The King of Coke
Henry Clay Frick was born to parents of Swiss-German descent in 1849, in west Pennsylvania coal country. He displayed an impressive business acumen from a young age, serving as an accountant in one of his grandfather’s distilleries, and by the time he was a young man had vowed to die a rich one.
The clear-eyed Frick had little taste for farming or wine and set his sights instead on the future. Pennsylvania in the years of the mid-19th century was a national center of the burgeoning steel industry. Steel, which is really a tougher alloy of iron, had existed for centuries, but its production had never been profitable, until the introduction of the Bessemer converter by its titular inventor in the mid-1850s. By forcing air through molten iron, Bessemer’s ‘beehive’ furnaces removed impurities at a rate fast enough to make the production of steel not only profitable, but fantastically so.
Also critical to this process was ‘coke’, a type of dense, hard coal which, when introduced to the furnace and mingled with the iron, helps to draw off the impurities and create an especially hardy final product. The greater part of the nation’s coke fields was situated here, in western Pennsylvania.
A new age had dawned, and the young Frick saw it.
When, with the assistance of a few cousins, he entered the coke business not long after his twentieth birthday, he was a short man (hardly over five-foot three), but wiry and strong. He was generally considered handsome, with a thick black beard and sharp granite eyes that impressed many a contemporary with their strength.
By thirty-five he had secured a near-monopoly over the coke business, made himself a millionaire, and picked up the grand and well-deserved sobriquet ‘the King of Coke’.
It was a comfortable existence, but Frick was ambitious, and saw no reason to content himself when he did not have to.
And in 1881, he met Andrew Carnegie.
Each of the two men saw an imperfect reflection of himself in the other. They were both of recent European extraction (though Frick was native-born), and Carnegie was still given to regular visits to his Scottish homeland. They were both ‘self-made’ men, as much as one could be at the time, who’d started with a handful of thousands and turned them into millions. They both had the sort of drive that characterized the day’s ‘captains of industry’. And they needed each other.
Carnegie was looking to expand into steel from his start in railroads and telegraph lines. But to make steel, he needed coke, and that was Frick’s domain.
The amicable Scot did most of the talking, but by the end Frick was convinced, and the two men entered into a fateful partnership, with each becoming part-holder of the other’s firm. Soon enough, Frick’s sharp mind, knack for accounting, and blunt-nosed style prevailed upon Carnegie, who made him chairman of Carnegie Steel.
Frick proved an able chairman, but sometimes a crude and autocratic one. He had little time for nonsense or dithering, whether it came from business partners, business rivals, or his own workmen.
Under this duumvirate, Carnegie Steel and Frick Coke piled up the gold, and this was in no small part thanks to Frick’s ability as chief manager of the companies.
Then came Homestead.
Homestead was a little town in western Pennsylvania, situated along the Monongahela River. In 1883, Carnegie bought out the local steel works, which the town depended upon for sustenance.
The life of a 19th century steelworker was no easy one. Men worked twelve-hour shifts in hideous heat, pouring and stirring molten steel that left few men unburned by the time they retired (if they ever did). Every laborer knew at least one horror story of a man who’d tripped or stumbled, and fallen headlong into a pit of bubbling metal, never to be seen again. Many Americans would not do such grueling work, and it often fell to foreign-born migrants, Poles, Italians, and especially Hungarians (which gave ‘alien’ laborers the general nickname ‘hunkies’), for whom even such conditions were preferable to the grinding poverty they’d left behind in Europe.
It was little different at the Homestead factory, save for one thing: Carnegie had earlier negotiated an agreement with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers, allowing them exclusive representation of the mill’s workers, and input when it came to the setting of annual wage scales. The work was still grueling, to be sure, but it was that much better than at many non-union mills.
Things chugged along until the summer of 1892, when Carnegie and Frick, in the face of falling profits, decided wages had to fall along with them.
Naturally, the workers did not take this kindly.
When negotiations with Frick, who was administering the plant while Carnegie was away in Scotland, foundered, the workers walked off the job.
Months earlier, sure that such an action was coming, Frick had commissioned the construction of a ‘great wall’ around the property boundaries of the factory, complete with watchtowers and barbed wire. The precautions were meant to keep striking workers from interfering with the factory’s operation.
Now, indeed, the angry workers surrounded ‘Fort Frick’, demanding he and Carnegie come back to the table, and keeping a sharp eye out for the scab labor they were sure was incoming.
As it turned out, Frick did not call in scab labor—at least not yet. He called in the Pinkertons.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency was a private organization—whence comes the term ‘private eye’, from their calling cards, which depicted a disembodied eyeball gazing at the viewer—that had made its name providing intelligence to President Lincoln and his generals in the dark days of the civil war. But ever since then, they had built a reputation for less savory work—union busting.
When the local sheriff failed to disperse the workers, now armed and surrounding the mill, as well as garrisoning the roads out of town to prevent interference, Frick hired 300 Pinkertons and associated toughs to take care of the matter and open the way for non-union labor to pick up the strikers’ slack.
They arrived on a barge from Pittsburgh on 6 July, armed with Winchesters and pistols, and attempted to force their way onto the company dock. There, a mass of thousands of workers, similarly equipped, was waiting. In a last-ditch attempt to avert bloodshed, Hugh O’Donnell, head of the strike committee, begged the Pinkertons not to come ashore, warning he would not be responsible for their lives if they did. The Pinkertons’ commander replied that if the workers did not lay down their arms and clear the way immediately, he would ‘mow every one of you down’.
In the ensuing gun battle, which lasted for hours, ten men died; seven strikers and three Pinkertons.
The hired guns ultimately surrendered, were hauled onto the shore, and imprisoned, and the workers luxuriated in their great victory over what they regarded as little less than an invading army.
Then Frick was nearly assassinated.
On 26 July, not two weeks after the bloodshed at Homestead, a Russian Jew and anarchist named Alexander Berkman attempted to gun down Frick in his Pittsburgh offices. When the bullets failed to kill him outright, Berkman drew a blade and attempted to run his quarry through. But the King of Coke wrestled him to the ground and, with the help of others present, disarmed him.
A policeman arrived, armed, and seeming ready to shoot Berkman on the spot. Frick, still bleeding demanded that he be ‘left to the law’, but that his head be raised, so Frick could ‘see his face’.
The assassination attempt greatly reduced sympathy for the strikers at Homestead, though there was no connection between the rather neurotic anarchist and his girlfriend Emma Goldman on the one hand, and the men at the mill on the other.
It had the dual effect of raising sympathy for the company and Frick, of whom the Pittsburgh Post said: ‘you may say what you like about Frick, he is a brave man.’
For Carnegie’s part, he at least claimed a deep regret over the events at Homestead, lamenting that things might have gone differently had he been there.
That irked Frick, who, despite—or perhaps because of—his brush with death, plainly denied he had any regrets. It was not that he enjoyed bloodshed, he assured. But the factory was company property. The workers could quit if they so desired, but they had no lawful right to prevent the company disposing of its property as it saw fit. The Pinkertons had every lawful right to bring the plant back on line, even at gunpoint. It was tragic that men had died, certainly, but if the strikers had not been so stubborn, all ten lives would have been spared.
Homestead, and Frick’s refusal to apologize or acknowledge any fault on the part of Carnegie Steel did not endear him to most, despite the outpouring of sympathy after his near assassination. But as always, Frick was steadfast. He was a mighty personality and unlike Carnegie possessed of no pathological need to be loved by all. Even so, probably almost as many admired as hated him.
But the whole debacle opened a rift between Carnegie and Frick. Carnegie never outright tried to offload all of the blame onto Frick, but he never took any responsibility for himself, either and was fond of pointing out that he had been in Scotland while the tragedy unfolded.
Frick saw this as cowardice, and it annoyed and upset him. He was in large part responsible for what happened at Homestead, but as he saw it, so was Carnegie, and the difference between the two of them was that Frick had the resolve to own up to it.
The two men drifted apart over the next two years, but the culmination came with the events of the Red Summer.*
At the height of the fighting in Chicago, the ever sentimental and optimistic Carnegie cabled Frick from Scotland and said, ‘deeply disturbing hope not as bad as papers say’.
Frick, who was in nearby Pennsylvania and keeping abreast of the bloody news, cabled back simply and characteristically, ‘is’.
He saw the whole tragedy as a vindication of his heavy-handed approach of two years earlier. This, he maintained to friends and associates, was what happened when too much ground was ceded to ‘radicals and revolutionists’. If George Pullman had mustered the conviction to force the strikers from his works early in the development of the situation, thousands would still be alive.
And now, in the heady atmosphere that followed those days, he had an audience.
It is not known when Frick decided to enter into politics, though it was probably at the behest—at least in part—of longtime friend and partner Andrew Mellon.
A popular but probably apocryphal story has Frick, Mellon, Frick’s wife Adelaide, and a few friends sitting about in the salon of a Pittsburgh townhouse, with Frick ranting against the incompetence of Cleveland that had allowed the strike to balloon into all-out rebellion. He opined that he could ‘do ten times better’, upon which Adelaide is supposed to have said, ‘well, say, Henry. Why don’t you?’ When Frick laughed it off, Mellon interjected and agreed with Adelaidel ‘Why don’t you, Henry?’.
In 1895, he decided he was going to run for Governor of Pennsylvania the following year. Mellon supported him, as did Phipps, another critical member of the Carnegie clique.
Carnegie himself was aghast. He claimed it was because he dreaded to lose Frick as his right hand—but Frick suspected, perhaps with cause, that Carnegie was simply determined to keep them hitched together, lest an independent Frick prove his better.
Frick was determined. Carnegie gave him an ultimatum: drop this political dream or be expelled from the company’s board and lose his shares.
It was something that could be done. When Carnegie Steel had been formed years earlier, Carnegie had included a clause in its founding contract which allowed three-fourths of the board to oust in a vote any given member and force him to sell the shares he held. It had been introduced just for situations like this, so that if needed, Carnegie could easily rid himself of troublesome partners.
He had never imagined it might be used against him.
But used against him it was.
Frick deftly outmaneuvered his former friend and partner. He had already won to his side Mellon and Phipps, and the three men got to work on the rest of the board.
Carnegie set a date, 5 July, 1895, for a convocation of the shareholders at which he intended to make one last heartfelt plea to Frick, and if he continued on this course, to be rid of him.
Much to his shock, the board instead met three days early, and a stunned Carnegie looked on helplessly as Frick and his allies voted him out of his own company.
He was left out in the cold, with a few million dollars’ worth of his shares as consolation, worth far less than the actual market value of the stock he’d owned, thanks to his own distaste for regular recapitalization.
Of course, Carnegie was still vastly richer than most Americans, but he felt as if he was the victim of highway robbery, and he would never forget it.
So, as the Pittsburgh Post would put it, Frick was now ‘ruler of a dual monarchy’. He was ‘the King of Coke and the Sultan of Steel’.
And now he went on the warpath.
It was easy enough to cinch the Republican nomination for governor. He was already a household name, even if that name was often spoken in less than glowing tones. His denunciations, often printed in the Post, of ‘red radicals’ made him popular with conservative elements in the party, and even some among the Democrats. Conscious of the growing influence of the SLP among laborers in west Pennsylvania, Frick promised to 'curb the influence of alien subversives on honest workingmen'. The campaign advertisements he took out in Pittsburgh's papers read, 'Frick for fairness and order'.
He outspent Robert Pattison, the Democratic nominee, by nearly 3:1. Ironically, he was aided by the foul taste the Democrats had left in the mouths of many after Cleveland’s suppression of the rising. Many of the Democrats’ constituents stayed home, particularly working-class voters, but there was little effect on the Republican electorate.
Frick was elected twenty-first governor of Pennsylvania in November 1896, just as McKinley ascended to the white house.
At his victory speech, he was naturally compelled to extoll the President Elect, who was of course a member of his own party. But he set the tone for the next thirty years of his political career when he tempered that endorsement of McKinley with a warning that both parties were ‘dangerously blind’.
“It does no good,” Frick said, “mumbling about silverites or goldbugs, or indeed about foreign wars, when America sits upon a volcano of anarchy”. Red ’94, he said, “has ripped the mask from these gruesome radicals. Unless you wish to see Chicago recreated in every city across the land, you must understand that first and foremost, this alien menace must be extirpated—the life of the Republic depends upon it. Then can we talk about sound money and tariffs all we like.”
The King of Coke and the Sultan of Steel had climbed another rung.
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*pretty much all as OTL up to this point
The clear-eyed Frick had little taste for farming or wine and set his sights instead on the future. Pennsylvania in the years of the mid-19th century was a national center of the burgeoning steel industry. Steel, which is really a tougher alloy of iron, had existed for centuries, but its production had never been profitable, until the introduction of the Bessemer converter by its titular inventor in the mid-1850s. By forcing air through molten iron, Bessemer’s ‘beehive’ furnaces removed impurities at a rate fast enough to make the production of steel not only profitable, but fantastically so.
Also critical to this process was ‘coke’, a type of dense, hard coal which, when introduced to the furnace and mingled with the iron, helps to draw off the impurities and create an especially hardy final product. The greater part of the nation’s coke fields was situated here, in western Pennsylvania.
A new age had dawned, and the young Frick saw it.
When, with the assistance of a few cousins, he entered the coke business not long after his twentieth birthday, he was a short man (hardly over five-foot three), but wiry and strong. He was generally considered handsome, with a thick black beard and sharp granite eyes that impressed many a contemporary with their strength.
By thirty-five he had secured a near-monopoly over the coke business, made himself a millionaire, and picked up the grand and well-deserved sobriquet ‘the King of Coke’.
It was a comfortable existence, but Frick was ambitious, and saw no reason to content himself when he did not have to.
And in 1881, he met Andrew Carnegie.
Each of the two men saw an imperfect reflection of himself in the other. They were both of recent European extraction (though Frick was native-born), and Carnegie was still given to regular visits to his Scottish homeland. They were both ‘self-made’ men, as much as one could be at the time, who’d started with a handful of thousands and turned them into millions. They both had the sort of drive that characterized the day’s ‘captains of industry’. And they needed each other.
Carnegie was looking to expand into steel from his start in railroads and telegraph lines. But to make steel, he needed coke, and that was Frick’s domain.
The amicable Scot did most of the talking, but by the end Frick was convinced, and the two men entered into a fateful partnership, with each becoming part-holder of the other’s firm. Soon enough, Frick’s sharp mind, knack for accounting, and blunt-nosed style prevailed upon Carnegie, who made him chairman of Carnegie Steel.
Frick proved an able chairman, but sometimes a crude and autocratic one. He had little time for nonsense or dithering, whether it came from business partners, business rivals, or his own workmen.
Under this duumvirate, Carnegie Steel and Frick Coke piled up the gold, and this was in no small part thanks to Frick’s ability as chief manager of the companies.
Then came Homestead.
Homestead was a little town in western Pennsylvania, situated along the Monongahela River. In 1883, Carnegie bought out the local steel works, which the town depended upon for sustenance.
The life of a 19th century steelworker was no easy one. Men worked twelve-hour shifts in hideous heat, pouring and stirring molten steel that left few men unburned by the time they retired (if they ever did). Every laborer knew at least one horror story of a man who’d tripped or stumbled, and fallen headlong into a pit of bubbling metal, never to be seen again. Many Americans would not do such grueling work, and it often fell to foreign-born migrants, Poles, Italians, and especially Hungarians (which gave ‘alien’ laborers the general nickname ‘hunkies’), for whom even such conditions were preferable to the grinding poverty they’d left behind in Europe.
It was little different at the Homestead factory, save for one thing: Carnegie had earlier negotiated an agreement with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers, allowing them exclusive representation of the mill’s workers, and input when it came to the setting of annual wage scales. The work was still grueling, to be sure, but it was that much better than at many non-union mills.
Things chugged along until the summer of 1892, when Carnegie and Frick, in the face of falling profits, decided wages had to fall along with them.
Naturally, the workers did not take this kindly.
When negotiations with Frick, who was administering the plant while Carnegie was away in Scotland, foundered, the workers walked off the job.
Months earlier, sure that such an action was coming, Frick had commissioned the construction of a ‘great wall’ around the property boundaries of the factory, complete with watchtowers and barbed wire. The precautions were meant to keep striking workers from interfering with the factory’s operation.
Now, indeed, the angry workers surrounded ‘Fort Frick’, demanding he and Carnegie come back to the table, and keeping a sharp eye out for the scab labor they were sure was incoming.
As it turned out, Frick did not call in scab labor—at least not yet. He called in the Pinkertons.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency was a private organization—whence comes the term ‘private eye’, from their calling cards, which depicted a disembodied eyeball gazing at the viewer—that had made its name providing intelligence to President Lincoln and his generals in the dark days of the civil war. But ever since then, they had built a reputation for less savory work—union busting.
When the local sheriff failed to disperse the workers, now armed and surrounding the mill, as well as garrisoning the roads out of town to prevent interference, Frick hired 300 Pinkertons and associated toughs to take care of the matter and open the way for non-union labor to pick up the strikers’ slack.
They arrived on a barge from Pittsburgh on 6 July, armed with Winchesters and pistols, and attempted to force their way onto the company dock. There, a mass of thousands of workers, similarly equipped, was waiting. In a last-ditch attempt to avert bloodshed, Hugh O’Donnell, head of the strike committee, begged the Pinkertons not to come ashore, warning he would not be responsible for their lives if they did. The Pinkertons’ commander replied that if the workers did not lay down their arms and clear the way immediately, he would ‘mow every one of you down’.
In the ensuing gun battle, which lasted for hours, ten men died; seven strikers and three Pinkertons.
The hired guns ultimately surrendered, were hauled onto the shore, and imprisoned, and the workers luxuriated in their great victory over what they regarded as little less than an invading army.
Then Frick was nearly assassinated.
On 26 July, not two weeks after the bloodshed at Homestead, a Russian Jew and anarchist named Alexander Berkman attempted to gun down Frick in his Pittsburgh offices. When the bullets failed to kill him outright, Berkman drew a blade and attempted to run his quarry through. But the King of Coke wrestled him to the ground and, with the help of others present, disarmed him.
A policeman arrived, armed, and seeming ready to shoot Berkman on the spot. Frick, still bleeding demanded that he be ‘left to the law’, but that his head be raised, so Frick could ‘see his face’.
The assassination attempt greatly reduced sympathy for the strikers at Homestead, though there was no connection between the rather neurotic anarchist and his girlfriend Emma Goldman on the one hand, and the men at the mill on the other.
It had the dual effect of raising sympathy for the company and Frick, of whom the Pittsburgh Post said: ‘you may say what you like about Frick, he is a brave man.’
For Carnegie’s part, he at least claimed a deep regret over the events at Homestead, lamenting that things might have gone differently had he been there.
That irked Frick, who, despite—or perhaps because of—his brush with death, plainly denied he had any regrets. It was not that he enjoyed bloodshed, he assured. But the factory was company property. The workers could quit if they so desired, but they had no lawful right to prevent the company disposing of its property as it saw fit. The Pinkertons had every lawful right to bring the plant back on line, even at gunpoint. It was tragic that men had died, certainly, but if the strikers had not been so stubborn, all ten lives would have been spared.
Homestead, and Frick’s refusal to apologize or acknowledge any fault on the part of Carnegie Steel did not endear him to most, despite the outpouring of sympathy after his near assassination. But as always, Frick was steadfast. He was a mighty personality and unlike Carnegie possessed of no pathological need to be loved by all. Even so, probably almost as many admired as hated him.
But the whole debacle opened a rift between Carnegie and Frick. Carnegie never outright tried to offload all of the blame onto Frick, but he never took any responsibility for himself, either and was fond of pointing out that he had been in Scotland while the tragedy unfolded.
Frick saw this as cowardice, and it annoyed and upset him. He was in large part responsible for what happened at Homestead, but as he saw it, so was Carnegie, and the difference between the two of them was that Frick had the resolve to own up to it.
The two men drifted apart over the next two years, but the culmination came with the events of the Red Summer.*
At the height of the fighting in Chicago, the ever sentimental and optimistic Carnegie cabled Frick from Scotland and said, ‘deeply disturbing hope not as bad as papers say’.
Frick, who was in nearby Pennsylvania and keeping abreast of the bloody news, cabled back simply and characteristically, ‘is’.
He saw the whole tragedy as a vindication of his heavy-handed approach of two years earlier. This, he maintained to friends and associates, was what happened when too much ground was ceded to ‘radicals and revolutionists’. If George Pullman had mustered the conviction to force the strikers from his works early in the development of the situation, thousands would still be alive.
And now, in the heady atmosphere that followed those days, he had an audience.
It is not known when Frick decided to enter into politics, though it was probably at the behest—at least in part—of longtime friend and partner Andrew Mellon.
A popular but probably apocryphal story has Frick, Mellon, Frick’s wife Adelaide, and a few friends sitting about in the salon of a Pittsburgh townhouse, with Frick ranting against the incompetence of Cleveland that had allowed the strike to balloon into all-out rebellion. He opined that he could ‘do ten times better’, upon which Adelaide is supposed to have said, ‘well, say, Henry. Why don’t you?’ When Frick laughed it off, Mellon interjected and agreed with Adelaidel ‘Why don’t you, Henry?’.
In 1895, he decided he was going to run for Governor of Pennsylvania the following year. Mellon supported him, as did Phipps, another critical member of the Carnegie clique.
Carnegie himself was aghast. He claimed it was because he dreaded to lose Frick as his right hand—but Frick suspected, perhaps with cause, that Carnegie was simply determined to keep them hitched together, lest an independent Frick prove his better.
Frick was determined. Carnegie gave him an ultimatum: drop this political dream or be expelled from the company’s board and lose his shares.
It was something that could be done. When Carnegie Steel had been formed years earlier, Carnegie had included a clause in its founding contract which allowed three-fourths of the board to oust in a vote any given member and force him to sell the shares he held. It had been introduced just for situations like this, so that if needed, Carnegie could easily rid himself of troublesome partners.
He had never imagined it might be used against him.
But used against him it was.
Frick deftly outmaneuvered his former friend and partner. He had already won to his side Mellon and Phipps, and the three men got to work on the rest of the board.
Carnegie set a date, 5 July, 1895, for a convocation of the shareholders at which he intended to make one last heartfelt plea to Frick, and if he continued on this course, to be rid of him.
Much to his shock, the board instead met three days early, and a stunned Carnegie looked on helplessly as Frick and his allies voted him out of his own company.
He was left out in the cold, with a few million dollars’ worth of his shares as consolation, worth far less than the actual market value of the stock he’d owned, thanks to his own distaste for regular recapitalization.
Of course, Carnegie was still vastly richer than most Americans, but he felt as if he was the victim of highway robbery, and he would never forget it.
So, as the Pittsburgh Post would put it, Frick was now ‘ruler of a dual monarchy’. He was ‘the King of Coke and the Sultan of Steel’.
And now he went on the warpath.
It was easy enough to cinch the Republican nomination for governor. He was already a household name, even if that name was often spoken in less than glowing tones. His denunciations, often printed in the Post, of ‘red radicals’ made him popular with conservative elements in the party, and even some among the Democrats. Conscious of the growing influence of the SLP among laborers in west Pennsylvania, Frick promised to 'curb the influence of alien subversives on honest workingmen'. The campaign advertisements he took out in Pittsburgh's papers read, 'Frick for fairness and order'.
He outspent Robert Pattison, the Democratic nominee, by nearly 3:1. Ironically, he was aided by the foul taste the Democrats had left in the mouths of many after Cleveland’s suppression of the rising. Many of the Democrats’ constituents stayed home, particularly working-class voters, but there was little effect on the Republican electorate.
Frick was elected twenty-first governor of Pennsylvania in November 1896, just as McKinley ascended to the white house.
At his victory speech, he was naturally compelled to extoll the President Elect, who was of course a member of his own party. But he set the tone for the next thirty years of his political career when he tempered that endorsement of McKinley with a warning that both parties were ‘dangerously blind’.
“It does no good,” Frick said, “mumbling about silverites or goldbugs, or indeed about foreign wars, when America sits upon a volcano of anarchy”. Red ’94, he said, “has ripped the mask from these gruesome radicals. Unless you wish to see Chicago recreated in every city across the land, you must understand that first and foremost, this alien menace must be extirpated—the life of the Republic depends upon it. Then can we talk about sound money and tariffs all we like.”
The King of Coke and the Sultan of Steel had climbed another rung.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*pretty much all as OTL up to this point
