The Book of Bastards (13 page)

Imagine a robber baron so ruthless that he was able to shock a bastard like Andrew Carnegie. That's Henry Clay Frick.

Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Frick got into the steel business early, founding his own coke-producing company (coke is an element that helps get blast furnaces hot enough to make iron into steel) before he was twenty-one. By the time he turned thirty he had bought his partners out.

Frick formed a decades-long business partnership with millionaire steel-magnate Carnegie after a chance meeting while Frick was honeymooning in New York City. He eventually merged his interests with Carnegie's to form U.S. Steel Corporation.

Frick was directly responsible for the devastation associated with the Johnstown Flood of 1889. He and several wealthy cronies had banded together as the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and had ordered an earthen dam built on a tributary creek of the Conemaugh River, just a few miles upstream from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

In May of 1889 the dam failed due to shoddy maintenance (and heavy rains), and the city of Johnstown was wiped off the map. The flood killed over two thousand people and caused millions of dollars worth of damage. Frick's lawyers succeeded in keeping Frick and the rest of the “club” from paying a dime in restitution.

Frick is probably most notorious for his response to the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892 (which in turn appalled Carnegie so much). When strikers took over the Homestead Plant during an impasse in talks between Frick's company and the steelworkers' union, Frick bypassed local law enforcement and hired three hundred Pinkerton detectives to take back the plant by force. Several people were killed in the ensuing bloodbath. After regaining control of the plant Frick fired two thousand employees (regardless of whether or not they had played any role in the strike) and halved salaries for the few who managed to keep their jobs. For Frick it was an unqualified success: he'd broken the union and actually made money doing so.

Toward the end of the strike an anarchist named Alexander Berkman broke into Frick's office intending to kill him. He shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him four times before being overpowered and arrested. Frick was back at work within a week, and Berkman went to jail for twenty years.

Due to be deported in 1919 as a result of his ongoing anarchist activities, Berkman at least had the satisfaction that the bastard who he blamed for so much misery had died before he could be forced from the country. Frick was dead of a heart attack at age sixty-nine.

John Pierpont Morgan's wealthy banking family raised him to appreciate the value of a dollar. Where people were always disposable to Morgan, capital was quite another matter. And like Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Morgan was a war profiteer. And it wasn't as if he needed the money he stole. Morgan was born rich!

Morgan grew up sickly, receiving the majority of his education in Europe. He joined his father's organization by going to work in the bank's London office in 1857.

During the American Civil War, Morgan and a partner saw an opportunity to make a real (literal in this case!) killing. They bought a batch of cast-off, defective rifles as surplus scrap metal from the U.S. Army, had the guns retooled, and then turned around and sold the rifles back to the Army. The price per gun when Morgan and his partner bought them: $3.50. The price at which the two men sold these defective guns back to the Army: $33.00! When the guns exploded upon firing — doing greatest harm to most of the soldiers who used them — federal officials realized that they had been re-sold their own defective firearms. They refused to pay, and Morgan went to court (TWICE!) to try to get his blood money.

Of course it goes without saying that Morgan, like so many rich men during the period, couldn't be bothered to do his patriotic duty to his country during its hour of need. Morgan paid a substitute to serve in the Army in his place, as did fellow bastards John D. Rockefeller and Grover Cleveland. Makes you wonder whether that substitute ever came to any harm because of his rifle exploding, doesn't it?

Morgan went on to broker numerous important deals, including the one that made Andrew Carnegie the wealthiest man in America. He died in 1913 with a personal fortune estimated at over a billion dollars in today's money. The beneficiaries of his philanthropy included Harvard Medical School and the American Museum of Natural History.

That doesn't make him any less of a bastard, or of a war profiteer, for that matter.

Imagine that, as a citizen, you've just endured eight years of the most corrupt, venal, and self-seeking government in recorded history; for those who are not fans of George W. Bush, it won't be too much of a stretch to get in touch with that feeling. Now further imagine that after those forgettable eight years in our country's history, the election intended to sweep the previous pack of liars, incompetents, and thieves right out of office is stolen, keeping the offending political party firmly in power.

At least the Bushies had the “decency” to swipe a contested victory at the
beginning
of their boss's eight years in office. President Ulysses S. Grant's administration just kept on sullying elections and politics right through both of his terms. It ought to come as no surprise that his party (the Republicans) just couldn't leave well enough alone when it came to the election of 1876.

For what it's worth, the Democrats were no better. The party then out of power worked desperately to swing the election in favor of their candidate, former New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden. One Democratic governor, Lafayette Grover of Oregon, even refused to certify an elector who was going to vote for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. The state of affairs began to unravel from there.

Four states — Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon — had “irregularities” with their electoral votes thanks to charges of fraud and corruption. What's more, Colorado had so recently become a state that there was little time to organize actual polling there; the state's legislature awarded all three of their electoral votes to Hayes.

In the end, Tilden won the popular vote; he beat Hayes with just over 250,000 votes. But he lost the electoral count by a single vote: Hayes garnered 185 to Tilden's 184.

For the first time in American history the clear winner of the electoral vote had failed to win the popular vote. At least in 1824 when Andrew Jackson had won the popular vote, the five candidates split the electoral vote and Jackson won a plurality.

Congress finally fixed the situation with a classic back-room deal. The Democrats agreed to accept Hayes if he would in turn recall the Union troops who had been propping up Reconstruction Republican state governments in the South since the end of the Civil War. Hayes agreed and sold Tilden down the river. The civil rights advances of Southern ex-slaves under Reconstruction went right along with him.

The ordeal of the election of 1876 and its aftermath broke Tilden's health. He accepted his loss with admirable restraint and retired from public life.

Hayes was such a pious man that he made the nation wait an extra day for him to take office as president, because the original inauguration date was set for a Sunday. Yet this “Godly” man, so upright and honest, made a political deal that ensured that the disenfranchisement of African Americans would continue in parts of this country for nearly a century after the end of the Civil War.

Pious bastard.

Successful former judge, lawyer, businessman, and mayor of Buffalo, Stephen Grover Cleveland was a picture of Gilded Age virtues and stability; he was also the only man elected to two nonconsecutive terms as president of the United States. And yet this paragon dodged the draft, had a child out of wedlock, and eventually married a much younger woman for whom he was serving as legal guardian.

Extramarital sex has been a part of the human experience since the invention of the institution of marriage. In the nineteenth century, America was smack-dab in the middle of the so-called “Victorian Age,” with its supposedly more stringent approach to morals. But really it was no more moral than at any other point in history. The difference was that personal immorality and vice were less likely to be acknowledged or even discussed then than they are now.

Could a character like Cleveland actually have won the most recent election? Take a good look at the recent implosion of John Edwards's political career after the revelations regarding the kid he had with a member of his campaign staff. Now answer the question for yourself. How can anyone explain the fact of Cleveland's successful election not once, but twice? Especially when he didn't win as a favored incumbent the second time?

First: all voters in presidential elections before 1920 were male. Men tended to wink and nod at each other over situations such as the one in which Cleveland found himself.

Second: there was no such thing as a paternity test in those days, and it's likely the little boy that Cleveland acknowledged as his son wasn't even his. The woman who bore the child “dated” several different men at the same time, Cleveland among them.

Where Cleveland differed from the rest of this young woman's “boyfriends” was that he was the only one of them who was still unmarried. So it seems that Cleveland “took one for the team.” He paid for the child's upbringing and apparently received help in that endeavor from the rest of the “circle of male friends” the child's mother had cultivated. Never mind that the boy also happened to be named after Cleveland's married law partner and was apparently the spitting image of him.

As for dodging the draft, Cleveland was the sole supporter of his widowed mother and sisters when the American Civil War broke out. At the time it was legal for someone drafted for military service to hire a “substitute” who could serve in his place. Cleveland opted for that, and his political opponents made him pay for it for the rest of his life.

And speaking of Cleveland's law partners and orphaned daughters, Cleveland's law partner Oscar Folsom named the future president as his daughter Frances's guardian in his will. The child was eleven years old when her father died. Cleveland had known the girl since her birth and bought her first baby carriage as a present. After Folsom's death, Cleveland took an active role in supervising Frances's upbringing, including seeing to it that she went to college. At some point his feelings for her changed, and he proposed marriage even though he was executor of her father's estate. She accepted. They were married right after her twenty-first birthday, and had five children together.

Grover Cleveland, upright Victorian gentleman.