Henry Frick (politician)

Transcription

If Carnegie is the most well remembered steel magnate of the 19th century, he is not historically the most reviled. That prize, that title, would go to the man known as Henry Clay Frick, whose name is perhaps only half-remembered now as a name of a museum in New York City. But it was Frick, who along with Andrew Carnegie, that really built the Carnegie Steel Company into something momentous, something memorable. Frick had assembled a collection of all the coal fields in Pennsylvania, near where Carnegie had his steel plants. And as they became united into one company in the 1880s, they amassed greater and greater wealth, greater and greater production. But they did this through what Carnegie had called the strictest economies, that is, by cutting the wages of their workers again, and again, and again. A very famous strike occurred in 1892 at one of Carnegie's steel plants at Homestead, Pennsylvania. At Homestead, there had been a strike only a few years earlier, or rather, a threatened strike in which, when Frick and Carnegie were out of town, one of the local managers capitulated to the local union. In this a contract was established that gave them, the workers, everything that Carnegie and Frick fought so hard against. And so in 1892 when that contract was set for renewal, Frick had his moment. He wanted to bring about the end of this union to break them, to do what Gould could not do on his railroads. Frick militarized the steel mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania. He built a wall across all of it with barbed wire and even holes for rifles to be pointed through. He envisioned that he would break the union by refusing to negotiate with them. And that's exactly what he did. After he refused to meet with the local union workers, he shut down the factory, locked everyone out, and prepared for the confrontation. This is the other side of the battle of labor and capital that capital wanted to fight. Frick knew that the workers would not allow replacements to come into the factory. And so he hired out for people to come in from out of town to break the workers. Now the workers had formed a human wall around the fort, blocking the entryway of these replacements. But Frick used a card in the back of his pocket. He hired a group called the Pinkerton detectives. Now the Pinkertons were like a private corporate security force of the late 19th century, like the company Blackwater is today, although Blackwater now has a different name. Blackwater and the Pinkertons were the same. They were corporate security used to control local labor disputes. And the Pinkertons were hired from faraway towns and cities, places that themselves were wrestling with this new capitalist inequality. So the poor and penniless from Chicago would sign on for $1 a day and three square meals to come to places like Homestead and push the workers around to make sure that they could not go on strike. So how does this play out in Homestead? At 4:00 AM, the Pinkertons go on barges up the river adjacent to the steel mill. Under the cover of darkness, they see an opportunity to confront the workers who then ring out an alarm and quickly come, 3,000 strong, to prevent the Pinkertons from getting access to the factory. The workers are armed with old Civil War guns. This is 1892. They're are also armed with an old Civil War cannon. And as the Pinkertons square off against the workers, no one knows who shot first. But shots rang out. Fighting was everywhere. And luckily, no one was a particularly good soldier, so not that many people died. These we're just workers, after all. They weren't soldiers. In the aftermath, though, what mattered less was the control of the factory. Very briefly, the workers held control. Very briefly, the steel mill was shut down. And almost deterministically, the government stepped in and sent federal troops and militia troops to break the strike. This strike turned out, as so many others had done in the late 19th century, with the state intervening to protect private property. But the aftermath of the strike was shocking. Americans reading in Harper's could see the images of the Pinkertons confronting the workers of Fort Frick as it was called. And Frick was denounced as a tyrant in popular songs, and poems, and essays. Frick came to represent everything the Carnegie was not. Somehow, Carnegie got off free from all of this. He was seen as someone distant from the actual operations of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. He was seen this way because he actually was. You see, the Carnegie Steel Corporation was organized in the new way that corporations were in the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century, with massive amounts of stock being offered, with a clear separation of owner and manager. Frick was the manager. Carnegie was the owner. And this clear separation of owner and manager that was perhaps muddled in earlier parts of the 19th century was becoming ever more clear in the late 19th. The Carnegie Steel Corporation's very structure allows for this moral distinction between Frick, on the one hand, as the raw, naked, vengeful, unrepentant face of industrial capitalism, and the other, Carnegie, with his gospel of wealth, who advocated the building of libraries. This confrontation between the two men came to a head in the late 1890s as Carnegie went on speaking tours extolling the virtues of Christian brotherhood and the necessity of giving back to the poor in the form of, of course, libraries and hospitals, not actual money to the poor. Frick, meanwhile, though he was villified in the press, continued to run the Steel Corporation-- successfully, I might add-- further cutting wages over the 1890s. But everything came to a head as Carnegie opened a new library in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in which he told the assembled crowd that if he had been in charge, there would have been no violence 1892. Frick, understandably, after he'd given his life making money, taking the hits for this other man, was furious and refused to speak to him ever again. In 1919, basically 20 years later, Carnegie and Frick were older men. Carnegie was on his deathbed. And though they lived only a few blocks apart from each other on the Upper East Side of New York City, they hadn't spoken in decades. Carnegie, not fully realizing what he had done to this man's life, to this man's legacy, sent him a note, trying to make up on his death bed. Frick wrote back a simple message. "Please tell Mr. Carnegie I'll see him soon-- in hell, where we are both going."