Homestead: 'They fought for home and right to live where they had toiled so long'
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 9005
The American Federation of Labor’s Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was the country’s strongest union in the late 19th-century.
Skilled workers, AA members had been in great demand as America's steel industry greatly expanded after the Civil War. But as steel making became more mechanized, thus requiring fewer skilled workers, the union's strength waned.
In 1892, Andrew Carnegie ran one of the largest steel companies in the world. But AA had a contract only in his Homestead mill near Pittsburgh.
Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant who had come from a working class family. He praised workers and fancied himself the ideal boss. But by 1890, he had decided the AA had to go.
Anxious to protect his phony reputation as a benevolent employer, Carnegie left the public dirty work to his trusted lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick. For the next two years, with Carnegie's blessing, Frick repeatedly cut wages for the AA men. Realizing they were too weak to win a strike, they went along.
Frick was ready for a strike. He had a high board fence built around the plant. The barrier was topped with barbed wire and rifle slits were cut in the planks at regular intervals.
The contract with Amalgamated was to run out June 30, 1892. The day before, Frick announced another wage reduction and shut the plant, which was making millions for its owner.
Fewer than 800 of the plant’s 3,800 hourly employees belonged to AA. Frick figured only the union men would strike, but all of the workers did. So he fired everybody.
Frick bought ads for strikebreakers in newspapers stateside and Europe. He planned to reopen the whole plant with scabs on July 6.
Frick hired men from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to escort strikebreakers into the plant. “Detectives” was a misnomer. Workers nationwide knew the Pinkertons for what they really were: hired guns. Employers could always count on “Pinkerton men” to help them crush strikes.
But how to get the Pinkertons into the plant? After all, workers, their families and supporters had surrounded the plant, which backed up to the Monongahela River.
Frick would have them arrive via the river.
Workers were on to him. They were patrolling the Monongahela in rowboats and a small steam-powered launch.
Before dawn on July 6, 1892, 300 Pinkertons, armed with Winchester repeating rifles, approached aboard two barges pulled by a tugboat. The workers, warned by the steam launch’s whistle, got ready.
When the Pinkertons reached the plant, the workers warned them not to land. When they refused, a gun battle erupted. Bullets flew past daybreak and into the afternoon. Three Pinkertons and seven workers were killed. Finally, the Pinkertons surrendered, dropped their weapons and meekly came ashore where the angry workers beat and cursed them and ran them out of town.
For the workers, the "Battle of Homestead" was only a temporary victory. Frick contacted the governor of Pennsylvania, a pro-business Democrat, and asked him to send in state militiamen, 8,500 strong and armed with Gatling Guns. He agreed.
(Union-busting was bipartisan in those days. Conservative Republican and Democratic governors used state troops to break strikes. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes, a pro-business Republican, sent Federal troops to crush the Great Railroad Strike of 1887. President Grover Cleveland, a pro- business Democrat, ordered out U.S. soldiers to overpower the Pullman Strike.
The Homestead workers and their supporters were powerless against the state troops. Soon, scabs were operating the mill.
The AA lost much public support, too, when a radical anarchist arrived and tried to assassinate Frick on July 23. He had nothing to do with the union or the strike. But the pro-business press saw a golden opportunity to smear all unions as radicals out to destroy the country.
The AA hung on until Nov. 21 when it gave up.
"In the meantime, waves of criminal charges were lodged against scores of union leaders and workers," the AFL-CIO says. "Although almost all were eventually acquitted, the charges meant that the union leaders languished in jail, out of touch with their members, as the strikebreaking proceeded."
The Homestead Strike was another crushing defeat for organized labor. After he’d won, a defiant Frick announced “Under no circumstances will we have any further dealing with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final."
“Life worth living again,” Carnegie telegraphed Frick after the strike was over.
Nationwide, union strength was at low ebb. Pro-union workers were fired or blacklisted. Corporations sent spies among workers to root out union sympathizers. Workers had to sign “yellow dog” contracts in which they promised not to join a union. If they did, they were fired.
Union organizers were beaten up or jailed or both. Anti-union judges freely issued injunctions to halt strikes. Workers called injunctions “Gatling guns on paper.”
Unions knew that local, state and national governments were against them. Cops, sheriff's deputies, state militia and even U.S. soldiers were ready to come to the aid of corporations facing strikes.
According to the AFL-CIO, the Homestead strike “was not the only measure of the steel workers' defeat. As Sidney Lens pointed out in his classic The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs, membership in the Amalgamated Association plummeted from 24,000 to 10,000 in 1894 and down to 8,000 in 1895. Meanwhile, the Carnegie Steel Co.'s profits rose to a staggering $106 million in the nine years after Homestead. And for 26 long years—until the last months of World War I in 1918—union organizing among steelworkers was crushed.”
But the strike inspired a "Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men," a famous union ballad:
‘Twas in Pennsylvania town not very long ago,
Men struck against reduction of their pay.
Their millionaire employer with philanthropic show
Had closed the works 'till starved they would obey.
They fought for home and right to live where they had toiled so long,
But ere the sun had set, some were laid low.