The Press: Editor & Hero

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"It is with no small gratification that, at the close of 28 years of editorship, I am so fortunate as to be able to entrust the high honor and unblemished character of this American institution to one so keenly sensible of his obligation and so admirably equipped to maintain its splendid tradition as is Mr. Mahony."

In other words, Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey had done a tiny piece of business. He had sold the North American Review, a magazine often found in libraries, to a corporation lawyer named Walter Butler Mahony, brother-in-law of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, for a sum that he refused to state.* And why did Colonel George Harvey sell his magazine? Because he is going to write the biography of Henry Clay Frick.

Friends of onetime (1921-23) Ambassador Harvey have never thought it strange that he should admire the late Henry C. Frick, that he should be retiring, now, to write the life of his hero, among other biographical and historical writing that he has laid out for himself. Henry Frick, the doer, would inevitably appeal to George Harvey, the talker, gangling, circumloquacious George Harvey with his big Adam's apple, his quick loyalties and fierce antagonisms, his life of violent spurts in oblique directions. Both men had had adventurous and active early years, Henry Frick (born 1849) baking coke in Pennsylvania, learning business methods from his grandfather, flour merchant and distiller of famed Overholt Whisky; George Harvey as a reporter, working for the New York World, managing editor at 27.

In later life Henry Frick, never a talkative man, said: "Success simply calls for hard work and devotion to your business, day and night." He grew old in that one trite and silly sentence. Looking back at youth, he could only see the smolder of coke fires, hear the tinny strum of a trolley going into a mine, hard work, devotion. No one can say that Frick did not work hard. No one can say that he might not have been successful with no luck at all. But the fact remains that, in the panic of 1873, a lot of Pennsylvania bituminous coal lands were put up for sale at a fraction of their value and Frick (with money borrowed from his relatives—he was but 24 then) bought them and became a millionaire, the greatest producer of coke in the world; formed the H. C. Frick Coke Co., operator of 12,000 coke ovens.

Andrew Carnegie, grasping for iron and steel monopoly made Frick his chief partner—in Carnegie Bros. That was in 1889. But theirs was no close friendship. Both were too individualistic. Eventually they quarreled, called each other names, separated, but this was after Frick, with the aid of some Carnegie men—Charles M. Schwab, William Ellis Corey and James Gayley—had smashed the bloody, massacring Homestead Strike of 1892. In the riots Anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Frick, stabbed him thrice.

Gambling was an aspect of Frick's adventuresomeness. He speculated in stocks and boldly used his inside, forehanded knowledge culled from directors' meetings in which he sat. At early meetings of U. S. Steel Corp. directors, Judge Gary, Methodist, often caught Frick matching $20 gold pieces with fellow directors—Henry H. Rogers, N. B. Ream, P. A. B. Widener. The Judge made them stop their games.