Andrew Carnegie once hired a militia and converted factories into makeshift forts to battle striking workers
Labor won the battle, but management won the war
On July 2, 1892, thousands of iron- and steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, cast down their tools. “When they will take them up again, and on what terms, is a question which time alone can solve,” reported the New York Times. “It is evident that there is no ‘bluffing’ at Homestead. The fight there is to be to the death.” The paper was right: by the end of the week, dozens had been killed.
The laborers at the Homestead mills and furnaces worked for Carnegie Steel, run by the fabulously wealthy tycoon Andrew Carnegie and managed by the hard-nosed, fiercely anti-union Henry Clay Frick. The union movement had gained power in the preceding years, with strikes and boycotts threatening profits all across the country. A consensus was emerging among wealthy industrialists that, one way or another, unions had to go.
In May of 1892, Carnegie drafted a letter to the workers in Homestead, declaring their union dissolved. Frick knew that a strike was coming in response, and he welcomed it as an opportunity to demonstrate corporate might. In preparation for the fight to come, he built a 12-foot wall around the factories, topped with barbed wire. As quoted in Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, the workers dubbed it Fort Frick and even wrote a song about it:
There stands today with great pretense/Enclosed within a whitewashed fence/A wondrous change of great import/The mills transformed into a fort
Frick then made secret arrangements with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private security firm with a reputation for ruthless violence that frequently provided hired muscle for employers in labor disputes. He requested that 300 Pinkertons, as they were called, be sent to Homestead by boat to quell the strike that loomed. The Pinkertons readily accepted — at that time they had 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, Brecher notes, making them larger than the standing army of the United States.
On July 2, the strike began in earnest. The company summarily fired those who refused to work, but the workers didn’t leave. Frick had been so busy making preparations that he hadn’t noticed the workers had formed an Advisory Committee, where they all decided together that every one of them would go on strike simultaneously, and furthermore that they would take over the entire metalworks and town of Homestead. And that was exactly what they did.
The workers divided themselves into regiments, like a military, each with shifts and duties. They overwhelmed and drove out the company guards and stood watch themselves, blocking the roads to Homestead from every direction. Soon, a thousand armed workers were patrolling ten miles of road and Monongahela River waterfront. “A communications system was created,” Brecher writes, “using flags, skyrockets and a steam whistle, with the telegraph at the strike headquarters.” Meanwhile, the Advisory Committee took over basic town functions, like providing gas and electricity. It also established ad hoc laws and enforced them, making this episode perhaps the closest America has ever come to a dictatorship of the proletariat.
When the company first lost control of the town, 11 Allegheny County sheriff’s deputies approached Homestead confident that they could resolve the issue. They were met by workers bearing pistols and rifles, who promised them that if they set foot in Homestead, they wouldn’t get out alive. Local law enforcement left Homestead alone; the sheriff himself couldn’t get enough men together to form a posse.
But the Pinkertons had already assembled, and all 300 were on their way by boat. When they passed Pittsburgh on the night of July 5, a sympathetic onlooker wired the Homestead telegraph office and warned of the invasion. Supporters in Chicago and New York confirmed the intel. The Homestead workers had no intention of letting the Pinkerton boats dock on their shores, so the striking workers — joined by many supporters from nearby towns, where people also worked in the mills — lined up on the riverbanks and built barricades of scrap metal. There, crouched behind iron and steel, they waited for the Pinkertons to arrive.
The moment the boats came into view on July 6, the workers began to fire. As they drew nearer, the workers also hurled dynamite and firecrackers at the barges. They dumped oil into the river and floated flaming rafts in the Pinkertons’ direction. By the end of the day, the Pinkertons were so fearful of the strikers that they attempted to stage a mutiny and turn their ships around. When they landed, they were greeted by 10,000 workers and supporters, ready to fight.
“Don’t step off that boat,” the workers cautioned the Pinkertons. Brecher recounts:
One striker lay down on the gangplank. When the first Pinkerton detective tried to shove him aside, he pulled a revolver and shot the detective through the thigh. Gunfire instantly raked the Pinkertons, killing one and wounding five. A force of additional Pinkertons rushed on deck and began firing steadily into the crowd, hitting over thirty and killing at least three. The fire from the crowd quickly drove the Pinkertons back below decks. When they tried again to land a few hours later, four more were shot down instantly and the attempt was abandoned.
After more bloody and fiery battle on the Monongahela River, the Pinkertons were finally marched at gunpoint off their barges and into Homestead. The Advisory Committee calmed the crowd and let the Pinkertons go. The detectives fled. In the final tally, 40 workers had been shot, and nine killed; 20 Pinkertons had been shot, and seven killed. Despite losing more men, the strikers had won the day.
The Homestead Advisory Committee held the town for another week after that. On July 12, the Pennsylvania militia moved to invade Homestead. The strikers wanted to fight them, too, but the Advisory Committee knew they were far outmatched. So when the militia arrived, the committee welcomed them, tongue in cheek, saying to General George Snowden, “I wish to say that after suffering an attack of illegal authority, we are glad to have the legal authority of the State here.”
Snowden scoffed and reported back, “Pennsylvanians can hardly appreciate the actual communism of these people. They believe the works are theirs quite as much as Carnegie’s.”
Homestead may have won the battle, but, with the state on his side, Carnegie won the war. Top Advisory Committee members were charged with murder, and other workers with lesser crimes. The union was eventually broken. But Homestead continues to occupy a privileged place in labor movement history — because for a brief moment in time, as the general himself understood, the works really did belong to the workers.
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