The Western Kentucky Worker

Feature Article

January 2007

Bronze plaque commemorates ‘The Battle of Homestead '

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT-Kentucky/KEA-NEA

HOMESTEAD , Pa. -- Most travel guides don't list Homestead among major historic sites in Pennsylvania .

Such is the usual fate of labor history.

At Homestead in 1892, striking steel workers took on “The Richest Man in the World.” They won the “Battle of Homestead.” But they were beaten by what America and its Peoples , a college history textbook, neatly summed up as “the powerful forces of capital, government and press.”

Supposedly, nobody was better-heeled than Andrew Carnegie in 1892. His Homestead mill was one of the largest steelworks in the world.

Publicly, Carnegie said he sympathized with workers. Privately, he was ruthlessly determined to smash the plant union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers, or “AA” for short.

The Homestead steelworks, which sprawled along the Monongahela River , is gone. The Pump House is virtually all that survives of Carnegie's mill.

A shiny bronze plaque next to the Pump House commemorates the July 6, 1892, Battle of Homestead. The brick building was at the center of the day-long gunfight between strikers and guards hired by Carnegie Steel. Ten men died, and 70 were wounded on both sides.

After the battle, the strike Advisory Committee outlined the workers' cause in an “An Address to the Public.” The words are cast into the plaque and punctuated with a relief titled “Workmen Cannonading the Barges.” The image is from the “Great Battle of Homestead,” an 1892 broadside by Edwin Rowe.

“…It is our duty as American citizens to resist by every legal and ordinary means the unconstitutional, anarchic and revolutionary policy of the Carnegie Company, which seems to evince a contempt [for] public and private interests and a disdain [for] the public conscience,” the committee said.

The Homestead mill employed about 3,800 workers in 1892. About 750 skilled steel workers belonged to the AA, according to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. With approximately 24,000 members nationwide, the AA was the largest union in the American Federation of Labor.
At Homestead , the AA won recognition and a three-year contract after an 1889 strike. Carnegie vowed to run Homestead non-union after the contract lapsed.

At the same time, Carnegie didn't want to ruin his carefully cultivated reputation as a benevolent employer, false as it was. Most of his workers toiled long hours at low pay in jobs that threatened lives and limbs.

In 1892, Carnegie went on vacation to his native Scotland . He left Henry Clay Frick, his trusted manager, to be the public face of Carnegie Steel union-busting.

Frick was happy to accommodate the boss. He despised unions and didn't care who knew it.

Frick expected a showdown with the AA. So he ordered a wooden fence, 12-feet-tall, built around the plant. He topped the planks with barbed wire and had rifle slits cut in them at regular intervals. The workers dubbed the three-mile-long barrier “ Fort Frick .”

The union was willing to negotiate with Frick. Encouraged by Carnegie's cables of support, Frick refused to parley with the union. He slashed wages by 22 percent. He also told the AA the company would no longer recognize the union when the contract expired.

The workers refused the pay cuts; Frick locked them out and shut the mill.

Union and non-union, they overwhelmingly voted to strike in protest, Zinn wrote.

Frick wasn't worried. He planned to reopen the steelworks with strikebreakers protected by rifle-armed guards from the Pinkerton National Detective agency. Workers hated the Pinkerton men, labeling them “capital's assassins.”

Workers and their sympathizers surrounded the plant. Expecting the Pinkertons to arrive by barge, the strikers patrolled a 10-mile stretch of the Monongahela in boats, Zinn wrote. “ A committee of strikers took over the town, and the sheriff was unable to raise a posse among local people against them,” the author added.
Before sunup on July 6, 300 Pinkerton agents approached the mill inside two enclosed barges. As many as 10,000 strikers and supporters waited ashore, according to Zinn.

 The crowd ordered the Pinkertons not to land. “A striker lay down on the gangplank, and when a Pinkerton man tried to shove him aside, he fired, wounding the detective in the thigh,” Zinn wrote.
The Pinkertons retreated to the barges and began firing their Winchester repeating rifles at the workers. Hiding behind makeshift barricades, they shot back with pistols, shotguns, rifles and a Civil War cannon, which they loaded with metal scraps. They hurled dynamite sticks at the barges and tried to set them on fire.

Finally, t he Pinkerton agents surrendered. Three Pinkertons and seven workers died in the firefight. The workers were buried in two local cemeteries.

The Pinkertons departed Homestead after running a gauntlet of angry workers. But more and better armed men soon arrived.

Gov. Robert E. Pattison, a Carnegie political ally, dispatched the state militia to Homestead “to protect law and order,” meaning to break the strike. Workers understood. "…The entire National Guard of the State of Pennsylvania has been called out to enable the Carnegie company to employ scab labor,” a worker said.

On July 12, 8,000 -- some sources say 8,500 -- militiamen armed with rifles, Gatling guns and cannons -- occupied the steelworks and high ground overlooking the mill on both sides of the river. The advent of the Guard doomed the strike.

In late July, p ublic support for the workers' cause waned when Alexander Berkman, an anarchist from New York City , tried to murder Frick. “The moment was urgent,” he said. “The toilers of Homestead had defied the oppressor.”

Frick was seriously wounded. But the mill manager recovered.

Berkman, who was arrested and imprisoned, was not connected with the union. However unwittingly, he was a godsend to labor haters. “The local and national press linked unionism with radicalism,” America and Its Peoples explained.

Even so, the workers were able to hold on until November, when the strike collapsed. "Life worth living again!" a happy Carnegie telegraphed Frick from Scotland .

The Homestead mill swung back into production with strikebreakers -- “scabs” to the strikers -- protected by the National Guard troops. “…S trikebreakers were brought in, often in locked trains, not knowing their destination, not knowing a strike was on,” Zinn wrote.

About 300 strikers asked to go back to work at the mill and were rehired. Most of the strikers and their leaders were blacklisted. Some were charged with murder, treason and other crimes. Local juries refused to convict any of them, Zinn wrote

After eliminating the union at Homestead , Carnegie cut wages. He also demanded longer hours from mill workers and got rid of 500 jobs.

Like Carnegie,Frick got richer. The mill manager became a patron of the arts, spending part of his fortune on a famous collection of paintings that sparked a peaceful protest when it was displayed in a London gallery in 2000. Objectors put up a poster at the gallery entrance declaring, “How easy it is to buy a place in posterity, so long as you can pay the asking price.”

Carnegie is better known than Frick. He is more famous as a library-founding philanthropist than as a union-buster (and a Civil War draft dodger). In 1960, a doting U.S. post office issued a Carnegie commemorative stamp.

“The stories of the great cultural benefactors…the Fricks, the Carnegies…rarely ask about the origins of their wealth,” the London protest poster also said. “Was it guilt that made Frick and Carnegie philanthropists? Maybe, but it is their names that are immortalised in galleries and libraries, not the anonymous steel workers who created their wealth and were shot down at Homestead .”

Carnegie is one of history's great hypocrites. Yet his enduring reputation as a “humanitarian” is proof indeed that “the…forces of capital, government and press” are still powerful.

Grave marker for John E. Morris, one of the union strikers killed the day of 'The Battle of Homestead.'

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All pictures on this page copyrighted ©2006-07, Berry Craig III.