Meet You In Hell!
I just finished reading "Meet You In Hell," the story of the relationship between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Frick was the chairman of Carnegie Steel after Carnegie retired, but while Carnegie still owned most of it. It's a fun book because almost everyone in it appears "larger than life." Carnegie and Frick both started out poor, and both started and ran their own businesses. Both eventually were stupendously wealthy. Stupendous is really the only word for it. If you look at the amount of money that Carnegie received when he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan to form the U.S. Steel conglomerate, it doesn't seem like much: $500-plus million. But when you view that money as a fraction of the US GNP, it's about equal to $200 billion today. You can buy and furnish a nuclear powered aircraft carrier for that much money. More to the point, you can put the Gates and the Waltons and the Cabots and the Stanfords in one pocket, and put one hell of a lot of change in your other pocket.
The two fell out, mostly over the handling of the Homestead strike, and that led to Fricks ouster from Carnegie Steel and from the H.C.Frick Coke company. In the process, Carnegie tried to cheat him out of a fortune, literally, by trying to force him to accept the "booked value" of his stake. The difference between $1.5 million and $150 million may not seem like much now, but ... well, no, it does seem like a lot.
The author describes Frick as a man who "never met a grudge he couldn't carry." Not surprisingly, he held onto this grudge for the rest of his life. Carnegie Steel had a huge (for the time) office building in Pittsburgh. Ten stories of gleaming, modern edifice controlling nearly all the steel in the U.S. When a church went on sale next door, Frick bought it, relocated the congregation, and built a fifteen story building a mere twenty feet to the east of the Carnegie building. The Frick building still stands in Pittsburgh, or at least it did when I went to college. The Carnegie building never again saw the light of morning, being in perpetual shadow until lunchtime, and was eventually torn down.
My own grandfather reportedly argued with his sister, and ordered her, in a fit of rage, to "Get out! Get out and never darken my door again!" Through the next four decades he never spoke to or of his sister again. I can relate to carrying a grudge, even if there isn't a fortune involved.
Carnegie, however, had a problem with unpopularity. So on his deathbed he sent a trusted minion to hand-carry a letter to Frick. Frick admitted both the man and the missive, and opened it in his presence. "So, Carnegie wants to meet, does he?" completely surprised the confidant, who had been there when the two men had their contretemps. "Sure, I'll meet with him. Tell him I'll see him in Hell, where we're both going!" was Frick's final rejection.
Andrew Carnegie is famous for selling Carnegie Steel and spending "the rest of his life trying to give away the world's largest fortune." He built libraries, churches, hospitals, and museums; gave organs to churches; established charitable foundations that survive to this day (see any PBS broadcast for example); and tried to advance the relationships among nations to the point of making war an artifact of history. But, "again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
Carnegie could not stand opprobrium, and went out of his way to respond to it, even (perhaps especially) when it was justified. It is pretty clear that his desire for a "good name" is what led to his split with Frick, and is what was driving him to his "good works." Frick's reply was not just the rough language of a coke and steel man, but a barb aimed at Carnegie's secret fear.
Early in the book, the author promises that there are many incidental stories that he won't cover. Parts of the history of steel, or of one man or the other, or of America, that don't directly relate. I had no idea, when I mildly accepted his limitation of focus, how truly many stories there were. In passing, he mentions that Frick had become the "King of Coke," driving his competitors under. Carnegie worked for a railroad, and eventually built one of his own. Frick invested in a "Country Club" that owned a valley with a lake formed by damming a river. Downriver was Johnstown, and when the dam collapsed the Johnstown flood ensued. (I've got a book on the subject in my to-read pile, but had no idea of the connection until now.) Carnegie, during his heyday, got the contract for the steel to build the bridge over the Missouri at St. Louis, and to provide all the steel for the Brooklyn Bridge (I finished reading "Nothing Like It In The World" a few weeks back, so I knew that was coming.) He lived through the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and WWI, and died of "The Great Influenza." Before dying, he had offered Woodrow Wilson, then President of the U.S., that he would create a think-tank to work for world peace if Wilson could get two of the great powers to sign eternal peace accords.
Apparently, all the really good bits of American history happened between 1846 and 1920. Man, is that frustrating!
The two fell out, mostly over the handling of the Homestead strike, and that led to Fricks ouster from Carnegie Steel and from the H.C.Frick Coke company. In the process, Carnegie tried to cheat him out of a fortune, literally, by trying to force him to accept the "booked value" of his stake. The difference between $1.5 million and $150 million may not seem like much now, but ... well, no, it does seem like a lot.
The author describes Frick as a man who "never met a grudge he couldn't carry." Not surprisingly, he held onto this grudge for the rest of his life. Carnegie Steel had a huge (for the time) office building in Pittsburgh. Ten stories of gleaming, modern edifice controlling nearly all the steel in the U.S. When a church went on sale next door, Frick bought it, relocated the congregation, and built a fifteen story building a mere twenty feet to the east of the Carnegie building. The Frick building still stands in Pittsburgh, or at least it did when I went to college. The Carnegie building never again saw the light of morning, being in perpetual shadow until lunchtime, and was eventually torn down.
My own grandfather reportedly argued with his sister, and ordered her, in a fit of rage, to "Get out! Get out and never darken my door again!" Through the next four decades he never spoke to or of his sister again. I can relate to carrying a grudge, even if there isn't a fortune involved.
Carnegie, however, had a problem with unpopularity. So on his deathbed he sent a trusted minion to hand-carry a letter to Frick. Frick admitted both the man and the missive, and opened it in his presence. "So, Carnegie wants to meet, does he?" completely surprised the confidant, who had been there when the two men had their contretemps. "Sure, I'll meet with him. Tell him I'll see him in Hell, where we're both going!" was Frick's final rejection.
Andrew Carnegie is famous for selling Carnegie Steel and spending "the rest of his life trying to give away the world's largest fortune." He built libraries, churches, hospitals, and museums; gave organs to churches; established charitable foundations that survive to this day (see any PBS broadcast for example); and tried to advance the relationships among nations to the point of making war an artifact of history. But, "again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
Carnegie could not stand opprobrium, and went out of his way to respond to it, even (perhaps especially) when it was justified. It is pretty clear that his desire for a "good name" is what led to his split with Frick, and is what was driving him to his "good works." Frick's reply was not just the rough language of a coke and steel man, but a barb aimed at Carnegie's secret fear.
Early in the book, the author promises that there are many incidental stories that he won't cover. Parts of the history of steel, or of one man or the other, or of America, that don't directly relate. I had no idea, when I mildly accepted his limitation of focus, how truly many stories there were. In passing, he mentions that Frick had become the "King of Coke," driving his competitors under. Carnegie worked for a railroad, and eventually built one of his own. Frick invested in a "Country Club" that owned a valley with a lake formed by damming a river. Downriver was Johnstown, and when the dam collapsed the Johnstown flood ensued. (I've got a book on the subject in my to-read pile, but had no idea of the connection until now.) Carnegie, during his heyday, got the contract for the steel to build the bridge over the Missouri at St. Louis, and to provide all the steel for the Brooklyn Bridge (I finished reading "Nothing Like It In The World" a few weeks back, so I knew that was coming.) He lived through the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and WWI, and died of "The Great Influenza." Before dying, he had offered Woodrow Wilson, then President of the U.S., that he would create a think-tank to work for world peace if Wilson could get two of the great powers to sign eternal peace accords.
Apparently, all the really good bits of American history happened between 1846 and 1920. Man, is that frustrating!
posted by Austin | 12:41 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting history, thanks! Now I'm getting more interested in learning more about the Industrialists and the changes they created in the world. It must have been an amazing time to be alive.
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