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ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES • APRIL 2014 33
interest in the Frick
Coke Company passed
to the Carnegie Bros.
Company.
After Tom Carnegie’s
death, Andrew enticed
Frick into the steel com-
pany to become the gen-
eral manager. Thus
began the team of
Carnegie and Frick that
would complete the steel
empire that had been
slowly growing during
the past 15 years.
Carnegie’s empire now
included the Edgar
Thomson Steel Works,
Homestead and Duquesne Steel Works, the Frick
Coke Company, the Keystone Bridge Company, and a
variety of small mills, mines, and coke works. It was
the largest steel operation in the country. Within a few
years (by 1892), the output of the newly organized
Carnegie Steel Company would exceed half that of the
entire steel industry of Great Britain, and Andrew
Carnegie owned more than 50% of it.
Great strike of 1892
However, the year 1892 would go down in history
for the great strike of the Amalgamated Association
of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead Works.
Frick was determined to break the union. To ensure
control of the situation should force be needed, he
arranged for 300 armed guards from the Pinkerton
Agency to stand by ready to help. Frick then rejected
the first proposals submitted by the union and of-
fered terms he knew would be unacceptable. The
workers walked out. When the local authorities were
intimidated by the laborers who were joined by the
whole town of Homestead, Frick sent for his Pinker-
ton force. The 300 guards came down the Mononga-
hela River in two steel barges and attempted to land
at the Homestead plant. Workers lined the riverbank
and the guards were met by a hail of gunfire. The bat-
tle raged all day, but suffered few casualties.
Late in the afternoon, the guards surrendered and
the union leaders promised them safe passage out of
town. However, when they came ashore they were at-
tacked by the entire town. The men, women, and
even children unleashed a fury that killed three of the
guards and injured the rest. Several days later, 8000
troops from the state militia arrived to take over the
plant and return it to management. Labor relations
and worker morale never recovered at Homestead.
Frick’s reputation, as well as that of Carnegie, would
never again ride as high within the industrial and po-
litical scene.
Skyscrapers and steel
move upward and onward
By the 1890s, steel was being used in many new
applications where it permitted breakthroughs in en-
gineering and construction.
One of these was the emerg-
ing world of skyscrapers. The
1890s witnessed such build-
ings going up in Chicago—the
birthplace of these struc-
tures—as well as Saint Louis,
Buffalo, New York City, and
other rapidly growing popula-
tion centers. The cost of steel
had been driven down by
Carnegie and his competitors
to the lowest the world would
ever see. What they all
needed was rapid growth in
their markets. This is what
they got, because they were
standing on the threshold of
the American Technological
Revolution.
It was at this critical junc-
ture in American history that
Andrew Carnegie decided
that he had taken his steel em-
pire about as far as he was
going to go. He was 65 years
old and his lifelong philosophy had been to turn away
from moneymaking for its own sake in order to do
something more useful with his life and fortune. At
Frick’s suggestion, he agreed to entertain offers for
his interest in the steel empire that had taken more
than 25 year to assemble. He sold to J.P. Morgan who
folded his Carnegie Steel Company into a new cor-
poration named United States Steel.
Henry Clay Frick, early
coke entrepreneur and
general manager of the
Carnegie Corp. Courtesy
of Library of Congress/
U.S. public domain.
State militia troops
sent to break the
1892 strike at
Carnegie’s
Homestead Works.
Courtesy of
.
Architect and “father of skyscrapers” Louis
Sullivan’s Prudential Building, Buffalo, N.Y.
Courtesy of Library of Congress/U.S. public
domain.
For more
information:
Charles R. Simcoe
can be reached at
.
For more metallurgical
history,
visit
.