The War for Homestead
LOCKOUT by Leon Wolff. 297 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.
On a hot July morning in 1892, a tug chugged up the Monongahela, towing two barges with a deadly cargo: 300 pistols, 250 Winchester rifles and a hired army of 316 Pinkerton men. Where Andrew Carnegie's Homestead mill sprawled along the south bank of the river, the barges beached. That was enemy territory, defended by a cannon, spiked clubs, small arms, and a force of strikers 10,000 strong. Hostilities began at once. One fusillade from the barges dropped 30 defenders, but not one Pinkerton got ashore. Homestead's striking mill hands had won the opening skirmish of a labor war that killed 35 and injured 400.
No Interest in Justice. Author Wolff's balanced but pedestrian account ranks the Homestead strike as one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of U.S. labor-management relations. Neither side produced a real hero, but both sides produced plenty of villains. The strikers turned ugly, on one occasion beat seven injured Pinkerton men to death. Andrew Carnegie, a public friend and private enemy of union labor, scuttied off to Europe before the strike began. Henry Clay Frick, his partner, was left to do all the dirty work--and he did it willingly. Prick's strategy was to break the strongest union in Sam Gompers' infant American Federation of Labor. He succeeded. Not until 1935, with the formation of the C.I.O., did the nation's steelworkers effectively organize again.
Justice, at least, seemed to be on the strikers' side. Although well paid by the standards of the time--a skilled hand could earn as much as $70 a week, the equivalent of $280 today--steelworkers more than earned their wages. Working conditions were appalling: twelve-hour shifts, seven-day weeks, temperatures of 150DEG, no time out for meals, no washing-up facilities, no compensation for injuries. The year before the strike, 300 men were killed and some 2,000 injured on the job in the mills around Pittsburgh alone.
Frick showed no interest in justice or the strikers' proposals. He simply put in a call to the Piftkerton Agency, already notorious for its ability to muster indefinite numbers of strikebreaking mercenaries who were delighted to do battle for $5 a day. Frick swore to hold fast, "if it takes all summer and all winter, and all next summer and the next winter. I will never recognize the union, never, never!"
Up by the Thumbs. The town of Homestead settled into a state of siege regularly interrupted by violence. An anarchist from New York, Alexander Berkman, inflamed by newspaper accounts of the strike, came to Homestead determined to assassinate Frick; one day he managed to pump two shots into the mighty magnate, but Frick survived. Eight thousand Pennsylvania National Guardsmen bivouacked in the town under a general who was sympathetic to management; for expressing an anti-Frick sentiment, one soldier was strung up by the thumbs. When Frick imported scab labor under armed guard, the strikers poisoned their food; at least three died.
By September, Frick had the smokestacks pluming again, and by November the ringleaders of the strike themselves gave up. They did not get their jobs back--Frick had them blacklisted from the industry forever. Wages were cut by half, and a man took what he was given; the company would not even explain how it had computed the sum in his pay packet. Despite the strike, Homestead registered a net 1892 profit of $4,000,000, only slightly below that of 1891.
Distributing a Fortune. Carnegie returned from Europe, fell out with Frick, and began giving away his fortune, a small part of which financed the construction of 2,505 Carnegie libraries. "How much did you say I had given away?" he asked his secretary one day toward the end of his life. When told the figure--$324,657,399--Carnegie expressed mild astonishment: "Good heavens, where did I get all that money?"
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