Victory for Historians

Ever since Pittsburgh Steel Tycoon Henry Clay Frick left his strong-willed daughter a fortune that has grown to at least $38 million in five decades, Helen Clay Frick has spent her life idealizing his "Christian" memory and devoting his cash to such cultural works as Manhattan's Frick art museum. Thus in 1964, Miss Frick was incensed when she unwrapped a Christmas present: Historian Sylvester K. Stevens' Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation (Random House), which limned her "stern, brusque, autocratic" father as the hard-knuckled "Coke King" who forced Pennsylvania coal miners to toil for $1.60 a day and crushed "the disastrous Homestead strike of 1892."

Calling Stevens a liar, Miss Frick sought to enjoin further sale and publication of the book--an effort that most lawyers viewed as doomed. After all, historians have freely depicted dead persons as they pleased throughout U.S. history. All the same, Miss Frick sued under a 1944 Pennsylvania precedent defining a libel as a publication "tending either to blacken the memory of one who is dead, or the reputation of one who is alive." Though rare, statutes in several states make defamation of the dead a crime. The possibilities of a Frick victory alarmed historians across the country.

Last week those fears were put to rest by Cumberland County Judge Clinton R. Weidner, who ruled not only that Stevens' book is accurate and protected as free speech--but also that Stevens was actually too polite to Tycoon Frick. If his daughter were upheld, said Judge Weidner, "our bookshelves would be either empty or contain books written only by relatives of the subject." He added: "Miss Frick might as well try to enjoin publication and distribution of the Holy Bible because, being a descendant of Eve, she does not believe that Eve gave Adam the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden."

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