Editor & Hero

"It is with no small gratification that, at the close of 28 years of editorship, I am so fortunate as to be able to entrust the high honor and unblemished character of this American institution to one so keenly sensible of his obligation and so admirably equipped to maintain its splendid tradition as is Mr. Mahony."

In other words, Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey had done a tiny piece of business. He had sold the North American Review, a magazine often found in libraries, to a corporation lawyer named Walter Butler Mahony, brother-in-law of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, for a sum that he refused to state.* And why did Colonel George Harvey sell his magazine? Because he is going to write the biography of Henry Clay Frick.

Friends of onetime (1921-23) Ambassador Harvey have never thought it strange that he should admire the late Henry C. Frick, that he should be retiring, now, to write the life of his hero, among other biographical and historical writing that he has laid out for himself. Henry Frick, the doer, would inevitably appeal to George Harvey, the talker, gangling, circumloquacious George Harvey with his big Adam's apple, his quick loyalties and fierce antagonisms, his life of violent spurts in oblique directions. Both men had had adventurous and active early years, Henry Frick (born 1849) baking coke in Pennsylvania, learning business methods from his grandfather, flour merchant and distiller of famed Overholt Whisky; George Harvey as a reporter, working for the New York World, managing editor at 27.

In later life Henry Frick, never a talkative man, said: "Success simply calls for hard work and devotion to your business, day and night." He grew old in that one trite and silly sentence. Looking back at youth, he could only see the smolder of coke fires, hear the tinny strum of a trolley going into a mine, hard work, devotion. No one can say that Frick did not work hard. No one can say that he might not have been successful with no luck at all. But the fact remains that, in the panic of 1873, a lot of Pennsylvania bituminous coal lands were put up for sale at a fraction of their value and Frick (with money borrowed from his relatives--he was but 24 then) bought them and became a millionaire, the greatest producer of coke in the world; formed the H. C. Frick Coke Co., operator of 12,000 coke ovens.

Andrew Carnegie, grasping for iron and steel monopoly made Frick his chief partner--in Carnegie Bros. That was in 1889. But theirs was no close friendship. Both were too individualistic. Eventually they quarreled, called each other names, separated, but this was after Frick, with the aid of some Carnegie men--Charles M. Schwab, William Ellis Corey and James Gayley--had smashed the bloody, massacring Homestead Strike of 1892. In the riots Anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Frick, stabbed him thrice.

Gambling was an aspect of Frick's adventuresomeness. He speculated in stocks and boldly used his inside, forehanded knowledge culled from directors' meetings in which he sat. At early meetings of U. S. Steel Corp. directors, Judge Gary, Methodist, often caught Frick matching $20 gold pieces with fellow directors--Henry H. Rogers, N. B. Ream, P. A. B. Widener. The Judge made them stop their games.

It was a long time before Judge Gary could ingratiate himself into Frick's circle of intimate friends. Frick was won over after Judge Gary, art amateur like Frick, advised him to buy a painting by the Dutch artist. Vermeer. Frick did so and enthusiatically wrote the Judge: "Have the new Vermeer here. It's a beauty. Am anxious you should see it." Eventually he had three of the 32 Vermeers, known exist.

That collection of paintings, bronzes and enamels he willed, at his death in 1919, to New York, together with his mansion in which he guarded them. He also established an endowment of $15,000,000 to support the museum.

George Harvey was a brilliant reporter. The speed of the old World copy-room dropped away from him between his newspaper days and his appointment as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (1921-23), in the years when he was getting traction stock in exchange for boosting the interests of the New York street-railways in his paper; when, later, he edited Harper's Weekly; when he was boosting Woodrow Wilson for President; when he founded Harvey's Weekly to damn his one-time friend, President Wilson. What happened between George Harvey and Woodrow Wilson? Mr. Harvey had seen Presidential timber in the sombre-faced Princeton professor long before New Jersey heard of him. He clewed Wilson's pennant to his editorial page of Harper's Weekly and saluted it each week with all the ardor of a discoverer. Everything went well; Wilson got the Democratic nomination--and then a letter came to Mr. Harvey. Wilson, he discovered, wanted him to stop his boosting. Once, after the election, Mr. Harvey went to the White House, but it was a bitter visit; something had gone wrong; Wilson had dropped him; Wilson, whom he had hailed and made famous, disdained his help. In this relationship Mr. Harvey seems to have been wronged, and this may have been so, for it was the pathos of Wilson's life to lose his friends without ever having known them. But George Harvey as a disinherited supporter was soon lost against the figure of George Harvey, the pantaloon, when, after a quick rebound to Harding's party and its consequent reward, he began to amaze polite England with blatant and incredible Yankeeisms, which the press--big with capitals-- copied.

**The North American Review is 112 years old. Two early editors, Poet James Russell Lowell and Harvard President Edward Everett, were U. S. Ambassadors to Great Britain.