Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  Frick’s son, Childs, took advantage of his position to further an interest in paleontology; if he remained an amateur, he was an avid one, donating some 250,000 specimens to the American Museum of Natural History when he died in 1964. Henry Clay Frick II, Frick’s grandson, lived a productive if quiet life as a physician and surgeon. One of Childs’s grandchildren, John Fife Symington, became governor of Arizona, only to be shamed by accusations of bank fraud during the savings-and-loan scandals of the early 1990s.

  Perhaps best known and most successful of the Frick heirs was his daughter, Helen. At the time of Frick’s death, estimates of the value of her inheritance were as high as $38 million. By the time she died, in 1984, Forbes magazine reported the value of her estate at more than $150 million.

  A noted philanthropist in her own right, Helen Clay Frick, who never married, held convictions scarcely less rigid than her father’s. Having developed a near-pathological antipathy toward things German as a result of that country’s actions in two world wars, she always insisted that the Fricks were Swiss, not German, and even tried to reclaim a building she’d donated to the University of Pittsburgh when that institution persisted in hiring professors with German-sounding names and including modern art in its collections.

  One of her most notable actions—aside from the formation of the Frick Art Reference Library, adjunct to the Frick Collection in New York, and the endowment that would develop her childhood home of Clayton into a formidable art and historical museum (including that “lesser,” two-ton, twelve-foot high, still-functioning Orchestrion)—was the filing of a lawsuit in 1965 against the historian Sylvester K. Stevens, who had made the mistake of including a few brief, if mildly derogatory, remarks concerning her father’s personal style and relations with labor in a volume with the decidedly uninflammatory title Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation.

  Though the suit, directed at both Stevens and his publisher, Random House, was dismissed after more than two years of wrangling, it represented an unprecedented attack on the academic and publishing establishments, which discovered just how difficult and expensive it could be to prove that the dead could not be defamed, especially by the facts. Said the judge in rendering his opinion: “Miss Frick might as well try to enjoin publication of the Holy Bible, because, being a descendant of Eve, she does not believe that Eve gave Adam the forbidden fruit . . . and her senses are offended by such a statement.”

  THAT HELEN FRICK WAS SUFFICIENTLY OUTRAGED by reference to her father as “stern, brusque, [and] autocratic” to spend a significant sum attempting to expunge such language from a mild-mannered volume of history should be no surprise, for passions have always run hot in the vicinity of Frick. After the final resolution of the strike of 1892, the New York Times carried the story of a cook at the Homestead works who had confessed to poisoning the food of the hated scabs whom Frick had installed at the factory. Six men were reported dead, and scores more were hospitalized. Even the comfortable quarters Frick had created for his imported labor behind the walls of his “fort” could not insulate them from the rancor of the displaced men.

  Likewise, there remain to this day Monongahela Valley establishments where a Frick or Carnegie might be unwise to dine, and many households where the thought of stepping foot inside a Carnegie library would be an act of heresy against every workingman ever born or yet to be—and this more than one hundred years in the lee of the Battle of Homestead. Tour guides leading groups from buses to a lovingly restored Clayton in Pittsburgh’s east end have witnessed men and women turn on their heels the moment it was revealed that the beautiful Victorian mansion the group was about to enter had once been the home of Henry Clay Frick.

  Meanwhile, the seeds of dissension that gave rise to the Battle of Homestead continue to fuel debate in the nation’s every nook and cranny—especially in its nooks and crannies.

  Some will say that in this country the likes of Frick and Carnegie can still rise from nothing, just as a peanut farmer from Georgia can become president. But others will ask how much room there truly is at the top of the pyramid. And while every American loves a bargain, how many profit when a national retail behemoth purveying hardware, clothing, groceries, and more comes to Everytown and annihilates the local mom-and-pop establishments with rock-bottom pricing, all the while paying the minimum wage and actively opposing unionization—just like Carnegie and Frick?

  Unions in general continue their struggle to achieve that vaunted commonality of interests that Carnegie was quick to invoke. At the turn of the twentieth century, the time of the formation of U.S. Steel, about 13 percent of nonagricultural workers in the U.S. were unionized. The figure rose to about 40 percent by 1950, but then both industrialization and unionization began a steady and intertwined decline. In 2000 the percentage of unionized workers had sunk to 13.5 percent—just where it was when Carnegie and Frick held sway over the new steel industry.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, nearly half of American workers were employed in manufacturing. By 2000, the figure had diminished to less than 15 percent.

  Whatever one’s position on the rights of industrial workers to organize and strike, the issue may soon be hypothetical in the United States, where a 1992 third-party presidential candidate claimed to hear a “giant sucking sound” as jobs poured out of the country. Euphemistically termed “outsourcing” these days, the practice is as common in the steel industry as in any other.

  While steel is still produced in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the United States, production is down from more than half of the world’s total to about 12 percent. Though a modernized and much diminished Edgar Thomson Works still operates in Braddock, local observers point out that few of its employees are drawn from the surrounding community. The streets of the nearby Braddock business district, if one can call it that, are a bleak warren of boarded-over shops and businesses shuttered for decades.

  Open-hearth and blast furnaces are a thing of the past in the United States, where most steel is produced in non-union or “mini” mills devoted to the recycling of scrap iron or the making of highly specialized, technologically dependent alloys in smaller (if significantly cleaner) electric-powered furnaces. The total number of steelworkers, which rose to a historic peak of 650,000 in 1953, declined to about 120,000 by 1990 and to 80,000 at the turn of the twenty-first century, a trend that reflects the deployment of the American workforce in general.

  According to a recent report by the Department of Labor, 308,000 new jobs were opened to American workers in March 2004. About 70,000 of those were in construction, almost 50,000 in retail, 40,000 in professional and business services, another 40,000 in health and education, 30,000 in tourism and hospitality, and 30,000 in the government sector. The number of new jobs in manufacturing? Not one.

  Surveys showed that workers’ wages rose all of 0.6 percent in 2003; during the same period, the average CEO received a 16-percent salary increase and a 20-percent hike in bonus pay—hardly reflective of Carnegie’s insistence that the interests of capital and labor are one. In another study, by Northeastern University, researchers showed that while the economy was indeed on the rise once more at the beginning of the twenty-first century, American workers received their lowest share of the nation’s income growth since the days of World War II.

  A RECITATION OF SUCH STATISTICS and a tour through the streets of the former bustling steel towns on the Monongahela suggest that history has traveled in one great circle in the century since Carnegie and Frick brought their enterprise to the apex of the Western world. Carnegie finally built a library for the workers of Homestead in 1898, an even grander sandstone monument than its counterpart across the river in Braddock. The building, complete with pool, auditorium, and lofty reading rooms, still stands, not far from where General Snowden’s troops once camped, keeping a watchful eye over the nearby town. And it is likely that the number of workingmen and -women from Homestead and Munhall who find the time to take some pleasure there is about the same as it was a centur
y ago.

  For all that, if an outsider were to saunter into a Pittsburgh tavern today and utter a few salient criticisms of capitalism or the American Way, it would be an invitation to a brawl. Although hard-liners remain who would never set foot inside a Carnegie building, those libraries in Braddock and Homestead are well used. Afternoons and evenings find them full of schoolchildren pulling down books from shelves, navigating the Internet at computer banks, and hard at work at school projects on venerable wooden tables that sit beneath lofty ceilings that “wee Andra” built.

  Furthermore, most of the children in those rooms are convinced they have a shot at a good life—a job, a healthy family, and a home, at the very least. Some dream that the sky is the limit, and it is difficult to imagine a parent who’d look them in the eye and say the least bit different.

  ONE OF CARNEGIE’S LIBRARIES WENT UP in the blue-collar hill town of Cambridge, Ohio, shortly after the turn of the century. It wasn’t on the scale of those virtual palaces in Braddock and Homestead; the library grants were tied to the size of the population, and Cambridge was an unprepossessing town of a few thousand souls. It remained pretty much that way into the 1950s, when I got my first library card there.

  To me, however, the building seemed grand. The staircases were broad and made of marble, the ceilings were high, the walls paneled in wood, and everyone inside moved carefully and spoke softly, the way they did in church. Certainly, the books I read there opened onto grand and boundless vistas. It is even possible that I read of the amazing rags-to-riches rise of the Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie.

  What I do remember reading there is a series of letters from a distant pen pal. It was something my sixth-grade teacher had inveigled us into—a flurry of correspondence between boys and girls in Cambridge and their counterparts in various foreign places. Our teacher was the nexus, dealing out letters from the front of the classroom every couple of weeks like an army noncom at mail call.

  My pen pal happened to be a young woman named Joyce Scott, who lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, about fifteen miles southeast (as the crow flies) from a place called Dunfermline. Joyce sent me a grainy black-and-white picture once, which showed her in a knee-length coat and scarf, atop a wind-whipped hillside overlooking an enormous body of water called the Firth of Forth. She might as well have told me she was on the surface of the moon.

  I would read and reread Joyce’s letters between homework stints in the library, where I spent my after-school hours while my mother finished up her shift at Champion Spark Plug and my father his at Continental Can. I recall the letters being mostly filled with descriptions of everyday life in Scotland, but it all sounded pretty exotic compared to mine.

  One letter, one of the last I received, stunned me. Joyce was about fourteen, three years older than I, and she wrote that she had made an important choice at school. Next year she’d go into training for the trades—a curriculum designed for a career as a secretary or stenographer. That was the way things worked over there, she wrote. One didn’t later decide to go to college. She had chosen. She was fourteen and now she knew what she would be, presumably forever.

  When my mother picked me up at the library that evening, I thrust the letter at her and demanded an explanation. How could you be forced to make a decision like that at such an age? How could it work that way anywhere?

  My mother glanced up from the letter and shook her head. The letter must have seemed as strange to her as to me; despite the fact that she had worked the assembly line all her adult life, she saw no reason why her son would have to. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I really don’t know.”

  IT WAS THE DREAM OF ALCHEMISTS to transform base metal into gold, and it could be argued that by combining iron ore and coke to create the richest and most powerful manufacturing entity on earth, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick succeeded in doing just that. It cannot be overlooked, however, that they accomplished this at the expense of thousands who labored more arduously and at greater peril than anyone should ever have to.

  Henry Frick never expressed a shred of public doubt about what happened at Homestead. And while Carnegie danced around the matter, he was never quite able to admit his own culpability, either.

  Freud reminds us that there will always be a contest between the hairy, insatiable id and the colorless and repressive counter-self. The goal is not to choose one or the other, we are told, but to properly integrate the two. When we look at Frick and Carnegie, then, perhaps what we see are two men unable to choose—men at war with themselves. Men who reflect the wars within ourselves.

  But whether one views Frick and Carnegie as rags-to-riches heroes, greed-mongers, or something in between, their contributions to the emergence of the United States as the economic leader of the world are undeniable. Over the half-century or so of their combined business careers, they saw—and in large part saw to—the transformation of an undeveloped and rawboned United States, divided by geography and any number of provincial interests, into the most powerful nation in the world. That much is a legacy to stand in awe of, even if their methods were sometimes faulty and even if the full promise of that legacy remains to be achieved.

  That would seem to leave the matter up to those of us who follow in the footsteps of the guilt-ridden champion of capitalism and his unrepentant shadow self. Otherwise we are sentenced to roll that Sisyphean boulder of accomplishment up its steep slope and then watch it, always, roll back down again.

  Not capital or labor, then. Not capitalism or something else.

  Balance. Here. Where we live and work and strive for something better. Every day.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A LIST OF ALL THE SOURCES containing information that bears upon the lives and times of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the development of the steel industry, and that industry’s impact upon the economic development of the United States would be virtually endless. The principal repository for the personal papers of Andrew Carnegie is found at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Considerable correspondence and other archival materials, especially that pertaining to the business dealings of Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, reside in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. The main repository for the personal papers of Henry Clay Frick, particularly those materials bearing upon his formidable collection, is found at the Frick Art and Reference Library in New York City.

  For the reader interested in delving deeper into the subjects and events touched upon in this book, I have listed some of the principal titles and their authors. I am greatly indebted to them all.

  Berkman, Alexander. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. New York: Schocken, 1970.

  Bridge, James Howard. The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: A Romance of Millions. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991 (reprint).

  Carnegie, Andrew. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.

  ———. The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays. New York: Century, 1900.

  Demarest, David P., Jr., ed. The River Ran Red: Homestead 1892. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

  Fabian, Larry L. Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment: The Tycoon, the President, and Their Bargain of 1910. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1985.

  Garland, Hamlin. “Homestead and Its Perilous Trades,” McClure’s, June 1894.

  Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. New York: Dover, 1970.

  Harvey, George. Henry Clay Frick: The Man. Private edition, 1936 (reprint).

  Hendrick, Burton J. The Life of Andrew Carnegie. New York: Doubleday, 1932.

  Hessen, Robert. Steel Titan: The Life of Charles M. Schwab. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  Ingham, John N. The Iron Barons: A Social Analysis of an American Urban Elite, 1874–1965. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978.

  Krass, Peter. Carnegie. New York: Wiley, 2002.

  Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Pol
itics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

  Livesay, Harold C. Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business. New York: Longman, 2000.

  McCullough, David. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.

  Sanger, Martha Frick Symington. Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Abbeville, 1998.

  ———. The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture, Interiors, Landscapes in the Golden Era. New York: Monacelli Press, 2001.

  Schreiner, Samuel A., Jr. Henry Clay Frick: The Gospel of Greed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.

  Tedlow, Richard S. Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

  Warren, Kenneth. Triumphant Capitalism: Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

  Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittick. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.

  Weingartner, Frannia, ed. Clayton: The Pittsburgh Home of Henry Clay Frick. Pittsburgh: Helen Clay Frick Foundation, 1988.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Les Standiford is the bestselling author of fourteen books, including the novels Bone Key and Havana Run and the critically acclaimed work of nonfiction Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean. He has received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A native Ohioan, he is a graduate of Muskingum College and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. He is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife, Kimberly, a psychotherapist, and their three children, Jeremy, Hannah, and Alexander. Visit his website at www.les-standiford.com.