Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America

A dual portrait of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the two titans whose partnership built — and then nearly destroyed — the American steel industry. Standiford traces their relationship from mutual admiration through the violent 1892 Homestead strike, which Frick managed in Carnegie's absence and which became the defining stain on Carnegie's reputation. The book is a study in how extreme competence and extreme ego can drive industrial progress and personal destruction in equal measure.

David Senra returned to this book for Founders episode #284, his second read. He pulled the mantra that defined both men: "Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves." Carnegie and Frick shared an obsession with cost control: "If you knew your costs down to the penny, you were always on firm ground." Frick "knew his business down to the ground" and had "ambition, a singleness of purpose, and a lack of self-doubt that even Carnegie envied." Senra drew the lesson that cost discipline is permanent while revenues are cyclical: "profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent." The book appears on the shelf of Andrew Carnegie's founder entry in this library.