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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good book? Yes. A Clash of Titans? Sort of., October 18, 2005
We live in a time where it's hard to comprehend the wealth, power, and influence wielded by men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Vanderbilt. Folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett carry only a whisper of the Goliath stature that was attained by a select few in the 1800s.
"Meet You in Hell" is Les Standiford's telling of the story of the rise and fall of a relationship between two such men, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Frick, the lesser known of the two, created an empire of his own in coke production (the steel-making input, not the soda or the drug) before being swallowed up by Carnegie Steel and agreeing to run that entire operation for Carnegie.
Carnegie was a man accustomed to getting his own way, but his new employee Frick possessed his own ideas on how a company should be run. The differences between the two surfaced occassionally early in their relationship, and were tested further by the Homestead Mill strike in 1890s which ended in the deaths of many strikers and Pinkerton detectives.
This conflict is the true focus of this book, but interestingly doesn't come across as the watershed in the relationship between Carnegie and Frick that Standiford really wants it to be for the sake of his book. That honor comes later, when Frick tries to trick Carnegie into selling his company to a secret group of speculators with a terrible reputation on Wall Street.
This book is still quite an interesting story about the Homestead strike, labor relations in the industrial age, and the realtionship between two titans of industry, but the stories don't mesh the way Standiford sets you up to believe they will. That doesn't hurt this book much - it's still well worth reading - but it's interesting that Standiford stuck with this central premise long after his research and even his own writing showed that it had fallen apart.
Flawed, but certainly not fatally so. Still recommended for its history of labor relations, the relationship between Carnegie and Frick, and the US steel industry. An engaging and informative read.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An enthrallng glimpse into the feud between 2 important figures in American industrial history, June 24, 2005
The dramatic centerpiece of Les Standiford's dual biography of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick is the bloody clash between striking steelworkers and imported Pinkerton "detectives" at Carnegie's Homestead, PA plant in early July of 1892. Fourteen people were killed in that battle, and many more injured.
Homestead may have been the signature event in the intertwined careers of Carnegie and Frick, but Standiford's book makes clear that it was not the reason that their close partnership turned to bitter enmity and mutual recrimination. Their breakup came seven or eight years later over a disagreement concerning a proposed sale of the giant Carnegie firm to outside investors whose credentials and intentions were suspect.
Thus, while Standiford's account of the week-long Homestead crisis is cinematically vivid, it does not by itself tell the whole story of the two men's lives. Both were born dirt poor (Carnegie in Scotland, Frick in western Pennsylvania) and rose through the industrial ranks through their own strong ambition and financial cunning. They joined forces only when they found they needed each other. Carnegie was the top man, Frick the on-site chief operating officer.
Carnegie at least publicly claimed to support working men and their right to organize, but Frick was an unapologetic anti-union hardliner. When Homestead exploded in gunfire and mob violence, Carnegie, vacationing back in Scotland, gave Frick full support for whatever means he adopted to suppress the strikers and keep the company sound. Only after it was all over and the dead had been counted did Carnegie express some mild criticism of Frick's tactics.
Standiford emphasizes the strong faith placed by both men in "social Darwinism," the idea that only companies willing to do whatever it took to survive would prosper in the industrial jungles. The welfare of the workforce made a nice topic for ceremonial speeches but was never high on their list of real priorities.
Both men also believed that the key to success in industry was strict control of costs rather than counting up profits or dividends. And after they became wealthy, both men sought to burnish their public images --- Carnegie by donating almost 3,000 community libraries and financing a host of other projects, Frick by amassing what is still regarded today as one of the great private art collections.
Standiford tells this complex tale in the style of a practiced writer (he has written ten novels and three other works of nonfiction). His research has been thorough, though his text is not without errors (Saugus, home of the earliest blast furnace in the United States, is in Massachusetts, not Michigan; Carnegie Hall was opened in 1891, not 1892). He does about as well as anyone could in trying to clarify the byzantine workings of high finance in the steel industry, a subject pretty much impossible to make interesting to non-millionaires.
Frick and Carnegie are present in Standiford's pages in all their personal complexity and baffling contradictions. There are also minor characters orbiting around them who are memorably portrayed, notably a union leader named Hugh O'Donnell who did his best to keep the militant steelworkers from erupting and tried vainly to find a way to head off the violence.
In the end, Frick was finally forced out of his high position in Carnegie's company and the two men ended their lives bitter enemies. Standiford's title is a paraphrase of a remark Frick made in the spring of 1919 in response to an offer of meeting and reconciliation from Carnegie: "Tell him I'll see him in hell, where we are both going." They died within weeks of each other that very year.
Standiford has done a good job of bringing before a new generation this classic love-hate story played out among smoky steel plants and lavish residential palaces. He has a tendency now and then to sermonize unnecessarily, but his basic story is both relevant and enthralling. The ghosts of his two protagonists, if they are still feuding in the hereafter, will at least find his book reasonably balanced and a valuable reminder of a crucial period in America's industrial history.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good yet perhaps not great story of foundry fathers, August 14, 2005
This is well-covered territory for any avid student of steel's history: the rise of two great pillars of the steel industry, the focal event based on the bloody Homestead strike, and the increasingly bitter demise in the relationship between Frick and Carnegie that followed. The two preceding Amazon reviews provide excellent insight as to the value of the book and the character of the men.
Homestead produced, in final count, thrity-one deaths. The original clash, in early July 1892, just outside of Pittsburgh, killed a small number of men. One Pinkerton guard brashly shot himself in the head in front of his colleagues stuck in the barge rather than fall into the hands of the strikers. Carnegie -- by most accounts -- felt betrayed by Frick's hard-nosed handling of the Homestead crisis. Carnegie insisted, especially after the deaths of Pinkerton "police" and strking workers -- that he would have just let the plant stay idle, wait the strikers out, and offer them no reason to fight. Carnegie wanted to be loved; he dreamed that a worker might even say, "If only you had been here, this would not have happended." Frick would not have any of this. He had firm, well-entrenced ideas not only about his rights as a capitalist, but also in his skills and obligations as Carnegie's chief operating officer.
The book does best at constrasting these two men. In some respects they were very much alike. "Ruthless" is not too harsh a word to describe the manner in which they cut costs, built their networks of industries, and squeezed out minor players. They were the masters of the dominant network of the day, based on steel and rail. As entrepreneurs Carnegie may still have not found an equal, not even in Bill Gates, although there are some parallels in the lives and methods of the two men. Frick comes across more as the master implementer, less of the visionary that Carnegie appears to have been. Frick, tied most closely to the production of coke, was a little further down the industrial stream.
The final conflict was more of a clash of egoes, with both men realizing that their personal fortunes lie with a schism. When Frick did not get his way in the split of the wealth, after thinking he had Carnegie's commitment, he was never going to forgive Carnegie for stepping back from the deal. Carnegie, on the other hand, felt Frick tried to front for some unscrupulous buyers and, despite Carnegie's own ruthless tactics, found Frick's friends to be unsavory. Such a divide between two such men was perhaps inevitable.
The research is rich; the book is full of details. What it lacks, in this reviewer's mind, is the full color of the story, of the poverty and squalor of the working men, just as much the ricj splendor of the wealthy. The story moves quickly across the lives of the men as well as the birth of the industries that they helped to create. There are three stories here -- Carnegie, Frick, and Homestead -- requiring perhaps more than any one book can provide.
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