I’ve just finished reading Meet You In Hell, a biography of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. It’s a great book, and I recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in the history of the Gilded Age.
Most of the book is dedicated to the Battle of Homestead, which is perhaps the bloodiest episode in American labor history. And it’s a great read full of drama, rich characters, and well, a boatload of violence. It’s amazing this sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Not because I think labor conditions are so bad, but because we live in a violent culture, yet we don’t have these sort of armed confrontations between labor and capital anymore.
But what fascinated me about the book was the study of its too central protagonists: Frick and Carnegie. Both were ruthless and not more than a little bit greedy. They were also both brilliant and driven men, who really were self-made men.
Carnegie tried to rationalize his darker side away. Everything he did was for the benefit of others, who he claimed to love so much. And then he felt so guilty of the millions he made, that he spent the last years of his life giving his fortune away, the standard of philanthropy which stands today. The Homestead workers probably would rather have gotten a higher wage than get the library, but whatever.
Frick, on the other hand, almost reveled in his dark side. He made no excuses. He was a ruthless man and he didn’t lose any sleep over the dozens of strikers who died by his orders. Which is remarkable in its own way, but in the end, I end up admiring Frick more for his unflinching honesty. He had no illusions that he was a ruthless, greedy man and he would crush anyone who cost him so much as a nickel.
Which is why, nearing death, when Carnegie tried to reconcile with his former partner and now bitter enemy, Frick refused to meet with Carnegie and make things right. He told the messenger:
“I’ll meet Carnegie in hell, where surely we both are going.”
They just don’t make them like that anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment