Titan: Henry Clay Frick

The billionaire’s impact on the steel industry is matched only by the museums that bear his name…

As the story goes, sitting in his mansion on New York’s Upper East Side, industrialist and entrepreneur Henry Clay Frick scanned the letter which had just been hand-delivered. Sent by his former business partner and friend, and fellow titan of the industrial age, Andrew Carnegie, the correspondence sent to the 69-year-old Frick was one of hindsight and regret with the specific goal of reconciliation. It spoke of the chance to make amends with one another before they reached the end of their lives. It was genuine, sincere and a legitimate attempt to end the enmities that had existed between these two giants for years.
And Frick wasn’t interested. He was at the twilight of his life, and he could look back with enormous satisfaction on his career and empire. While Carnegie had been an important ally, Frick had proved the more courageous of the two, and, some could argue, the better man of business. Despite his relatively humble origins, and dropping out of college, he became a millionaire by the age of 30. According to Forbes, in 1918, the year before he died, his net worth was equivalent to about US$4 billion (in today’s dollars). His impact on the birth and growth of the modern American industrial complex cannot be understated.
Having started his career as a salesman, he went on to become chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, and played a major role in the formation of the giant U.S. Steel manufacturing concern. He invested in railroads, utilities, mining, banking, and manufacturing, and owned property in and around Pittsburgh, as well as in Massachusetts and Indiana. His neoclassical mansion in New York City — one of a few he built over his lifetime — became The Frick Collection museum, home to one of the finest collections of European paintings, and Old Masters in particular, in the U.S..
Frick was born in 1849 to a Mennonite family living in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. He set to work at a young age, including time spent as a sales clerk, and overseeing the bookkeeping for his family’s distilling business, which produced Old Overholt, said to be America’s oldest continually-maintained brand of whiskey. While his future wasn’t to be spent in alcohol production, his dazzling skills in accounting and efficient management were the cornerstones on which his fortune would one day be built. He happened to be living in the centre of what was becoming a major economic powerhouse, the seams of high-quality bituminous coal that existed around the nearby town of Connellsville.
Unlike other forms of coal, the kind in Frick’s region was especially well-suited to coking, the creation of a carbon derivative, coke, that is integral in the creation of steel. In 1871, Frick and a cousin decided to seize their opportunity, and with some family money purchased low-priced coking fields and built fifty coke ovens. When the economic troubles of 1873 arrived, the duo used the chaos to grow their holdings even further, and at a discount. By the end of the company’s first decade, Frick’s company operated over a thousand coke ovens and produced roughly eighty percent of the coke being used in Pittsburgh to create the steel and iron that was transforming the nation from coast to coast.
After his marriage to Adelaide Howard Childs in 1881, the young couple travelled to New York City for their honeymoon. It was in New York that Frick got to know fellow industrialist Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel titan. The partnership between the two men wouldn’t just make them enormously wealthy, it would transform America itself into a behemoth of manufacturing, transportation and economic growth.
It was a partnership of obvious synergy, as the mills churning out Carnegie’s expanding steel empire were in constant need of the coke supplies that Frick had almost monopolised in western Pennsylvania. Formalised in May 1882 with the joint partnership of H.C. Frick Coke Company and Carnegie Brothers and Co., Ltd., it became an integrated steel business that would make both men amongst the richest in the world. Over the next few years, Frick impressed his partner with his business mind, acuity for efficient production, and his ability to limit costs and thus increase profits.
By 1887, Carnegie decided to bring Frick directly into the steel business by selling him a two percent interest in Carnegie Brothers and Co. Frick had proven himself absolutely invaluable to his partner.
As Carnegie consolidated his companies, Frick would become instrumental in the successful reorganisation. Carnegie would go on to discover that there was only one man for the job of overseeing such a vast empire. Despite some tensions between the two over the years, and with Carnegie eager to step back from some of the more tedious aspects of overseeing a steel empire, he sent Frick a request. Carnegie trusted Frick’s business acumen implicitly, and requested that Frick become chairman of Carnegie Brothers & Co. in 1889. “Take supreme care of that head of yours. It is wanted,” Carnegie wrote to him. “Again, expressing my thankfulness that I have found THE MAN.”
Carnegie was a ruthless businessman,but he was also keenly aware of how his public image would affect not only himself but his empire. He knew that he and his wealthy peers were being referred to disparagingly as robber barons by the public at large, and were often blamed for society’s woes, economic or otherwise. Perhaps nowhere could the tension between those getting enormously wealthy and the general pubic be more vividly on display than at the mills of Carnegie Steel.
While the pro-union movement grew and gained strength in the latter stages of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie made a point of publicly supporting labour, unions and the improvement of pay and conditions for workers. He wrote profusely in favour of the workers’ goals, and put on an impressive façade of sympathy for the enormous numbers of workers who toiled for his company. But he also knew that increased wages and costs meant decreased profits, and therefore, despite his public proclamations, his workers were strongly discouraged from unionising.
Fortunately for Carnegie, he seemingly had the perfect man for the job once again, Henry Clay Frick. Already well-known for his fiery temperament, strong anti-union beliefs and a willingness to stand up for both his beliefs and his profits, Frick was entrusted to oversee the labour issues occurring at the company’s Homestead mill. Carnegie essentially used Frick to do his dirty work where suppressing the unions was concerned. Frick essentially became the scapegoat for actions that Carnegie was loathe to declare his support for. And Frick’s public image suffered to the extent that he became the target of an attempted assassination by an anarchist during the Homestead strike. Frick survived the point blank shot and stabbing, and in an example of his iron will, courage and indomitable nature, cabled both his mother and Carnegie with the same message: “Was shot twice, but not dangerously.”
Needless to say, the relationship between the two men had reached an irreparable phase. Rumors abounded that Carnegie was blaming Frick for everything from the Homestead mill strike, which turned violent, to simple business operations decisions. It reached such a fevered state that Frick eventually had to interrupt a company board meeting to exclaim, “Why was he not manly enough to say to my face what he said behind my back? I have stood a great many insults from Mr. Carnegie in the past, but I will submit to no further insults in the future.”
Eventually conflicts between the two would lead to Carnegie demanding Frick’s resignation from the board of Carnegie Steel in 1899. He also demanded that Frick relinquish his shares at book value. Frick took Carnegie to court over the value of his interests. An agreement was finally reached that did make Frick’s shares, and therefore Frick, worth an even greater fortune, but it was the end. The two great men, Frick and Carnegie, never met again.
Frick continued successfully, forming the St. Clair Steel Company, a division of which operated the largest coke works in the nation. Then in 1901 Andrew Carnegie sold his remaining interest in Carnegie Steel to financier J.P. Morgan. Morgan in turn created U.S. Steel, and in an ironic twist that certainly must have made Frick smile and Carnegie displeased, Frick was asked to serve as a director and become a member of the powerful finance committee. US Steel was larger than any company Carnegie had ever run — it was the largest corporation in the word, in fact.
The rivalry was never truly settled. Frick made sure that his mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan would make Carnegie’s own mansion nearby seem pedestrian at best, and continued assembling his unparalleled art collection, featuring works by the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer. He also bought a parcel of land in Pittsburgh next to Carnegie’s office building, and designed a skyscraper on it specifically so it would cast a perpetual shadow on his rival’s building. That two men who had worked together, in one of America’s most effective and profitable business partnerships, were now so far divided by their complicated history gives us insight into Frick’s delicate balance between administrative genius and ruthless entrepreneurial drive. He was equal parts brilliant and brash, and a chief executive of almost unmatched abilities.
Establishing his philanthropic legacy, he gave generously to the cities of New York and Pittsburgh, where he had lived, and upon his death, approximately US$117 million of his fortune — about US$1.8 billion in today’s dollars — was designated for philanthropic and charitable causes. He bequeathed 151 acres of undeveloped land to the City of Pittsburgh for use as a public park, together with a US$2 million trust fund to assist with the maintenance of the park, which was opened as Frick Park in 1927, and over the years land has been added, and the park is now Pittsburgh’s largest historic regional park, covering 644 acres. More than 60 years later, following the death of his daughter Helen Clay Frick, Clayton, his gentlemanly estate in Pittsburgh, opened to the public as as part of the Frick Art & Historical Center (known today as The Frick Pittsburgh).
So while Frick, holding that letter from Carnegie in his hands, to which he responded, essentially, “See you in hell” — might have been right in proclaiming their next meeting would take place in the afterlife, perhaps he got the location wrong. To be sure, Frick has left an incontrovertible impact not only on the modern industrial nation he helped build, but on the cities and communities in which he lived. So after all of the bitterness, Carnegie ended up being right after all. In the world of business titans, Henry Clay Frick was THE MAN. ■