TIL: Today I Learned...

Sailorsaint said

There were many violent strikes during the Robber Baron days. The one that I always think about was the Carnegie Steel strike when Frick hired the Pinkertons to enforce his policies. It was on the "Men who built America" series on History channel a while back. Sadly, looks like we are on the verge of a modern day Robber Baron movement.

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Thing is, Andrew Carnegie had sort of allowed the Carnegie Steel strike to fester to a boiling point and adopt a more "hardball" negotiating standpoint from his chief deputy, Frick, and when Carnegie left for a private holiday cruise back to Scotland, he sort of knew based on Frick's temperament and hardline stance, what was probably going to occur in Pa. and if it did and public outcry got to the point where Congressional hearings were called, he could always blame it on Frick. And for those who watched the "Men Who Built America" series about 10-15 years ago, that's essentially how it went down and Frick was the "hothead" convenient fall guy and ironically, not long after the Carnegie Steel massacre, he was attacked by a pro-labor anarchist and boyfriend of Emma Goldman in his office.

The incident permanently altered public sentiment and worker perception towards Andrew Carnegie whereas before many of his own employees had actually thought he was a good boss and even today, this incident has been sort of whitewashed or sanitized whenever brought up in terms of Andrew Carnegie's direct culpability or responsibility for this massacre.