Opinion. This one's an argument, not a news story.
Take a drive around this city and read the signs. Carnegie Library. Carnegie Museum. Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Science Center. Frick Park. Frick Building. Frick Art Museum. There's a whole borough named Carnegie. We put these names on the buildings where we take our kids on a rainy Saturday.
Now go read what the men did.
The lake above Johnstown
In November 1879, Henry Clay Frick pulled together a group of Pittsburgh's wealthiest men to found the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The membership grew past 60 and read like a Gilded Age directory: Andrew Mellon, future attorney general Philander Knox, federal judge James Hay Reed, and Andrew Carnegie.
Their clubhouse sat beside a private lake held back by the South Fork Dam, which the club had altered and patched. On May 31, 1889, it failed. The water hit Johnstown, 14 miles downstream, and killed more than 2,000 people.
The club was never held legally responsible. Not one member paid a dime in damages. Some of them sent relief supplies, which was generous of them, considering.
The fence at Homestead
Three years later, the contract with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was expiring at the Homestead Works. Carnegie, who liked to write essays about the duties of the rich, went to Scotland and left Frick in charge.
Frick built a fence around the plant, 15 feet high and topped with barbed wire, and the workers started calling it Fort Frick. He advertised for strikebreakers. He locked the men out. Then, before dawn on July 6, 1892, he floated 300 armed Pinkerton agents up the river on barges.
The town met them at the water. When the shooting stopped, seven workers and three Pinkertons were dead. Four days later, 8,500 National Guard troops took over the town at Frick's request. By November the union was finished, and it would be more than 40 years before steelworkers organized again at that scale.
Wages went down. Hours went up. The profits went into things with names on them.
The buildings
Here's where it gets genuinely funny, in the way that makes you want to sit down.
Carnegie spent his later life giving away a fortune, including some 2,500 libraries. One of them is the Carnegie Library of Homestead, built in the town where his company's Pinkertons shot at his own workers, a few years after it happened. It has a gym, a pool, and a beautiful music hall. It is a genuinely wonderful building. It was paid for with money squeezed out of the people who lived there.
Frick left the city Frick Park and an art collection. He also left a mansion full of European paintings in New York. He died one of the richest men in America, never once having been found responsible for anything that happened at Johnstown or Homestead.
And the Homestead Works itself? It's a shopping center now. You can park where the mill stood, in the shadow of the preserved smokestacks, and buy a candle.
So what do we do with that
Not tear the names down, probably. The libraries are still libraries. The park is still a park. Refusing to use them wouldn't return a single dollar to anybody.
But we could stop telling the story backwards. These men were not civic saints who happened to have labor trouble. They were men who broke a union with hired guns and bought their reputations back at retail, and the city took the deal because the city needed the buildings.
The workers at Homestead didn't get a museum. They got a historical marker and a song.