Titans Rout Steelers, Second Time in Three Years, But Practice Scrimmage Leaves Titan Offense Injured

The late 19th century was not a good time to live and work in Pittsburgh. If you worked for Carnegie Steel, you were paid a pittance and the dangers on your job were literally playing with white-hot, molten, hellish fire. Unless you were Andrew Carnegie or his partner Henry Clay Frick.

In Meet You in Hell, Les Standiford has recreated the rise to wealth of these two titans of the steel industry, showing their business acumen and their lavish lifestyle and philanthropy starkly against the meager existence of their laborers.

Here is another story that illustrates that it is not just place, but more importantly time, that indelibly marks the main characters, providing an alignment of fate and opportunity. Their lives coincided with the rise of Industrialism. They were fortuitous to live in a region of the country, recovering from the Civil War, where raw materials, river and rail transportation, and burgeoning ranks of East European immigrants came together to make Pittsburgh the engine of growth.

Both were essentially self-taught and self-made men, the remnant of the Puritan hard work ethic with its corollary of entitlement to relish its rewards. While both espoused a philosophy of rags to riches achievement, neither created a climate to encourage or mentor others. To them, it was survival of the fittest and the weaker be exploited.

This theme is expressed through three events: first, the Johnstown flood of 1889. I never realized this flood was anything other than a natural disaster. Standiford clearly outlined the contribution of a private hunting club used by both Carnegie and Frick and other elites and their lack of maintenance and upkeep on the dam holding back an aged reservoir. None of these owners were ever found liable. The second, the strike in 1892 at the Homestead mill predated the worst of America's labor unrest. Both Carnegie and Frick intended to burst the union, and succeeded after a lock-out of almost 150 days, during which both armed Pinkerton guards and the Pennsylvania State militia were called in to intervene. The last incident is when Carnegie turned on Frick to force him out of Carnegie Steel and Frick Coke, its subsidiary supplier of fuel for the furnaces. The titans of industry lost only when they attacked each other. But the payout for selling the company to J. P. Morgan to create U. S. Steel out of the ashes of this fiery feud gave them both phoenix-like reincarnations as benefactors of culture, art and higher education.

I got more of a sense of time from Meet You in Hell than a feeling for Western Pennsylvania. I sensed more clearly the journey through the fifty states is time travel as well as a trip over blue highways. The book did not attempt to show the monstrosity of the mills, their effects on the environment or health of the population. It did not portray scenery or community other than as an extension of the furnace -- as a place to recoup briefly before returning for another twelve hour shift. Missing is the alchemy of making a life instead of a legacy, aspiring to an eternal flame. The only fires left around Pittsburgh are not producing steel but are the inextinguishable consumption of abandoned coal mines below the decimated small surrounding towns.