The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company

"For years I have been convinced that there is not an honest bone in your body. Now I know that you are a god damned thief," Henry Clay Frick reportedly told Andrew Carnegie at their last meeting in 1900, just before J.P. Morgan bought the Carnegie Steel Company and founded United States Steel. Three years later, James Bridge, who had served as Carnegie's personal secretary, published "The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: A Romance of Millions". In it he recounted the events that led up to the final confrontation between two of America's most powerful capitalists. The book created a sensation when it appeared in 1903. Not only did it describe the raw emotions of Carnegie and Frick, those most brilliant and uneasy of business partners, it also told of the history and inner workings of the industrial giant, Carnegie Steel. In all probability steel has never been served by so literary a figure as Bridge. An Englishman who was educated in Germany, he worked as a newspaperman and then became private secretary to Herbert Spencer, the eminent social Darwinist.
He became Carnegie's "literary assistant," and there were rumours that he was co-author of Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy". Later he bought a California magazine and published several of the early stories of Jack London. With the perspective of an insider, Bridge tracks the history of Carnegie's steel companies from the 1860s through the years of great expansion. Little is known about the upper-level management of the steel industry of the period, and Bridge's detailed description of the machinations and innovations of the Carnegie board of directors is especially valuable. He discusses the origins of the notorious Iron Clad Agreement which protected the company from the ownership rights of its illustrious partners, including Andrew Kloman, David McCandless, Thomas Carnegie, William R. Jones, and Henry Phipps. He tells of the emergence of Frick, whose management skills and immense holdings in the Connellsvile coke field made him the partner. Carnegie could neither do with nor without. He details the contribution made to the company by William P. Shin's accounting procedures, and explains how the Bessemer process was adopted and why the Edgar Thomson works were built.
Bridge was an open partisan of Frick, and the portrait of Carnegie that emerges from his book is not flattering. But as an experienced journalist, he uses sources carefully, and his well-written book remains a striking insider's narrative of the American steel industry of the time - as well as the most revealing account of the emotions of some of its major owners. An introduction by John Ingham, of the University of Toronto, places "The History of Carnegie Steel" in historical perspective for both the historian and the general reader.