Home to Homestead

"Labor," observed Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s President Eugene Grace as he opened a new $20,000,000 strip & sheet mill at Lackawanna, N. Y. last week, "is paramount in all our minds today."

Last week American Iron & Steel Institute, representing 95% of the nation's steelmasters, took full-page advertisements in some 375 newspapers to repeat its declaration of war against Labor's drive to organize its historically unorganized workers (TIME, July 6). From over 100 organizers put in the field by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee went reports and charges that the war had already begun.

Workers who joined the union, said they, were being dismissed. Steel superintendents were exhorting their men to stand by their company unions. Workers were being forced to sign petitions against the organization drive. An organizer had been run out of Steubenville, Ohio. Steel plants were importing gunmen, storing up "veritable arsenals."

"This is not a strike." cautioned anxious Secretary of Labor Perkins. "The Iron & Steel Institute seems to be several steps ahead of the program. I hope they will not do anything foolish and against the public interest themselves. I hope they do not get nervous and panicky."

"It is the purpose of the Committee for Industrial Organization," stated that body, "to conduct this campaign in a perfectly legal manner. . . . The Committee desires to avoid industrial strife and disturbance or violence of any character."

This pacific declaration was supplemented by an ominous growl from the Committee's potent leader. John Llewellyn Lewis: "If the steel industry insists on a fight we have no alternative but to meet them. I should judge that they would do just that thing. They always have."

On the brink of what many an observer thought promised to become a historic industrial war, Industrial Unionist Lewis also moved closer last week to a show-down in his struggle with President William Green & fellow craft unionists of the American Federation of Labor.

Leader Lewis and the heads of the nine industrial unions joined with his United Mine Workers in the Committee for Industrial Organization were summoned to appear before the A. F. of L. Executive Council this week on charges, punishable by suspension of their A. F. of L. charters, of attempting to set up a rival labor organization. Far from knuckling under, Committee for Industrial Organization leaders welcomed into their fellowship the stripling United Rubber Workers and United Auto Workers unions, announced that organizational drives in the rubber, automobile and textile indus tries would be pushed simultaneously with the steel campaign. As individuals they proclaimed their refusal to answer the A. F. of L. summons.

As a body they contemptuously dismissed the demand by declaring it "inconceivable that the Executive Council would commit any act to split the labor forces of America in the midst of the campaign in the iron and steel indus try and in the face of the arrogant ultimatum issued to the entire labor movement by the American Iron and Steel Institute." R, L P. At week's end the steel campaigners repaired for inspiration to the scene of the first great battle between U. S. steelmasters and U. S. steelmakers.

In 1892 the now impotent Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers, on whose bones John Lewis is attempting to put robust flesh, was one of the strong est unions in the land. As its local's three-year contract with great Carnegie Steel Co. in Homestead, Pa., seven miles below Pittsburgh, drew toward a close, the company proposed that the new contract include a wage cut. The union refused. Famed for his humanitarian statements on the subject of Labor's rights, Andrew Carnegie skipped off to Scotland, left his mills in charge of hardbitten, union-hating Henry Clay Frick.

Refusing to negotiate, Steelman Frick tossed up a board & barbed-wire fence around the plant, locked his workers out. When the men surrounded "Fort Frick," barring entrance to scabs, Frick sent to New York for 300 Pinkerton detectives.

Towed stealthily up the Monongahela aboard two barges, they arrived at Home stead at 4 a. m. on July 6. The workers, massed along the river with their women & children, were ready for them. As the first detectives stepped ashore, someone banged a gun. At that the Pinkerton army fired a volley into the crowd and one of the bloodiest battles in U. S. Labor history was on. It lasted until 5 o'clock that afternoon. When it was over three detectives, seven workers lay dead.

Few days later Pennsylvania militia took over the town and by November the workers were starved out, their union crushed. Last week some 4,000 steelworkers, solemn in shirtsleeves, massed on and around a hilltop playground for grimy Homestead's first union rally in 18 years.

On the platform stood a huge sign urging "Join Now -- No Initiation Fee -- One Union for All Workers!" Four green-rib boned wreaths were inscribed: "In Memoriam. The Spirit of 1892 Lives On." Chief speaker was red-faced Thomas Kennedy, Secretary-Treasurer of United Mine Workers and Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania.

Out struck this oldtime Debsian Socialist against the two great enemies of militant Labor: police and hunger. "The Governor of this State. George H. Earle." barked he, ''is an honest and courageous man. and as chief of the armed and police forces of this State he will see that the workers are given their constitutional rights to organize. . . . This is a peace ful organization drive; no trouble is looked for. If the steel magnates throw the people into the streets, then the Pennsylvania Emergency Relief Board will find that these people are entitled to relief under the law." Straight from his steel-furnace job arrived Charles Scharbo to stumble in broken English through a Steel Workers' Declaration of Independence, paraphrasing the words of Thomas Jefferson at Philadelphia in 1776, and those of Franklin Roosevelt at Philadelphia in 1936:

"Through their control over the hours we work, the wages we receive and the condition of our labor . . . the lords of Steel try to rule us as did the royalists against whom our forefathers rebelled. They have interfered in every way with out right to organize. . . . They have sent among us swarms of stool pigeons. . . . They have kept among us armies of company gunmen. . . ." When the speeches were over, a thousand workmen lined up, marched with wreaths to the graves of four of the Homestead dead of 1892. In their ears rang the chant of Patrick J. Fagan. U.M.W. district president: "Let the blood of these labor pioneers who were massacred here by Pinkertons in 1892 be the seed of this new organization in 1936.

And may the souls of the martyrs rest in peace. Amen." Terrorist. They did not speak his name, but an uneasy ghost hovered over the militants at Homestead last week. In 1892 Alexander Berkman was a naming young anarchist running an ice-cream parlor in Worcester, Mass. His partner in business and love was an equally radical young woman named Emma Goldman. They decided that Henry Clay Frick must pay with his life for the Homestead workers' deaths, prepared a bomb which fizzled out on a Staten Island meadow. Then Alexander Berkman got pistol and dag ger, went to Pittsburgh, forced his way into Prick's office, shot and stabbed him. The steelmaster recovered and the anarchist, grown suddenly famed as the No. 1 U. S. terrorist, went to prison.

He emerged 14 years later, bald, nearsighted, learned, his notoriety undimmed. As he went up & down the land preaching anarchism, the Press suspected him of performing or inciting almost every act of terrorism that occurred. Steelmaster Frick was said to have spent $10,000 per year having him watched. In 1917 he and Emma Goldman were arrested for obstructing the Draft, in 1919 ordered deported to Russia with 247 other Reds. Short time before he sailed, reporters brought him news of Henry Clay Prick's death, asked for comment. Said Alexander Berkman: "Just say he was deported by God."

Soon bitterly disillusioned with bureaucratic Russia, Anarchists Berkman and Goldman fled that country, became unwelcome world wanderers. Discovered in Paris in 1930, Berkman was deported to Belgium, later allowed to settle on the Riviera when he convinced French police that he was now only a harmless translator. Emma Goldman was 50 miles away in her villa at St. Tropez last week when, in his mean, fifth-floor flat in Nice, Alexander Berkman, obscure, outmoded, 65, wracked by uremia and with only $80 to his name, once more drew a pistol, this time used it to kill himself.

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