rowing money to purchase certain Connellsville mines, then much
depreciated in price. From that moment, coke became Frick's obsession,
as steel had been Carnegie's. With his early profits he purchased more
coal lands until, by 1889, he owned ten thousand coke ovens and was
the undisputed "coke king" of Connellsville. Several years before
this, Carnegie had made Frick one of his marshals, coke having become
indispensable to the manufacture of steel, and in 1889 the former
distiller's accountant became Carnegie's commander-in-chief. Probably
the popular mind associates Frick chiefly with the importation of Slavs
as workmen, with the terrible strikes that followed in consequence
at Homestead, with the murderous attack made upon him by Berkman,
the anarchist, and with his bitter, long drawn-out quarrel with Andrew
Carnegie. Frick's stormy career was naturally the product of his
character.

On the other hand, temperamental pliability and lovableness were the
directing traits of the man who, in his way, made contributions quite as
solid to the extension of the Pittsburgh steel industry. Schwab worked
with the human material quite as successfully as other men worked with
iron ore, Bessemer furnaces, and coal. He handled successfully what was
perhaps the greatest task in management ever presented to a manufacturer
when to him fell the job of reorganizing the Homestead Works after the
strike of 1892 and of transforming thousands of riotous workmen into
orderly and interested producers of steel. In three or four years
practically every man on the premises had become "Charlie" Schwab's
personal friend, and the Homestead property which, until the day he took
charge, had been a colossal failure, had developed into one of the most
profitable holdings of the Carnegie Company. As his reward Schwab, at
the age of thirty-four, was made President of the Carnegie corporation.
Only sixteen years before he had entered the steel works as a stake
driver at a dollar a day.

When the Carnegie group began operations in the early seventies,
American steel, as a British writer remarked, was a "hot-house product";
yet in 1900 the Carnegie partners divided $40,000,000 as the profits of
a single year. They had demonstrated that the United States, despite
the high prices that prevailed everywhere, could make steel more
cheaply than any other country. Foreign observers have offered several
explanations for this achievement. American makers had an endle