye, could point to newly minted real-world models to fuel his most fantastic dreams. One such role model was Henry Flagler, who had left the upstate New York home of his Presbyterian minister father in the early 1850s as an unschooled teenager with twelve cents in his pocket. Forty years later he’d made one $100 million fortune as the co-founder of Standard Oil, and was on his way to making a second as a railroad baron in the untrammeled wilderness of Florida.
Meet You in Hell Page 2