Henry Clay Frick

Henry Clay Frick

Henry Clay Frick (December 19 1849 – December 2 1919) was an American industrialist and art patron.

Early years

Frick was born in West Overton, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, USA and came from a working-class family. At 21, Frick joined two cousins and a friend in a small partnership, using a beehive oven to turn coal into coke, for use in steel manufacturing.

By 1880, Frick bought out the partnership. The company was renamed "H. C. Frick & Company", and employed 1,000 workers.

Frick and Andrew Carnegie

Shortly after marrying his wife in 1881, Frick met Andrew Carnegie in New York City. This meeting resulted in a partnership between H. C. Frick & Company and Carnegie Steel Company, and was the predecessor to United States Steel. This partnership ensured that Carnegie's steel mills had adequate supplies of coke. Frick became chairman of the company.

The Johnstown Flood

Frick, at the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Ruff, formed the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club high above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The sixty-odd Club members were the leading business tycoons of Western Pennsylvania and included among their number Frick’s best friend, Andrew Mellon, his attorneys Philander Knox and James Hay Reed, as well as Frick's sometime business partner Andrew Carnegie. The Club members created what was at that time the world's largest earthen dam behind which formed a private lake called Lake Conemaugh. Poor maintenance, unusually high snowmelt and heavy spring rains combined to cause the dam to give way on May 31, 1889 resulting in the Johnstown Flood. When word of the dam's failure was telegraphed to Pittsburgh, Frick and other members of the Club gathered to form the Pittsburgh Relief Committee for tangible assistance to the flood victims as well as determining to never speak publicly about the Club or the Flood. This strategy was a success, and Knox and Reed were able to fend off all lawsuits that would have placed blame upon the Club’s members.

Homestead strike

Frick and Carnegie's partnership came to an end over actions taken in response to the Homestead Steel Strike, an 1892 labor strike at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. At Homestead, striking workers had locked the company out of the factory and surrounded it with pickets, some of whom were armed. Frick was known for his anti-union policy and as negotiations were still taking place he ordered the construction of a solid board fence topped with barbed wire around mill property. The workers dubbed the newly fortified mill "Fort Frick." With the mill ringed by striking workers, Pinkerton agents planned to access the plant grounds from the river. Three hundred Pinkerton detectives assembled on the Davis Island Dam on the Ohio River about five miles below Pittsburgh at 10:30 p.m. on the night of July 5, 1892. They were given Winchester rifles, placed on two specially-equipped barges and towed upriver with the object of removing the workers by force. Upon landing, the resulting confrontation resulted in a large melee between workers and Pinkerton detectives. Several men were killed, and the riot was ultimately quelled only by the intervention of 8,000 armed state militia. Among working-class Americans, Frick's actions against the strikers were condemned as excessive, and he soon became a target of radical anarchists and others seeking to use the incident to foment labor unrest and even class warfare.

Assassination attempt

Russian-born anarchist Alexander Berkman plotted to kill Frick in revenge for the seven steelworkers killed by the Pinkerton detectives hired by Frick to disperse the locked-out workers and allow in their replacements. On July 23 1892, Berkman, armed with a revolver and a sharpened steel file, entered Frick's office in downtown Pittsburgh.

Frick, realizing what was happening, attempted to rise from his chair while Berkman pulled a revolver and fired at nearly point-blank range. The bullet hit Frick in the left earlobe, penetrated his neck near the base of the skull, and lodged in his back. The impact hurled Frick off his feet, and Berkman fired again, again striking Frick in the neck and causing him to bleed profusely. John George Alexander Leishman, Frick's assistant and later chairman of Carnegie Steel, who happened to be in Frick’s office, then grabbed Berkman’s arm and deflected a third shot.

Although seriously wounded, Frick rose and tackled his assailant. All three men crashed to the floor, where Berkman managed to stab Frick four times in the leg with the pointed steel file before finally being subdued by other employees, who had rushed into the office. For more than two hours doctors probed for the bullets; Frick reportedly refused anesthesia so he could help guide their efforts. As the police entered the room, guns drawn, Frick reportedly yelled, "Don't shoot! Don't kill him! The law will punish him."

Frick was back at work in a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman's actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. He eventually served a total of fourteen years, and under pressure from supporters in the labor movement, was pardoned in 1906.

Negative publicity resulting from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.

Private life

Eagle Rock in 1913

In 1881, Frick married Adelaide Childs of Pittsburgh. In 1882, after the formation of the partnership with Andrew Carnegie, Frick and his wife bought Clayton, an estate in Pittsburgh. They moved in 1883. The Frick children, Childs, Martha and Helen, were born in Pittsburgh and were raised at Clayton. In 1904, he built Eagle Rock, a summer estate at Prides Crossing in Beverly, Massachusetts on Boston's fashionable North Shore, although the 104 room mansion designed by Little & Browne would be razed in 1969.

Frick was an avid art collector whose wealth allowed him to accumulate a significant art collection. By 1905, Henry Clay Frick's business, social, and artistic interests had shifted from Pittsburgh to New York. He took his art collection with him to New York. In 1910 Frick purchased property at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street to construct a mansion, now known as The Frick Collection. Built to a massive size and covering a full city block Frick told friends he was building it to "make Carnegie's place look like a miner's shack."

To this day, the Frick Collection is home to one of the finest collections of European paintings in the United States. It contains many works of art dating from the pre-Renaissance up to the post-Impressionist eras. In addition to paintings, it also contains a beautiful exhibition of carpets, porcelain, sculptures, and fine furniture; and is a wonderful example of design and architecture. Frick continued to live at both his New York mansion and at Clayton until his death.

Henry Clay Frick died of heart damage from an undiagnosed case of syphilis weeks before his 70th birthday. He was buried in Pittsburgh's Homewood Cemetery. That evening, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were attending a farewell banquet in Chicago, their last whirlwind tour before being expelled from the country by federal authorities. At a dinner given in honor of the anarchist movement, a reporter approached Alexander Berkman with news of Frick's death and asked him what he had to say about the man. Referring to his own impending deportation from the U.S., Berkman coldly replied that Frick had been "deported by God. I'm glad he left the country before me."

Frick left a will in which he bequeathed 150 acres of undeveloped land to the City of Pittsburgh for use as a public park, together with a $2 million trust fund to assist with the maintenance of the park. Frick Park opened in 1927. Between 1919 and 1942, money from the trust fund was used to enlarge the park, increasing its size to almost 600 acres. Following the death of Adelaide Howards Childs Frick in 1931, the Frick Collection was opened to the public as a museum in 1935.

Many years after her father's death, Helen Clay Frick returned to the Clayton in 1981 and lived there until her death in 1984. After extensive restoration, this property was also opened to the public in 1990 as the Frick Art & Historical Center.

References

• Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait, 1998, Abbeville Press, New York, NY
• Martha Frick Symington Sanger, The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture, Interiors, Landscapes in the Golden Era, 2001, Monacelli Press, New York, NY
• Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and the Bitter Partnership that Transformed America, 2005, Crown Publishers, New York, NY

External links

• Official Frick Collection Website
• The Frick Art & Historical Center and The Clayton
• Biographer Martha Frick Symington Sanger Website
• The Homestead Strike
• Reaction to the passing of Henry Clay Frick