The Carnegie Company had practically a monopoly of it and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. The high tariff on imported steel had greatly boomed the American steel industry. Frick was also the owner of extensive coke-fields, where unions were prohibited and the workers were ruled with an iron hand. It was particularly significant that Andrew Carnegie, its president, had temporarily turned over the entire management to the company’s chairman, Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his enmity to labour. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation, known as a hard master. It was one of the biggest and most efficient labour bodies of the country, consisting mostly of Americans, men of decision and grit, who would assert their rights. News from Pittsburgh announced that trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its employees organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. There was then in the United States a young anarchist, Alexander Berkman… lover of Emma Goldman, who, on hearing of the gun-fight between the steel men and the Pinkertons, hastened to Homestead and there burst into Frick’s office.ĭocument Two: from Living my Life, Emma Goldman 1931 In desperation, workers returned to work as non-unionists.īut Frick did not win the battle unscathed. The union’s treasury was empty winter was coming on, and families were going cold and hungry. The soldiers stayed till the end of November, when the strike officially ended in the utter defeat of the workers. Incensed, Frick then called upon the governor of the state of Pennsylvania for the militia and within a few days the little mill town of 12,000 was an armed camp. At the end the workers got the better of the gunmen, captured the entire 300, minus the few who were killed, held them prisoners of war for 24 hours, and finally ran them, disarmed, out of town. A battle followed, in which 10 men were killed and three times that number wounded. On the night of 5 july, a boatload of Pinkertons attempted to land in Homestead. They knew that the gunmen would be armed and prepared themselves to meet them on their own terms. The locked-out workers heard that the Pinkertons were coming, and they watched for their arrival. He erected a wire fence three miles long and 15 feet high around the works and called upon the Pinkerton Detective Agency to send him 300 gunmen. The union declined these terms and on 1 July, before they could declare a strike, the workers were suddenly locked out.īefore that occurred, however, Andrew Carnegie, already famous as a major prophet of American ‘democracy’, anticipating violence, had hurriedly turned the command over to the company’s superintendent, Henry C Frick, a frank and brutal union-hater, and departed for Europe.įrick immediately indicated by his action that he meant war to the bitter end. Three years previously the union had been recognized by the company indeed, had entered with it into a three-year contract, at the expiration of which Carnegie wanted the men to take a reduction of wages. In 1892 there burst out the fury of the so-called Homestead strike, which was really a lockout, involving on the one hand the iron and steel workers, who, with a membership of nearly 25,000, were one of the strongest unions in the country, and on the other the Carnegie Steel Company. Document One: from Dynamite: a century of class violence in America 1830–1930, Louis Adamic, 1934 (reprinted by Rebel Press, London, 1984)
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