HENRY CLAY FRICK

Henry Clay Frick, the grandson of a wealthy businessman, was born in Pennsylvania
in 1849. At nineteen Frick started work as a bookkeeper with his grandfather's
company. With the help of family money, Frick began buying coal mines. This was a
highly successful venture and he eventually controlled 80 per cent of the coal output
of Pennsylvania.

One of Frick's best customers was Andrew Carnegie, the owner of a large steel
company. The two men became business partners. Carnegie purchased a controlling
interest in the Frick Coke Company and Frick obtained 11 per cent of the Carnegie
Steel Company.

Although Carnegie remained the largest shareholder in the company, he retired from
active management in 1889. Frick now became chairman of the Carnegie Company.
At the time, the firm consisted of various mills and furnaces in the Pittsburgh area.
Frick was concerned that there was no centralized management structure and so in
1892 all productive units were integrated to form the Carnegie Steel Company.
Valued at $25 million it was now the largest steel company in the world.

In an effort to increase profits, Frick decided to lower the piecework wage rate of his
employees. In 1892 the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers Union called out its
members at the Carnegie Steel's Homestead plant. Frick now took the controversial
decision to employ 300 strikebreakers from outside the area. Organized by the
Pinkerton Detective Agency the men were brought in on armed barges down the
Monongahela River. The strikers were waiting for them and a day long battle took
place. Seven Pinkerton agents and nine workers were killed before the governor
obtained order by placing Homestead under martial law.

Frick was criticized for causing the violence at Homestead by importing

strikebreakers. One man, Alexander Berkman, the companion of Emma Goldman,
attempted to assassinate Frick. After gaining entry into his office, Berkman shot Frick
three times and stabbed him twice. However, Frick survived the attack and made a
full-recovery.

The Carnegie Steel Company continued to expand and between 1889 and 1899
annual production of steel rose from 332,111 to 2,663,412 tons, and profits increased
from $2 million to $40 million. There was growing conflict between Frick and
Andrew Carnegie during this period. This came to a head in 1899 and Carnegie
bought out Frick for $15 million.

Henry Clay Frick worked as a director of several large companies until his death in
1919. He left a fortune of nearly $50,000,000 and five-sixths of it was donated to
charitable organizations. This included bequeathing $15,000,000 and his mansion in
Fifth Avenue, New York, to establish the Frick Art Museum.
 HENRY CLAY FRICK

(1849-1919), industrialist and art collector. Born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the
son of an impecunious farmer, Clay was determined to escape the poverty of his unambitious
father and sought to emulate his maternal grandfather, Abraham Overholt, a successful
whiskey distiller and the wealthiest man in the county. Nor did Frick have far to look to find
a source for the wealth he desperately wanted, for under the thin topsoil of this region lay
thousands of acres of soft coal, ideally suited for making coke, an essential ingredient in the
production of Bessemer steel.

After a few years of schooling, Frick became a grocery clerk and then a bookkeeper in his
grandfather's distillery. Every penny he could save or borrow was invested in the purchase of
land and the building of coke ovens. Taking advantage of low prices during the 1870s
depression and with the financial backing of Thomas Mellon, Frick by 1880 had emerged as
the Coke King of Pennsylvania.

He had also attracted the attention of Andrew Carnegie, the acknowledged Steel King of
America. On a wedding trip to New York in 1881, Frick and his bride, Adelaide Childs, met
Carnegie at a dinner. Carnegie surprised the guests by proposing a partnership with Frick,
which the latter quickly accepted. From that moment, the two men's destinies were joined,
and both were to profit immensely from the union. Carnegie gained control of the coke his
steel mills needed and in Frick found the able general manager of operations he had long
sought. Frick, in turn, now had a partnership in Carnegie Steel and the capital he needed for
further expansion.

Both shared the same views in building an industrial empire: cut costs and reinvest profits in
plant expansion rather than pay out big dividends. Frick proved to be even more daring than
Carnegie in seeking vertical integration. It was he who persuaded his reluctant senior partner
to seize an opportunity to lease the rich Mesabi iron range lands owned by John D.
Rockefeller.

In temperament, however, the two men were polar opposites. Frick was as taciturn and
antisocial as Carnegie was voluble and gregarious. Frick scorned Carnegie's frequent
pronouncements on the rights of labor and the social responsibility of wealth as foolish, if not
hypocritical. A break between the two was inevitable.
It began with the Homestead strike of 1892. Although Frick was simply carrying out
Carnegie's instructions to break the union at that plant, Carnegie never forgave him for the
bloodshed that resulted when Pinkerton strikebreakers were brought in. Carnegie tried to shift
the blame for the massacre onto Frick, but the latter won public sympathy by being nearly
assassinated by the anarchist Alexander Berkman.

The final break occurred in 1900 when Frick sought to end the special pricing agreement
between Carnegie Steel and the Frick Coke Company. In retaliation, Carnegie demanded that
Frick sell his 11 percent interest in Carnegie Steel at its grossly undervalued book value.
Frick fought back and won. He kept his steel stock, and when Carnegie the following year
sold out to a syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan, Frick played a prominent role as director of
the newly created United States Steel Corporation.

Although generally regarded as a tough entrepreneur whose only interest was in business,
Frick was far more complex than most associates realized. Within his family he was warm
and affectionate, and in his avid collecting of European art, he expressed a surprising
appreciation for aesthetic values. He left to the American people one of the country's finest
art collections, housed in his mansion on Fifth Avenue and richly endowed for its
maintenance.

George Harvey, Henry Clay Frick: The Man (1936); Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie
(1989).