When Frick carried out Carnegie’s union-busting scheme to the letter, the Scots-born industrialist bent over backwards to hide his participation in the scheme. Dipping deeply into Carnegie’s personal correspondence with Frick (and vice versa), Standiford reveals a hypocrite who prided himself on being a friend of the working man, while at the same time planning and executing what turned out to be one of the bloodiest labor lock-outs in U.S. Meet You in Hell, Les Standiford’s outstanding new look at Carnegie and his tempestuous relationship with his iron-fisted business partner and trusted company manager, Henry Clay Frick, offers its subject up on a plate. Well, rejoice, lovers of business scandal. Carnegie himself has been given a somewhat easy ride by business historians thanks to his penchant for building libraries the world over and giving away his many millions of dollars as the greatest American philanthropist of his age.
There is no new evil under the sun and for every Donald Trump posing as a wheeling, dealing tycoon, there is an Andrew Carnegie who actually built something lasting, often over the bodies of the thousands of men who worked for him. Since our society began its retreat into Social Darwinism tricked out in the guise of laissez-faire economics, those of us who enjoy our economic history red in tooth and claw have the guilty pleasure of reading about business scandals. Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford Crown, 336 pp.
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