Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

The surprised group obeyed, and Berkman’s jaws were forced open. All stopped to stare in surprise. On the assassin’s tongue lay a capsule of fulminate of mercury, a suicide device that—had Berkman managed to crush it between his teeth, Bridge tells us—would have blown them all to kingdom come.

  Bridge’s account and George Harvey’s 1928 biography, commissioned by Frick and titled Henry Clay Frick: The Man, paint a picture of near-superhuman behavior by Frick on that day. When a surgeon was rushed to the office to tend to his wounds, it was said that Frick refused any anesthetic, and calmly assisted the doctor as he probed the wounds for the bullets.

  “There, that feels like it, Doctor,” Frick said, on two different occasions. And each time, the doctor extracted a slug with his tongs.

  With the removal of the bullets, the doctor advised that his patient be removed immediately to the nearest hospital, but, according to Harvey, Frick would have none of it. He insisted that his wounds be sewed up then and there, and next had himself propped up in his chair, where he completed the letter he had been working on when Berkman attacked, stipulating the final terms for a loan he sought. After that task had been completed and he had signed the rest of the day’s essential correspondence, he took the time to dictate two cables, one assuring his ailing mother that he was all right, then another to Carnegie.

  “Was shot twice but not dangerously,” the message to Scotland read. “There is no necessity for you to come home. I am still in shape to fight the battle out.”

  Only after he was finished with his day’s work did Frick permit himself to be carried from the office to an ambulance that would take him to his East End home, and even then he had his litter bearers stop so that he might issue a statement to reporters:

  “This incident will not change the attitude of the Carnegie Steel Company toward the Amalgamated Association. I do not think I shall die, but whether I do or not, the Company will pursue the same policy and it will win.”

  No wonder that Hugh O’Donnell was ready to submit. He and his men were only human. Their adversary was clearly as invincible as Vulcan himself.

  20

  NOT AN INCH

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, SPECULATION arose immediately that Berkman had been acting in league with the strikers. And shortly after the would-be assassin was taken into custody, Pittsburgh police arrested two local men long suspected of unsavory activity. The arrests of Carl Nold and Henry Bauer, identified by police as the leaders of a group known as the “Northside Anarchists,” were presented to the Pittsburgh Post and other media as evidence of a “carefully laid conspiracy against the life of Chairman Frick.”

  A cache of anarchist literature was confiscated from the homes of the men, including plans for the making of dynamite bombs, a discovery much ballyhooed in the local press. It was the observation of the Post that such an instrument could be carried about “in perfect safety by any person who took care to avoid a collision.”

  As his September trial would bear out, however, Berkman had acted on his own, drawn to Homestead by press accounts that he and Emma Goldman had pored over as they worked the counter of the luncheonette they operated in Worcester. Berkman and Goldman were Russian immigrants who had arrived in the United States in the 1880s, both profoundly affected by the radical anarchist tradition that had grown exponentially in Europe during the last half of the century, resulting in the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881.

  Goldman, who would one day be labeled by the press as “the high priestess of anarchism” and by J. Edgar Hoover as “one of the most dangerous women in America,” followed the accounts of the 1886 Haymarket incident closely, and was appalled by the opening declaration of the judge presiding at the trial of those accused of killing Chicago police officers: “Not because you [threw] the Haymarket bomb, but because you are anarchists, you are on trial.”

  When four of the Haymarket defendants were hanged, the seventeen-year-old Goldman made a decision. She would dedicate her life to avenging what she saw as a heinous miscarriage of justice, and would do everything in her power to seek the overthrow of a government that ruled principally by coercion. When she and Berkman read of the Pinkertons who had been summoned to Homestead and the occupation of the town by the state militia, they found a target for their outrage. Frick must die, they determined, and Goldman even went so far as to offer her services as a prostitute to secure the funds to buy the necessary pistol.

  While the use of Pinkertons to quash a strike had become something of a negative to most Americans, the appearance of bomb-throwing, pistol-blazing radicals as representatives of labor was even more damning. Though certain of Goldman’s tenets—opposition to the draft, free love, equality between the sexes, and birth control—have earned her adherents to this day, a cold-blooded murder plot went too far, and even steadfast friends of labor drew the line.

  Berkman’s attempt on Frick’s life, then, exerted an incalculable influence on the public’s perception of the Homestead strikers’ cause. Though his trial would bear out Berkman’s lack of connections with Nold or Bauer, or with any other labor activist in Pittsburgh, the damage was done.

  No one on the side of ownership benefited more than Henry Frick. “Say what you will of Frick,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote, “he is a brave man.”

  By July 28, The Nation was reporting that there seemed to be no connection between Berkman and the Homestead strikers, but went on to state that the attempt on Frick’s life was the natural extension of the attitude taken by them: “If it was right to murder the Pinkertons—and nobody among the strikers, from O’Donnell down, has ever admitted that it was wrong—it was right and logical to try to kill the employer of the Pinkertons.”

  Berkman’s actions moved the local Pittsburgh Catholic to suggest, however, that perhaps the freedoms so prized by Americans went too far: “The attempt on Mr. Frick’s life is an eye opener. We are no better, no safer, no securer, than the people residing in France, or Germany, or Russia. Our lax laws have given these Anarchists a foothold here.”

  Even the National Labor Tribune would write of Berkman’s prospects, “Whatever the term of imprisonment may be it will be inadequate to fit this crime—a crime that is against both capital and workman.”

  Had either Nold or Bauer known Berkman, their suspicions as to his true errand in the city would have likely been aroused: The New York Times reported that for a period of time following his immigration, Berkman had worked in the city on radical anarchist John Most’s publication, Die Freiheit. It was said that Berkman often told co-workers that any capitalist who refused to give up his property should be murdered, a sentiment that alarmed even the hard-bitten Most, who fired Berkman.

  In her 1931 memoir, Living My Life, Emma Goldman wrote that Sasha, as she referred to Berkman, had originally intended to carry out a far more dramatic plan. The two had decided Berkman should build and carry a bomb to Pittsburgh for the purposes of annihilating Frick. Berkman’s mechanical abilities were unequal to his passions, however. When a test of the bomb design carried out in a remote section of Staten Island failed, the plan to use a pistol evolved in its place.

  In the end, Nold and Bauer received five-year sentences for having sheltered Berkman before the assassination attempt, and Berkman, who conducted his own defense, received a twenty-two-year sentence, which exceeded the usual attempted manslaughter sentence by a factor of three.

  Berkman, who had announced to the judge at the outset that he expected no justice and that he dedicated his actions to those workers “murdered” by the state in the aftermath of the Haymarket trials, would stay in prison until 1907. Upon his release, he returned to New York and became editor of Goldman’s Mother Earth, a radical journal that was produced until 1919, when the two—staunch opponents of the World War I draft—were deported by the U.S. government, along with several hundred other “subversives.” Berkman died in the south of France in 1936, of a gunshot from his own hand, following a long and debilitating illness.

  Meanwhile, the
political fallout in Homestead and its environs was intense. When news of the assassination attempt reached the ranks of the newly installed state militia, one man, Private W. L. Iams, jumped up from a group of twenty or so comrades with whom he had been conversing to shout, “Three cheers for the man who shot Frick.”

  As the incident was reported by the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, none of his surprised colleagues was moved to respond to Iams’s call. Undaunted, Iams went on to deliver the three cheers himself. At that juncture, the regimental commander, one Lieutenant Colonel James Streator, came out from his tent and angrily called the men to attention.

  “Who spoke those words about Frick?” the commander shouted.

  Iams stepped forward without hesitation, proudly claiming responsibility.

  The commander stared at him in disbelief. Such words flew in the face of the guardsman’s oath to protect and defend the laws of the state. In effect, Iams had just publicly confessed to treason. The commander asked for an apology, to himself and to the regiment of which Iams was a part.

  Iams, however, was resolute. “I refuse,” he said, and Commander Streator ordered his immediate arrest.

  As Iams was being dragged away, Streator, a veteran of the coke region labor confrontations of the 1880s, ordered the immediate formation of a court-martial, which sat at once, and took almost no time in reaching a verdict of guilty. As punishment, Iams was sentenced to be hung by his thumbs. Following that, he was to be dishonorably discharged from the militia.

  Though Iams was to have been suspended for thirty minutes by slender cords fastened to his digits, he passed out from pain after twenty. He was cut down and thrown into the guardhouse for the remainder of the evening, then hauled out the next morning so that the signs of treason might be inflicted upon him before his dismissal was made final.

  A barber shaved half of Iams’s head bald and half his mustache as well. His rifle and pistol were taken from him, as was his uniform, the latter replaced by a threadbare suit and hat. Following the reading of the charges against him and the subsequent judgment, Iams was marched to the edge of the camp and out of sight while the regimental band played “The Rogue’s March.”

  “He was always a troublesome fellow,” Colonel Streator was reported to say, as Iams disappeared.

  WHILE ALL THIS WAS GOING ON, Frick was making a near-miraculous recovery at Clayton, his fashionable home in the suburbs, and carrying on business as usual from his bedroom. From Rannoch Lodge, Carnegie had cabled his reassurances that Frick was still his man: “Too glad at your escape to think of anything. Never fear my brave and dear friend my appearing on the scene as long as you are able to direct matters from house and unless partners call. We know too well what is due to you. Am subject to your orders. . . . Be careful of yourself is all we ask.”

  One of the first matters Frick attended to on the morning following the attempt on his life was to dictate a notice to the five hundred or so men who had joined the company after the strike was announced on July first.

  “In no case and under no circumstances will a single one of you be discharged to make room for another man,” Frick’s announcement read. “You will keep your respective positions so long as you attend to your duties. Positive orders to this effect have been given to the general superintendent.” What conflicts this directive might occasion with Superintendent Potter’s earlier assurances to those other-than “strife-makers” that they could have their old jobs back were not addressed.

  For nearly two weeks Frick stayed at home, a telephone at one side of his bed, a secretary on the other, attending to his duties as chairman of Carnegie Steel as though nothing had happened to him. On Thursday, August 4, however, he was required to leave his bed for an event that troubled him far more than any strike or assassin’s bullet.

  Less than one month before, on July 6, 1892, the very day of the Battle of Homestead, Frick’s wife, Ada, had given birth to Henry Clay Frick Jr., their fourth child and second son. Ada had gone into labor slightly prematurely, owing, some said, to the stresses surrounding the events at Homestead. From the moment of the child’s delivery, both mother and son were in ill health, and while doctors were unable to make a diagnosis, the child took little nourishment and there were fears for Ada’s life as well as the newborn’s.

  Early on the morning of August 3, Henry Clay Frick Jr. went into convulsions and died of internal hemorrhaging. It was a devastating blow to Frick, even though he was no stranger to such loss. One year previously, his seven-year-old daughter, Martha, had died as the result of an abdominal infection that had festered inside her since the age of two, when she swallowed a pin during a family vacation to Paris.

  Over the years, Martha’s health had had its ups and downs, and Frick had agonized over the possibility of an operation that might alleviate her condition. Today no parent would hesitate to authorize such a procedure, serious though it might be. In the late 1880s, however, an operation of that nature could as easily have killed young Martha as saved her. Frick, a resolute believer in the practice of homeopathy, resisted the surgery until the last. By the time he relented and called physicians in, it was too late. The doctors who examined young Martha explained that while an operation was called for, she was now too weak to survive. Shortly after the surgeons had delivered this prognosis, young Martha Frick died.

  Whether or not Frick felt that his delay made him complicit in Martha’s death, the loss affected him profoundly. He commissioned a bust of Martha that was displayed prominently at Clayton, and had printed a series of checks bearing her likeness, which he often used for charitable causes. And his granddaughter Martha Frick Symington Sanger would later speculate that much of the art collected by Frick was acquired in conscious or unconscious tribute to the memory of his beloved young Martha. In fact, Frick would later confide to a reporter that when Berkman had aimed the pistol at his head, a radiant vision of Martha had appeared suddenly at his side, an apparition so vivid that Frick had been convinced she was real.

  Reeling now from the loss of two children, Frick forced himself from his bed to attend the funeral service of his infant son on August 4, held in the downstairs parlor at Clayton. On the following morning, as if driven away by death or resolved to defy it, he rose to leave the house for the first time since the attack. He rode a streetcar to his downtown offices and began his day promptly at 8:00 a.m., thirteen days after being gunned down. “At office feeling first class,” he cabled Carnegie. “Everything assuming good shape.”

  Carnegie cabled back, “Hearty congratulations from all here upon your return to the post of duty. Every thing is right when you and Mrs. Frick are right. Every other consideration insignificant.”

  When Frick returned home that evening, he found that local policemen had been stationed outside his home, “for the family’s peace of mind.” Frick thanked the officers, then immediately sent them home. “If an honest American cannot live in his own home without being surrounded by a bodyguard,” he told a reporter for the New York Times, “it is time to quit.”

  Difficult as his week had been, the bad news was not over for Frick. On August 3, the day of his son’s death, Hugh Ross, one of the strikers who had been charged with murder, appeared in the offices of Pittsburgh alderman Festus M. King and swore out warrants for the arrest of William and Robert Pinkerton, Frederick Heinde, Superintendent Potter, Secretary Lovejoy, and several other Pinkertons and company officials on charges of murder. Most prominent among the others named was Henry Clay Frick.

  Murder warrants were issued, and Frick and the others were forced to appear before a Judge Ewing in Criminal Court. Ewing released Frick on $10,000 bail and gave some sense of his feelings on the matter during the hearing. “This information is made by a man who himself is charged with murder, and is now on bail,” Ewing said. “It would have been better had it been made by some other person. I think, if the story in the newspapers is true, none of the men charged . . . can be held for murder and certainly not in the first degree. The men
on shore were there illegally and unless you can show me there was a malicious and deliberate killing there is no use wasting any more time. The men on the barges were there legally and the others were there illegally.”

  In this regard, Ewing was following the line of defense that Frick and his counsel had held as their trump card from the beginning. Once the mob broke down the fences on that night and entered onto company property, they were trespassers, and in that light, all the actions they undertook from that point on were illegal.

  While the cases against both company and Pinkerton officials and the strikers wended their way through the courts, Frick stayed focused on his plan to bring the Homestead mills back on line. By early August there were said to be as many as one thousand men at work at Homestead. General Snowden announced that there was little likelihood of further violence and sent several regiments of his militia home.

  Though Hugh O’Donnell had long seen the writing on the wall and continued his efforts to contact Frick as well as members of his own advisory board, attempting some settlement between the union and the company, neither side was willing to listen. The union remained formally on strike, and Frick continued to bring in outside workers as well as a number of former Homestead employees who had never aligned with the AAISW, including more than one hundred of the plant’s mechanics and maintenance men.

  During his visit to New York, O’Donnell had managed to prevail upon Whitelaw Reid, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in the upcoming election, to approach Carnegie and let him know that the union was willing to accede to all the terms of the contract originally offered. Reid cabled Carnegie, who quickly wrote to Frick urging that this proposal be accepted. Then, when Carnegie realized that this would have the unfortunate effect of leaving the union as the legal bargaining agent at Homestead, he quickly wrote Frick back, urging him to disregard O’Donnell’s offer. “Use your own discretion,” Carnegie finished by saying.