#75 Henry Clay Frick: Andrew Carnegie's Partner

**David Senra** (0:00)
Charles Schwab summarized Frick to an interviewer in the 1930s.
No man on earth could get close to him or fathom him. He seemed more like a machine, without emotion or impulses, absolutely cold-blooded. He had good foresight and was an excellent bargainer. His assets were that he was a thinking machine, methodical as a comptometer, accurate, cutting straight to the point. He was the most methodical thinking machine I have ever known.
John D. Rockefeller said he had the soul of a bookkeeper, that he seemed to earn money like many pursue athletic awards.
That is from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Henry Clay Frick, The Life of the Perfect Capitalist, and it's written by Quentin R. Skrabec Jr. There's actually a word in that intro that I was not familiar with, and I had to look it up, and that's that word, Comptometer. So in case you don't know what it is, it says the Comptometer was the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in the United States by Dore E. Felt in 1887 And it says although the Comptometer was primarily an adding machine, it could also do subtractions, multiplications, and division. And I didn't know the definition of that word until after I had already finished reading the book. And I love this description of Frick, because that's kind of how he comes off to me. They say he was a thinking machine, methodical as a Comptometer, accurate, cutting straight to the point, the most methodical thinking machine I had ever known. Now before I found that excerpt, I actually was thinking about starting the podcast reading the back cover of the book. And then I realized they're both really good excerpts to get an introduction to what this podcast is going to be about. So let me read that to you as well. It says, Henry Clay Frick, reviled in his own time, infamous in ours, was blamed for the Johnstown flood as well as the violent homestead strike of 1892 He survived an assassination attempt, yet at the same time he was an ardent philanthropist, giving away more than $100 million during his lifetime and in his will, while insisting on anonymity. This biography explores the contradictions in this great industrialist nature and avoids the extremes of both haggography and denunciation. And that was another word I had to look up, so I just want to read that definition to you because I think it's extremely important. And so haggography means adulatory writing about another person. A biography that idolizes its subject.
And I really appreciate that the author put that on the back cover because that's a point that I try to make all the time. The point of this podcast is for us to learn from people that have built companies in the past, but definitely not to idolize them and realizing that there's no human that's ever existed that deserves our idolization, that we're all flawed and we're going to make a lot of mistakes and we do good. We do both simultaneous good and bad things. And so today's going to be no different. We're going to learn a lot from the career and the life of Henry Clay Frick, and we're going to learn a lot of what to do in our own lives and what to avoid. So I'm just going to start with a preface. There's just a bunch of random quotes that are going to kind of illustrate this point. Oh, and before I begin too, this is part three. This is the last part in this Andrew Carnegie, this impromptu Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick series that I stumbled upon when I read the book Meet You in Hell. So if you haven't listened to that, you don't have to listen to them in order, but I think you should definitely listen to all three of them, because I started with the combination of their relationship, then I did Andrew Carnegie's autobiography last week, and then now we're doing the biography of Henry Clay Frick. And their careers and lives are interwoven, they're constantly mentioned in the same sentences over and over again. And now after reading these three books, I have an understanding of why that happened, although Andrew Carnegie is way better well known than Frick was. But Frick was, even if he never interacted with Andrew Carnegie, he was an unbelievably gifted entrepreneur, and there's a lot we can learn from him. So first it says, Frick was human, not evil, and his life demonstrates many shortcomings found in us all.
He says, Frick had both saintly and evil attributes. While labeled a robber baron, he believed in playing fair to his masses millions.